Edge – April 2022
English | 134 pages | pdf | 66.33 MB
For pioneers, it’s one thing to worry about taking an arrow between the shoulder blades, but what about if you make it to the destination safely? If you find an appreciative audience, that’s when trouble can really start. What are you going to do next? It’ll be along the same lines, yes? And it’ll be twice as good, right? What the heck is the hold-up, anyway – why don’t you just get on with it right now? Come on, we’re waiting.
Success breeds expectation. Valve appreciates this better than most companies. Has any game ever been requested more than Half-Life 3? And does any other yearned-for sequel feel less likely to actually happen? If Valve was like most game studios, it would’ve delivered a follow-up – if not multiple iterations – in the 15 years since the release of Episode Two. But it has more ambition than this. Instead, it created an exceptional VR-powered prequel in 2020, and here in 2022 it’s in the process of launching its very own portable videogame console, Steam Deck.
Having spent a good while with Valve’s handheld this month, we cannot begrudge the engineering effort and ingenuity that has gone into its development, even as it gets in the way of further adventures for Gordon Freeman. It’s a device that, by definition, makes you reassess your entire Steam library, and it feels more convincing in the hands than the various shrunken-PC devices that have preceded it. If Valve has its way, this new machine will be just the first of many, so perhaps it won’t stop at the second iteration this time. Our Steam Deck report begins on p68.
Someone else who knows all about audience expectation is Shinji Mikami. In directing Resident Evils 1 and 4, he built the framework for the survival horror genre, and fans have been demanding more of the same ever since. The Evil Within series saw him return to the theme, but now it’s time for a new kind of game – and not directly from his hand but from the emerging talents of his younger colleagues at Tango Gameworks. They tell us the stories behind the creation of Ghostwire: Tokyo on p52.
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