The essential guide to Xbox 360 and Xbox One Issue 128 September 2015
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new games inside mirror’s edge 2! dark souls III! fallout 4!
Be Boba Fett. Fight on Hoth. Duel with Darth. Star Wars comes to life on Xbox One
Welcome…
bigger, better, boxier?
Do you find yourself inexplicably sweating? It’s likely down to the 24 pages I’ve added to make this the biggest issue of OXM ever. It’s not just for show: it takes a larger mag to fit in all those exciting E3 developments. We’ve gone in depth on Halo 5 and Gears of War, quizzed Kudo Tsunoda, cooked up a backwards compatibility wishlist and investigated the Xbox Game Preview programme. You’ll also see Game Preview titles start to appear as reviews. You’ll note they don’t have scores – they aren’t final products, after all – but I feel it’s important to offer a value judgement on anything with a price tag. I hope you find them useful. And all this before “stepping into darth getting to our mighty vader’s size tens and cover star. Star Wars exploring hoth is the Battlefront blew us away at E3, finally stuff of dreams” achieving what so much promotional puff has promised us in the past: putting you in the movies. Stepping into Darth Vader’s size tens and stomping around Hoth is the stuff of dreams. Well, until you find yourself on the wrong end of a force choke...
EMAIL matthew.castle@futurenet.com Live OXM Pesto Twitter @mrbasil_pesto
@OXM
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Star wars Battlefront: A new hope
DICE’s shooter is the perfect balance of fantasy and functionality – find out how the studio did it (p30)
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Halo 5: hero or villain?
gears of war: ultimate edition
Alex makes sense of Halo 5’s sprawling spread of new ideas (p58)
Remaking one of the Xbox 360’s most cherished games? No pressure (p66)
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choose your own misadventure
unfinished symphonies
One swanky party, many different ways to kill. Hitman is back! (p20)
We explore the exciting, and slightly buggy world of early access (p80)
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#128
contents
page
30 star wars battlefront
It takes Tatooine to tango in 2015’s biggest online shooter.
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page
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58
DASHBOARD
News and interviews curated for your easy digestion
08 The Full 360
Why backwards compatibility drives Xbox One forward.
16 Xbox One’s New Dashboard A sneak peek at the new Xbox One interface.
18 The Making of Rare Replay
How Rare is crafting the perfect retro compilation.
20 Hitman: Choose Your Own Misadventure
Exploring the murderous possibilities of Hitman’s ‘The Showstopper’ level.
xbox extra page
126 4 / the official xbox magazine
halo 5: hero or villain?
Everything we know thus far.
GETTING MORE FROM YOUR CONSOLE
124 OXM Investigates
Where the biggest games of the winter will take place.
126 Now Playing
Revisiting our dog ownership troubles in Fallout 3. www.totalxbox.com
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74
“Sea of Thieves is going to be the best game that Rare has ever made”
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save up to 50% See P72
Microsoft VP Kudo Tsunoda makes a bold prediction
page
features
page
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74
58 Halo 5: Hero or Villain?
After the controversy that followed The Master Chief Collection, is this the game that will finally repair 343 Industries’ reputation?
80 Xbox Game Preview
Microsoft’s latest initiative lets you buy unfinished games at bargain prices – here’s how it works.
116 Cult Status
Virtua Fighter! Blur! Spec Ops! The forgotten Xbox 360 gems you MUST play.
mirror’s edge
page
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Faith some more.
page
ghost recon
38 wildlands
Clancy goes south of the border.
previews
38 Ghost Recon Wildlands 42 Dark Souls III 44 Battleborn 45 For Honor 46 Assassin’s Creed Syndicate 48 Destiny: The Taken King 49 Adr1ft 50 Mirror’s Edge Catalyst 52 Guitar Hero Live 53 Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night 54 Need For Speed
reviews page
88 page
95 page
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gears of war ultimate edition
How The Coalition brought back a bloodthirsty classic. @OXM
88 Elite: Dangerous 92 Rory McIlroy PGA Tour 94 MotoGP 2015 95 F1 2015 96 Devil May Cry 4 98 The Swapper 99 Tembo the Badass Elephant 100 The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited 104 Payday 2: Crimewave Edition 105 No Time To Explain 106 The Long Dark 108 The Swindle 110 Tales From the Borderlands: Episode Three 111 Reviews round-up the official xbox magazine / 5
Meet the…
oxm contributors
The people behind, and in some senses also under, the UK’s biggest games mag
Alex Dale
Emma Davies
Tom Stone
Joe Skrebels
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
Live ChocoboOfDoom
Live OXM Emma
Live OXM Tom Stone
Live OXM Joe
Live OXM ETboy
Twitter @SporadicDaler
Twitter @emcetera
Twitter @TheTomStrange
Twitter @2plus2isjoe
Twitter @dirigiblebill
Alex wasted most of the month attempting to dream up Bolivia puns for his Ghost Recon Wildlands preview. ‘Seeing is Bolivian’? Nope. ‘La Paz-manian Devils?’ That’s a reach. ‘Peru-tiful’? Wrong country, dolt.
Emma was the only team member deemed disposable enough to be allowed to go to Glastonbury this year. Rumours she spent the entire weekend furious that ‘deadmau5’ isn’t capitalised are… depressingly true.
Tom subscribes to the ‘method acting’ school of game reviewing: that’s why he expensed a trip to the zoo for Tembo, and spent the rest of the month on the golf course for PGA Tour. He is so reviewing DOOM.
Joe spent a boozy week on a boat this month, as part of a friend’s stag do celebrations. “The experience reminded me of a Rare game,” said an ashen-faced Skrebs the next Monday. Cobra Triangle? “Nope – Sea of Heaves”
We’re still trying to reconcile the fact that young master Edwin, the world’s poshest games journalist, is massively into Gears of War. It’s just not typical of the upper class to enjoy a cruel blood sport, is it?
Deputy editor
Production editor
Staff writer
Community manager
Contributor
OFFICE PLAYLIST > WHAT WE’VE SPENT OUR TIME ON THIS MONTH
Batman: Arkham Knight Now the Knight’s INCREDIBLE reveal is a distant memory, we’re mopping up Gotham’s goons.
OXM on GR+
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Lego Jurassic World Matthew’s write-up was the review 65 million years in the making. He decided not to endorse the Park.
Letters We’ve refreshed our letters page to give our online communities a bigger voice – we hope you enjoy!
We’re not just a magazine, you know. We’re also a travelling circus troupe and a website. The former isn’t going so well (turns out tightrope knot-tying isn’t one of Emma’s skills) but the latter is going swimmingly, thanks. Head to gamesradar. com/oxm for the latest Xbox news and reviews, many of which are online exclusive. Recent highlights: The seven towns you’ll build in Fallout 4 / Arkham Knight Riddler guide
The Shield Alex has bought a copy of the 2007 Xbox game. Sounds like a mistake of Money Train proportions.
oxm on iPad Reading the digital edition of OXM has its disadvantages. It can’t be turned into bedding for your hamster, for example. But what you lose in rodent comfort, you make up for with exclusive videos, galleries and audio commentary from the team. bit.ly/ipadoxm
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xbox news, analysis, culture, opinion & more So far, 21 backwards compatible games have been announced, but many more will be available later in the year.
back from the future
The full 360
Armed with backwards compatibility and game previews, the Xbox One of 2015 is a triumphant marriage of nostalgia and ambition 8 / the official xbox magazine
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Pitchford slates Aliens lawsuit
ZombiU Xbox port rumoured
Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has commented on a failed lawsuit against the studio over the quality of Aliens: Colonial Marines, describing it as a case of “mafiastyle extortion tactics” and insisting that the open market is the ultimate arbitrator.
An Xbox One edition of WiiU launch title ZombiU appears to be in the works. The rumoured port (rather forlornly titled Zombi) has been rated by both Taiwan and Australia’s certification boards. Watch out for an announcement from publisher Ubisoft.
//backwards compatibility is the last piece of the puzzle microsoft has been trying to solve//
Rare has described Sea of Thieves as “its most ambitious effort ever”. We can’t wait.
I
At £130 it’s not cheap, but the new Elite controller offers an array of customisation options.
@OXM
n order to know where you’re going, embrace where you’ve come from. Thus the subtext of Microsoft’s decision to support Xbox 360 compatibility on Xbox One. The move is unlikely to have much of a direct impact on the younger console’s market uptake – previous generations have demonstrated that backwards compatibility isn’t a huge draw on the sales floor – though it’ll probably sway a few last-gen holdouts who are already tempted by the likes of Halo 5: Guardians. But the symbolism of it can’t be overstated. This is the final and most decisive of Microsoft’s efforts to re-establish the through-line with the halcyon years of Xbox 360, the last piece of a puzzle the manufacturer has been trying to solve since deterring many fans with a mixture of Kinect-heavy entertainment features and restrictive online policies back in 2013. It’s not just that you can play BattleBlock Theater or Viva Piñata on your Xbox One now – it’s that the era that gave us those fabulous titles no longer feels at odds with the era that gave us Titanfall and D4. This point extends to more than just backwards compatibility, of course. It’s apparent in how Microsoft has nurtured and evolved its core first-party properties, allowing new teams to get to grips with them while taking care not to depart too dramatically from its formula. As we write elsewhere in this issue, the restoration of the original Gears of War alongside a suspenseful trailer for Gears 4 is a firm reassurance that we won’t be treated to another Judgment-style experiment. Halo 5 might have attracted umbrage lately for its scripted-seeming campaign and lack of split-screen co-op, but we’d challenge you to sit through a colossal Warzone threeway or a snappy bout of Breakout and not feel as giddy as a Halo 3 player making his first run on a Covenant Scarab. Forza’s deft alternation between the open world mayhem of Horizon and the car anorak perfectionism of the numbered series is a masterclass in how to innovate within a brand. And Rare Ltd, finally, is back in the spotlight for reasons other than its long dalliance with Kinect. It’s early days, but the forthcoming Sea of Thieves has the potential to be a wonderful meeting of past and
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Call of Duty stays frosty
The “Juggernog” edition of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will ship with a working fridge, modelled on the in-game Perk-a-Cola machine. It’s an ice touch.
present – the cuddly aesthetic and action emphasis of a vintage Rare game, plus the water physics and online community element of a Kinect Sports Rivals. It’s hard to get as excited about the next Dashboard revision, which switches out the old ‘Metro’ tile interface for a Windows 10-inspired array of feeds, but then again, that’s kind of the point. Where Metro was designed to push Kinect controls to the fore, its large panels suiting graband-swipe motion controls, the new front end is all about getting out of your way. Switching between functions is noticeably faster, and accessing platform features while playing a game is much less fiddly – rather than compressing the view to fiddle with a Snapped app or retreating to the main Dash, you’ll pop out a tab that unifies your Friends list, party invites, messages and key settings such as game-to-chat volume ratios. The introduction of Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri-style voice-controlled search app, also promises to make life easier for multi-taskers: you can order it to break off a chunk of game DVR footage, upload it and add a caption in the space of a few seconds, without having to pause the action. The new Elite controller, meanwhile, is a 10 / the official xbox magazine
The new Elite controller will take the Red vs Blue rivalry to a whole new level.
celebration of the lust for a competitive edge that has defined Xbox Live since Halo 2’s multiplayer brought about a historic rise in online headcounts. It’s an accessory for players who love to optimise – you can swap in additional thumbsticks or D-pads, tweak sensitivities and assign extra inputs to under-mounted control paddles. Were backwards compatibility the only major step-change in Xbox One’s future, there’d perhaps be cause for accusing the platform-holder of
complacency. But the feature was announced alongside Xbox Game Previews, the first console-native take on Steam’s very successful Early Access programme, which allows studios to sell work-in-progress versions of games over Xbox Live. As with Steam, the genius of this is that it transforms players who are willing to overlook placeholder bits and rough edges into collaborators, fellow travellers on the adventure that is creating a game. In allowing studios
Oh to have a living room big enough for a Forza setup like this...
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THIS month Coming up… more in this section we learnED...
Xbox to skip TGS
Xbox won’t have a booth at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, reflecting its less-than-stellar sales in the region. Expect “updates” from Microsoft Japan, however.
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With 1TB of hard disk space as well as the option to add more external storage, the new Xbox One console gives you loads of room to store your games.
What Keiji Inafune has put at the core of his new game, ReCore.
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When Cortana will be arriving on our console Dashboards.
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to tap into that audience early, it’ll take a little of the risk out of developing an unfamiliar or inaccessible concept. The result, hopefully, will be more games on Xbox One that are as idiosyncratic or demanding as The Long Dark, a survival sim in which your greatest foe is Mother Nature. There will be the odd totally broken release, of course, but support for time-limited free trials should help players dodge that particular bullet (more about that on page 80). As always when processing the fallout from E3 season, there’s the tantalising thought of what Microsoft didn’t show. A notable absentee was Lionhead’s new, non-Fable IP – expect to hear more about that once Fable Legends is out the door. There’s also the new zombie survival MMO from Undead Labs, creator of hit Xbox Live Arcade release State of Decay, plus the revival of a “beloved” strategy franchise in development at Decisive Games. In the short term, we’ll lay
eyes on the much-coveted Crackdown reboot, Remedy’s time-bending shooter Quantum Break and Platinum’s dragon ‘em up Scalebound at Microsoft’s Gamescom booth in August – all titles that are worth watching, with Scalebound in particular likely to capture the imagination. And of course, there’s the fascinating prospect of HoloLens, Microsoft’s holographic gaming headset, and the still-unanswered question of exactly how much it will tie into the Xbox brand. The device continues to dazzle – turning a kitchen table into a fully interactive Minecraft level is surely one for the history books – but in the wake of E3 2015’s revelations, it no longer feels like Xbox One needs a dash of virtual reality magic to sex up its appeal. In revisiting the golden age of Xbox 360, and adapting a few proven ideas from PC, the console has laid the foundations for a golden age of its own. Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
//of course, there’s the fascinating prospect of hololens, and the stillunanswered question of how much it will tie into the xbox brand// @OXM
Some of the many murderous tricks Agent 47 has up his sleeve.
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That apparently not everybody loves powersliding about in the Batmobile.
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Why we might feel a tad guilty about drinking human blood. the official xbox magazine / 11
D A SHBO A RD core blimey
On the pull
Joule’s arm-mounted Extractor lets her yank out enemy cores. “You’ve not only destroyed a creature, but gained something as well, and that can be used in an entirely different gameplay system,” hints Pacini.
A dog’s life
As Pacini describes it, Mack’s not the dog, but the core itself. “Place him into the dog and he’s Mack, the personality, but he’ll also inherit some of the robot anatomy – he’ll bark and take animalistic animations.”
Going ape
Inserting the core into other frames imbues Mack with new traits. “Put him into a gorilla-type frame and it’s still this gentle character, but now he’s gruff and bangs his fists and hoots like an ape,” explains Pacini.
Getting to the core of the matter
We quiz Keiji Inafune on ReCore, E3’s most mysterious game What’s the story?
Never has a reveal been quite so… unrevealing. Three minutes of teaser shows sand, a girl, and a soon-to-be-dead robotic dog. ReCore’s creator, Keiji Inafune, is almost as cryptic in person, recounting the entire trailer with added colour – she’s Joule, the dog’s Mack – and relishing in our confusion. “A lot of it is shrouded in mystery: where is this taking place? Why has this place been taken over by robots? Why am I the only lone survivor?” Interview 101 Mr Inafune: we ask the questions.
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Why should I care?
Mark Pacini, game director at ReCore‘s co-developer Armature, paints a more enticing picture of a “third-person action adventure where there’s platforming, fast combat and some shooting.” Deciding to drop his Riddler routine, Inafune is also keen to emphasise that it’s “not just a fast-paced, ‘clear the level and hit the next level’ design. There is a relationship you form with your companion, a whole different dynamic that’s integrated into the game and the story.”
What happens next?
Armature makes the magic happen – it’s in full production after a year spent prototyping ideas. Considering the studio is staffed by Metroid Prime’s creative leads, that’s a pretty potent magic. There may even be some Metroid in ReCore’s DNA. “Your robotic companions become keys to the world, similar to [Metroid’s] ‘oh I have this thing that allows me to grapple up there’.” Any game that channels the spirit of Nintendo’s GameCube classic is welcome in our Xbox One slot.
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