Table of contents for Issue 261 in Hyper

For as long as I can remember I've been an avid fan of fantasy. As soon as I could read my head was stuck in a book and my brain was consumed with heroic deeds, fantastical creatures and the triumph of good over evil. When I was around 10, the Borrible trilogy by Michael de Larrabeiti changed my view of fantasy. It was my first experience with contemporary or urban fantasy and instead of a cut and dry differentiation between good and evil, the Borribles themselves were militaristic vagabonds and thieves and their greatest enemy, the British govenrment, may have been dictatorial and xenophobic but they were portrayed not as evil but instead as misguided. From then on my understanding of fantasy broadened and I no longer saw much appeal…

“WHAT STARTS OFF AS A SMATTERING OF INITIAL UNLOCKS EXPANDS TO HUNDREDS OF PASSIVE AND ACTIVE SKILLS” PLATFORM: XBOX ONE, PS4, PC • CATEGORY: ACTION • DEVELOPER: TECHLAND • PUBLISHER: TECHLAND • DUE: TBA When Hellraid missed its 2015 release window, it was widely speculated that the game had been canned. Techland was quick to put an end to the rumours, declaring that Hellraid is still very much alive, albeit in need of additional development time as it didn’t meet the developer’s expectations. Outside of the delay caused by the jump from Chrome Engine 5 to 6, it’s a smart move by Techland to hopefully help further differentiate Hellraid from similar fantasy-themed dungeon crawlers. Beyond this, it will also make Hellraid feel less like a mod for Dead Island –…

“GIGANTIC'S ART COMBINES EASTERN AND WESTERN STYLES INTO A DEEPLY APPEALING HYBRID” PLATFORM: XBOX ONE, PC • CATEGORY: MOBA • DEVELOPER: MOTIGA • PUBLISHER: MOTIGA • DUE: 2016 Gigantic is a fresh take on the multiplayer online battle arena (or MOBA), a highly competitive genre flush with millions of players, forcing developers to vie for attention with unusual gimmicks and game mechanics. As the name of the game suggests, Gigantic is trying to take one small step for MOBAs and one gigantic leap for MOBA-kind… and it does have potential. With its unique art style and feel, in conjunction with a whole new kind of gameplay objective (in terms of a MOBA) it has the chance of becoming a great game, if not an inspiration to future MOBA developers. The…

When I was 10 or 11 I became very ill. I got Chicken Pox and wound up with lesions in my throat and a related lung infection that is rare in adults and all but unheard of in children. I was out of school for quite a while, so dedicated much of my time to reading. I quickly churned through everything unread on my shelf, so my mother offered to head to a nearby second hand bookshop to pick up some reading material. I told her that I would like a fantasy or SF series. She came home with a box – a literal box – of books. Someone had passed on their collection to the shop and I benefitted greatly. In the box was the complete Elric of Melnibone…

Normally my tastes run to the more gothic and weird areas of fantasy. I like weirdos in black velvet taking strange drugs and knives in the dark and eerie, pallid women. You can keep your Pug’s and urine-gargling Kvothe’s. Give me Gwyn of Ashamoil and Gerald Tarrant and Maldoror, laughing as sharks eats sailors, shooting the only survivor in the head. So it’s odd I genuinely love Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. Written in the 90s, these aren’t revolutionary or mould-breaking. They’re a simple quest fantasy. Find the three titular swords, kill the undead elf baddie. The main character is even a scullion turned hero but he’s also a genuine, likeable young man we want to win. Rare in these days of rapey incest bastard heroes. But originality aside, it’s all…

The history of Japanese Role-Playing Games is as colourful as the spiky haired protagonist they star. It’s a story that’s been shared, embellished, and analysed in countless articles, and it usually starts a little something like this… Dragon Quest is released for the Nintendo Famicom in 1986, it’s kinda rough, but it pretty much invents the genre. Final Fantasy follows one year later, refining the original blueprint. The Japanese public lose their collective mind over random encounters and turn based combat. The games sell millions, and the genre eventually makes its leap to the West with Dragon Quest (renamed Dragon Warrior) given away free to subscribers of Nintendo Power Magazine. While that’s the accepted narrative, Japanese RPGs didn’t just emerge from the ether one spring morning in the mid 80s.…

We’ve all met our share of bogans. In packs they are bothersome, but get them alone and not every one is bad. Take, for example, an American friend who met his first bogan some years ago at a youth hostel. While said bogan’s mates went out to buy cases of a beer that doesn’t deserve to exist, he got to talking about how he was working on a fantasy novel. Also, he was annoyed because those Lord of The Rings films that had just come out had apparently taken all of his ideas. Clearly he hadn’t read the bit in On Writing where Stephen King suggests that you read a lot of materiel from the genre you intend to write. But the larger point here is that, to the developed…

“IT IS THE DM’S JOB TO DRIVE THE STORY, APPLY THE RULES, MANAGE NPCS, AND BASICALLY ACT AS THE ENGINE THAT KEEPS A GAME MOVING FORWARD” Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) can be an intimidating prospect for a newcomer. It’s a complicated game governed by esoteric rules that can take even the most dedicated players weeks, if not months, to master. For a budding Dungeon Master (DM) it’s an even bigger ask: as well as understanding the rules, you’re also in charge of their judicious application while trying to deliver a memorable campaign for your players. So you can appreciate why a feature like this might be useful. What follows is an introduction to D&D as delivered by a new DM with next to no experience with pen-and-paper roleplaying. How much…

THE NAMELESS ONE FIRST APPEARANCE: PLANESCAPE: TORMENT (1999) SUBSEQUENT APPEARANCES: N/A The Nameless One is an immortal with a centuries long identity crisis. His path through history is littered with corpses: mostly others, but many his own. He has been killed – stabbed, chopped, crushed, flayed, immolated, and disintegrated – countless times and has always returned, physically whole but bereft of memory and identity. You can’t rob death, not even on the planes, but you can, under circumstances, make a deal with it. In this case, a fairly simple transaction takes place: life for identity – immortality in exchange for the self. Every death and rebirth is an opportunity for a new identity to emerge, a new story to be told. Respected sorcerer, feared general, reviled thief and murderer... aristocrat,…

Videogame movies don't have the best reputations. They're either terrible or they're brilliantly terrible, and your interpretation of their value invariably hinges on how close you are to the source material. Street Fighter fans find it tough to like the Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle despite it having some genuinely brilliant moments. It doesn't help that films based on games are invariably bad – the only movie with a Rotten Tomatoes score over 40% is Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within – which means they generally only deliver fan service to a group they usually don't understand in the first place. Warcraft will hopefully be different – although it's come a long way to get there. As Blizzard has tried desperately to find a way to bring the fantasy series to…

The Grim Patron Warrior nearly killed Hearthstone. Popular streamers either quit the game or outright said they were only playing it because it was their job. “It was not a dominant deck in terms of win percentage anywhere,” explained Hamilton Chu, one of the Executive Producers on Hearthstone. We were sitting on a level above Blizzcon, up away from the show floor. “Up until fairly high level it was a losing deck. It was actually a very difficult deck to play. Up in Legend it was minorly winning and then the best handful of players in the world had it. They did quite well with it because it’s... well it’s actually pretty powerful.” For five mana, a player can summon a minion called the Grim Patron with three attack and…

“DONALD DUCK AND GOOFY FINALLY MAKE A COMEBACK, SOMETHING FANS HAVEN’T SEEN SINCE KINGDOM HEARTS II” PLATFORM: PS4, XBOX ONE • CATEGORY: JRPG • DEVELOPER: SQUARE ENIX • PUBLISHER: SQUARE ENIX • DUE: TBA Kingdom Hearts 3 is coming to your home console, with its first release outside of a Sony or Nintendo platform. Xbox One and PlayStation 4 owners will soon have the chance to continue Sora’s adventure. Newcomers to the series may be left scratching their heads, as this is now the eighth game in the story and there aren’t any collections officially announced for the current generation of consoles. Fans, however, have many things to look forward to. The story takes place after Dream Drop Distance, the most recent handheld Kingdom Hearts title, and will tie up…

PLATFORM: PS4 • CATEGORY: RPG • DEVELOPER: LEVEL 5 • PUBLISHER: BANDAI NAMCO • DUE: TBA Ni No Kuni blew JRPG fans away with its stunning art direction and music, and for good reason. Some of Studio Ghibli’s veterans worked with Level 5 games to bring this game to life. Composer Joe Hisaishi was also closely involved, best known for his work on the scores of Ghibli’s most popular films. Hisiashi’s talents are the only confirmed Ghibli interaction with this new game, however the studio’s art style remains influential. The Kingdom of Ding Dong Dell, the primary setting of the first game, makes a return, but the protagonist, the boy King Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum, is new. Evan is approached by a mysterious figure, Roland, who comes from a different world…

It’s hard to find a richer setting than fantasy. Considering it builds itself around the realms of dreams and imagination, it has the power to be all at once whimsical, brutal and otherworldly. It exists on a plane of pure experimentation: where Nordic warriors battle dragons, Night Elves ride griffons across purple skylines, and mages perform forbidden experiments in the deep recesses of Tevinter. Yet these foreign tales in no way distance their audience, but call out to them, as they rise from our subconscious desires. One such element that remains a constant is the tale of the hero, a trope that has been around from the dawn of storytelling, seen in religion, mythos, fairy tales and parables. Yet it wasn’t until 1949 that mythologist Joseph Campbell identified a universal…

Games are now canonical sources of fantasy. One person’s Riftwar is another person’s Witcher 2. But games have always, and still do, draw on novels more than any other source. Literature was the place swords and sorcery, high and low fantasy, slipstream and other genres first appear, merrily sharing their ideas with the other mediums. But it’s games that make the best use of them. Here’s a few of the most significant novels that inform games. Lord of the Rings - J.R.R Tolkien Let’s just get this out of the way. Lord of the Rings has spent the last 80 years being fantasy. The rolling fields of The Shire, the brave Gondor dudes, mangled English, noble goodies and ugly baddies, plundering 14th.C English history and Norse myth, is the…

DAY ONE I’ve never played Final Fantasy VII beyond the opening five minutes. When I was nine years old, I played through the first cutscene and battle at my mum’s friend’s place. I couldn’t figure out how to reach the second screen, because I was young and unfamiliar with the controller. The next week I sat down and wrote out scores for all the games I had played recently: FF7 was awarded 32%. In 2015 I’ve returned to the game, intending to play it every night for a week, to see what all the fuss is about and whether it holds up. My first session – which only lasted about an hour before I get a headache (my eyes lived through 1997, but have a hard time adjusting to it)…

What follows is an abridged account of our first game of D&D using the Starter Set. The game was DMed by me (Dan) and played by four people: Wilks, Alex, Rachel, and Craig. Of the five of us, only Wilks and Craig have any significant experience with D&D and tabletop roleplaying. We’ve all played computer roleplaying games, though, meaning we all had a base level of familiarity with D&D’s structure and core concepts. You’d be surprised how much this helps. The Mines of Phandelver is a shortish adventure designed for a party of four. Set in the Forgotten Realms, the story takes place in and around a medium-sized mining town by the name of Phandalin, a few days travel southeast of Neverwinter. To begin the adventure, the player characters are…

The first time I played an RPG I had no idea what I was doing. I’m guessing it was 1989, and for reasons I still can’t properly understand or explain, I decided to purchase Bard's Tale 3 for my Commodore 64. Maybe I had seen it a magazine somewhere, or I liked the box cover, or I don’t know? But when it arrived in the mail I quickly discarded the box and instruction manual, placed the 5 ” floppy disc in the drive, and nodded in approval as a full screen animation of a bro playing the lute kicked in. The character creation bit came next. Apparently you could import your characters from the previous two games, but that meant nothing to me, so I just got down to brass…

“LEGION IS SET TO BE A MASSIVE HEROIC POWER FANTASY FROM CHARACTER CREATION TO FINAL RAID” PLATFORM: PC • CATEGORY: MMO EXPANSION • DEVELOPER: BLIZZARD • PUBLISHER: BLIZZARD • DUE: 2016 Every month it seems like someone's telling us that World of Warcraft is dying – the latest round of pronouncements coming after it was revealed that WoW has recently dropped to the lowest number of subscribers since 2005. That sounds a little dire without numbers attached. Even though the numbers have dwindled, World of Warcraft still has 5.5 million subscribers. Guild Wars 2 currently boasts around 7 million subscribers but due to the buy-to-play model, the ongoing revenue from the game is much less. The numbers may be down but the game isn’t dying. Not by a long shot.…

“COMBAT IS CURRENTLY UNPLAYABLE, WITH SHODDY SOUNDS AND ANIMATIONS THE LEAST DAMNING ISSUES” PLATFORM: PC • CATEGORY: RPG • DEVELOPER: PORTALARIUM • PUBLISHER: PORTALARIUM • DUE: TBA There’s a lot of promise in Richard “Lord British” Garriott’s latest game, Shroud of the Avatar. That is, if you read the original Kickstarter pitch, or the laundry list of intended features on the Steam page. The reality, though, is Shroud of the Avatar isn’t close to being finished and, given it’s been in pre-alpha since Early Access release in November 2014, it isn’t likely to be close to finished anytime soon. In fact, there’s a capitalised warning from developer Portalarium that comes just shy of telling you to not buy the ambitious MMO in its current form. Outside of the normal pre-alpha…

“EVER WORKED HARD TO HAVE SOMETHING YOU LOVED PRETTY MUCH IGNORED? LEAVES YOU GUTTED. LEAVES YOU SAD. BUT IT’S A GIG. NO TIME FOR FEELINGS.” There’s an old Hollywood joke - ‘did you hear about the blonde who was so dumb she slept with the writer?’ Kinda sexist but the point stands: The writer is the person with the least power. Found that out working on Sacred 3. Here’s how it starts, here’s how a writing job can go tits up. My publisher tells me over lunch at the San Diego Comic Con "A computer game thing... someone came. They were looking for you. Something about a job." It is July 2012 and I am flattered to be asked. A year later, I will have grown a sadness beard about…

Before you ask: yes, it’s meant to be the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts. Intellectual lusts aren’t laying slate: they’re being satisfied, fulfilled – slaked. “One of the QA guys pointed this out one month before we shipped," said Torment writer Chris Avellone in an online Q&A. "Suffice it to say we are idiots – not to mention the fact we REALLY didn’t want go back through reams of text to change it.” Given that Torment’s script is 800,000 words long, you can understand their reticence. Thankfully (for pedants) there’s a fan mod that fixes it. In the words of its owner/proprietor and chief succubus, Fall-From-Grace, the brothel exists “to give those lustful fevers that strike the mind more avenues of expression rather than the simply carnal.” So no: there’s…

I have an overactive imagination, which means that whenever I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom or get a glass of water, my brain starts running through impossible worst-case scenarios for what perils could befall me. Perhaps the most abstract sleep-addled thought I regularly have is: "what if you open this door and there’s a completely different world on the other side, a hellscape where awful things will start happening to me immediately with no explanation or justification?" Spirited Away is like a beautiful movie adaptation of this abstract fear. The protagonist, Chihiro, stumbles into the Spirit World after following her parents through a strange doorway – there’s no more context in the film than that, things just happen – and soon finds…

In a glade somewhere not far from here rests the Master Sword. Golden light works its way between oaken trunks as small critters scurry through the underbrush – free from the fear of predators thanks to the warm, comforting aura of the forgotten blade. It rests hilt skyward, blade thrust into stone, shining brilliantly in the morning light despite years of solitude. Symmetrical in design, brilliant to behold, the Blade of Evil’s Bane waits patiently for the moment it is once again called upon. Governed by threes, the blade was crafted by a long forgotten goddess and her ancient sages. It was then tempered and honed by the flames of Farore, Din and Nayru – the three Golden Goddess’ – imbuing it with the strength to reflect any power driven…