Level design has a lot in common with theme park design. They use similar tricks to guide and lure visitors, tell stories with the world, reward visitors, conceal flaws and boundaries, reveal surprises… heck, go watch Scott Rogers’ GDC talk Everything I Learned About Level Design I Learned from Disneyland. But what has Fallout 4 [official site] learned from Disneyland about building an actual theme park? We’ll see on August 30th, as Bethesda have announced that’s when the Nuka World expansion will launch with a new fizzypop Disneyland copycat. Have a look in this new trailer:

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I’ve spent a significant chunk of the last few days having an explore in No Man s Sky [official site]. I still have my reservations and there’s so much clunkiness and frustration that needs dealing with AND the tutorial/new player onboarding is dismal – in fact, my thoughts are pretty much in line with John’s review of the game – BUT I’ve also had moments of joy, and I do feel compelled to keep exploring. My screenshot count is just shy of 400 right now so I’ve put together a kind of travellogue to illustrate my journey so far via my favourite images. You can click on any of them for a larger version and you can navigate the gallery using the arrow buttons just next to the images.

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I’m always interested in big balance changes to long-running competitive games, the rewriting of rules and reshaping of how matches go. I’m still waiting for football to follow Dota’s lead and re-landscape and re-plant the pitch every few months – I’d love to see how the cars deal with that. Over in the world of StarCraft II [official site], Blizzard have announced details of a big rebalancing coming up in November. Why go into it this early? Because they want a good few months of feedback and tweaking. Terran mechmen, read on! Oh, and hey, SC2 is on sale now too.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Or OlliOlli 2, whatever you want. I prefer the look of the first one, with it s crunchy pixels and bloodied sprites. Because that s what happens in this skateboarding game, you mess up your trick, fall from 10 feet, crack your bones, roll, bleed and eventually come to a stop. It s delightful.

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Last month, I visited Relic at their home in Vancouver. As well as spending a few hours with a single, complete mission from the Dawn of War III [official site] campaign, I had the chance to sit in on short presentations from various members of the team, demonstrating how their own contributions and creativity become part of the bigger picture. There was a lot to absorb, including enough environmental variety to excite the extraterrestrial explorer in me (ruined temples on jungle planets? Yes please), but one series of brief videos stood out, despite containing nothing that hinted at previously unseen planets or units.

The best of the videos used simple shapes to tell me everything I needed to know about the game’s races, and how well Relic understand them.

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Today, a little bit of heresy. I’m going to talk about adventure games. Specifically, about a thing I’ve always loved in them, when they offer the chance – that sense of being given a ship and a universe to explore. I get a shiver when I look at the star-map. I feel proud of my usually low-resolution, 256-colour VGA vessel. And yet, jump genres to something like RPG or strategy and the moment is just gone. Why does No Man’s Sky, a game that actually supports that wanderlust, not give me anything close to the same thrill that something like Space Quest V still does, even knowing that Space Quest V is a) limited to a handful of worlds, each only a few screens in size, and b) makes your cool ship a garbage scow full of people who pretty much hate you?

I don’t know, but I love this screen. This, more than any Galaxy Map, is a screen that whispers “You can go anywhere. Do anything. The universe is yours>…”

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No Man s Sky [official site] is better on the PS4. Those aren t words I wanted to write. The PC port feels more like a drag-n-drop than a conversion, the released build dragged down by a dozen console millstones that shouldn t be here, and the tech on release not near ready to cope in the wild. And yet it’s a game I’m enjoying an enormous amount. It is a quandary. Here’s wot I think:>

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Stellaris [official site], Paradox’s sci-fi fusion of 4x design and grand strategy ideals, is a game that generates stories. As your species moves through the galaxy, encountering all manner of alien life, you’ll create tiny tales and epic sagas. There are also stories already written, however, in the form of quest chains, and over the weekend we learned that one of the minds behind Fallen London and Sunless Sea will be adding to those space-stories. Alexis Kennedy, co-founder and formerly creative director of Failbetter Games, is now crafting word-shapes for Stellaris.

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Armello’s [official site] new DLC, Usurpers, adds all new ways to conquer the throne this month, along with a few new doe-eyed fur heroes to help you on your quest. Each new character has unique abilities to add even more depth to your quest for domination. League of Geeks is throwing in new Clan Rings, too, that provide unique stat boosts for each of the four animal clans.

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I’ve been mostly absent from the internet for a week, enjoying a holiday that involved as little in the way of online interaction and vidputergames as possible. I did take some time to play a rather splendid game though. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it.

It involves procedurally generated worlds, littered with resources, and you must navigate those worlds in vehicles that run out of fuel extremely quickly. Sometimes, alien slugs will attack. The game is called Switchcars [official site] and it’s delightful.

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