Dragon’s Dogma has a menagerie of large mythological creatures and interesting combat system in which we can fight them with. But it’s our party members and Dragon’s Dogma’s online functionality that intrigues us the most. We spoke to Capcom director Hideaki Itsuno, who told us about the pawn system and how borrowing them from other players works:

“I thought ‘what if we make a system where you raise a mercenary, have others all over the world use it and then the mercenary grows stronger based on those experiences?” Hideaki told us, “If it is done in that way, then the user will not be hindered from playing as they wish and they will still have that feeling of being online. This way, even without the real time communication of things like blogs and twitter, the player is still connected and can play online as they please.

“The pawns are not just partners that you take with you on your adventures, but they are the base of communication. These pawns bring back information about their experiences and the knowledge they have received from their adventures with other users, making them quite helpful.

“The game does not give very straight forward hints but that is where the pawns come in, by bringing back information from all of their travels. This is not just information on the maps or quests, but also information on how to fight monsters. Pawns that are lent out do not just gain knowledge and experience from those renting them, but can also be rated and receive gifts. So every day the player can sit and enjoy that fact that somewhere out there, someone is borrowing their pawn.

We spoke to Remedy Entertainment’s Aki “AJ” Järvilehto on the upcoming sequel, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, to find out what he thinks has ensured American Nightmare’s success:

360 Magazine: Alan Wake was originally planned as an episodic release, what was behind the original thinking and why was it changed to a boxed release?

AJ: With original Alan Wake we wanted to really go for a Stephen King meets Lost theme, tipping our hats to some of the greats like Alfred Hitchcock and Twin Peaks. We took a lot of inspiration from different TV series, and this way we could create an experience, which was easy to jump in an out of. Structuring the game to episodes with “Previously on Alan Wake” inserts to help players get back into the game just flowed naturally. It was also a great structure for storytelling in videogames.

While the episodic format for the game was an awesome fit, however, distributing it this way would have been a massive risk. The world simply wasn’t ready for this new model. Gaming has come a long way since then and continues to balloon. Who knows, I at least hope it’ll be a very viable option in the near future.

360 Magazine: What are the benefits for you as a developer to having your game on XBLA and not on shop shelves?

AJ: There are benefits to both models of course. The fun part about digital distribution is that we can do things faster and with easier iteration. Another really important thing is that in a sense were quite a bit closer to our actual audience, the gamers. Believe it or not we actually read our email and everything people write on Alan Wake’s Facebook pages and forums, and now it is just so much easier to react to the feedback from the fans!

You can read the full interview more about Alan Wake’s American Nightmare in issue 97 of 360 Magazine, on sale 22 February.

We ask Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning’s lead designer, Ian Frazier, what it’s like to change your entire fate. Possibly because he’s a mage or something…

360 Magazine: Amalur is coming out between some well-established action RPGs. What’s its angle?

Ian Frazier: Reckoning has several different traits that help us stand out from the crowd, but here are three of the bigger one. First, we have a rich, colourful art style that’s surprisingly refreshing in an age where ‘dark and gritty’ is the order of the day.

This helps us to sell R.A. [Salvatore]’s core idea that Amalur is a world worth saving, a place that’s so beautiful and varied that you really want to save the world from the various evils that plague it.

Second, we have an innovative approach to character class –what we call the Destiny system – which lets us get around one of the big historical problems of the RPG genre: buyer’s remorse.

We let you get a feel for the game before settling on a class, and even after you have settled on one, we let you evolve and change it further over the course of the game.

Finally, our combat is simply spectacular. It’s smooth, it’s responsive and it gives the player an obscene amount of freedom in how to approach it. It’s incredibly fun.

Frankly I think Reckoning’s combat is head and shoulders above any other game in the genre when it comes to raw entertainment value.

360: We’ve been spoiled a bit by The Elder Scrolls’ generous open worlds; what can we expect from Amalur’s?

IF: It’s big. Really, really big. And perhaps more importantly, it’s incredibly dense – there’s nowhere you can go in the Faelands (the part of Amalur focused on in Reckoning) where you won’t find a ton of different peopleto talk to, quests to do and things to discover.

Beyond that, something we’re really proud of is the sheer amount of visual variety in the world—we’ve got five exterior regions that each have their own very different biome and mood, from dank swamps to arid deserts to the strange crystalline landscape of Alabastra, so you get a lot more variety than is the norm for open-world games.

360: How big is the open world, both in terms of mileage and number of dungeons?

IF: I couldn’t tell you the exact square footage of the overworld map (that’s a hard number to nail down due to how our playable space is technically constructed), but I can tell you that it takes over half an hour to sprint at full [speed] across the map, even if you somehow avoid all combat.

As for dungeons, there are around 130 of them in the game, and each one is hand-crafted (we never reuse dungeon layouts).

Plus they come in several different art styles, from crystal caverns to the organic innards of an ancient tree, so there’s an awful lot of variety to experience there.

There are also a ton of buildings in the game, from shops to taverns to guild halls, so you’ve got all those to explore as well.

360: Finally, can you give a bit of background on the world of Amalur itself?

IF: Before we even started production on Reckoning, R.A. Salvatore provided us with a massive story bible that lays out over 10,000 years’ worth of history (both past and future of Reckoning) for the world of Amalur.

We know how different races have related over time, where civilizations have risen (and fallen), where wars were fought, where great artifacts of the past were lost and how new cultures will form in the future.

Having this broad base of knowledge has allowed us to build out the world in a really broad way from the very start, giving it a sense of reality and texture that’s incredibly hard to accomplish without doing all this ‘homework’ in advance.

As far as the specifics of the setting in Reckoning, it focuses on a region of Amalur called the Faelands, named for the immortal beings who hold sway there. The mortal races are relatively ‘new’ (a few hundred years of settlement) to this area in our time period, and there are still some racial tensions there.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Time-wise, we’re set in a period of Amalur’s history called the Age of Arcana, a time when magic is freshly blossoming in the world after a long period of stability – races and peoples who previously had no magical gifts now find themselves developing such powers; meanwhile those who already had access to magic are finding it to be increasingly unstable and chaotic.

As you might imagine, this change in magic plays a pretty big role in some of the story events afoot in Reckoning.

Check out the latest issue of 360 Magazine or, if RPG’s are your thing, take a look at the 5 things we think are missing from Skyrim.

If you liked this article, there’s plenty more where that came from. You can download the latest issue of 360 Magazine (also available in all good newsagents) through iTunes to your iPad or iPhone for just £1.99 per issue. Bargain!

Or go here for the United States iTunes store version.

Speaking exclusively to 360 Magazine earlier this month, Binary Domain producer Masayoshi Kikuchi spoke up for the hidden strengths of Kinect interaction, suggesting it’s a greater tool for integrating players with their AI squad mates than simple ‘words on a screen’.

‘Even when you’re playing through the game on your own, we want people to immerse themselves in the team dynamic. We want to be emotionally stimulating throughout the story so this is where the voice recognition comes in.

Obviously you can play with button presses, choose different responses and call-outs that you make to them with your buttons. But with voice recognition you can make that part of the game more natural; you can think about how you might call out to them, thank them if they’ve saves you with a health pack or something.

It would be great if you could have full-blown conversations with them, if you could walk alongside them and talk to them about anything. But that’s impossible right now.’

Who’d have thought that Peter Molyneux’s Milo And Kate demo would actually bear fruit in a little futuristic shooting off of faces, eh? You live and learn…

If you liked this article, there’s plenty more where that came from. You can download the latest issue of 360 Magazine (also available in all good newsagents) through iTunes to your iPad or iPhone for just £1.99 per issue. Bargain!

Or go here for the United States iTunes store version.

Check out the following for more 360 Magazine goodness:

Binary Domain: 2012′s First Sleeper Hit?

Best Game Ever: The Top 10

Trolling Battlefield 3: 5 Ways To Be Very, Very Annoying (Video)

Whether you’re relatively new to video gaming or are a hardcore hobbyist with several decades of experience under your belt, our capacity for weathering the vagaries of any game in anticipation of a reward isn’t what it used to be. In the eighties we’d suffer crippling bugs and bad game design purely because we didn’t know any better; The nineties saw our palates refine and these days a typical gamer demands that a new title grabs them by the lapels and gives them a firm slapping within five minutes of play.

It’s a point we bring up with IO Interactive Game Director Tore Blystad, who’s currently working on Hitman: Absolution. Its brilliant 2006 predecessor, Blood Money, required a degree of patience that’s rare in today’s console gamer.  That’s something IO has had adapt for in its development of Absolution:

Tore Blystad: In the play-through you come to a place, there are ten guys up ahead – what are you going to do? Are you going to go in guns blazing, circumvent it or deal with it in another way. But we want to give the information… how to say… in front of the player?

360 Magazine: So there’s less trial and error?

TB: Yes. Also, trial and error might have been fun in the past but people are less… open, for trial and error now.

360 Magazine: That’s the COD effect on our attention spans.

TB: It’s a different world now than when Blood Money came out. We’re trying to take the consequences of that without dumbing-down the game in any way. Giving people, if they want to be a purist and they don’t want these fancy new mechanics, the fibre-wire and that’s it? That’s fine, you can play that way and you will be rewarded for that. If you then play through as silent assassin then there’s literally hundreds of hours…

Obviously developers have been adapting their products for market trends since the birth of the industry – that’s common business sense. But this specific example is curious to us: Blood money was a superb game and the particular trial-and-error mechanic Tore Blystad talks about in our interview would still be viable in Hitman: Absolution. But the immediacy of games like the Call Of Duty franchise, which in the time between Blood Money and Absolution has evolved like a fruit fly in a genetics lab, has rubbed off on the masses.

Could we be falling into a vicious circle of shorter attention spans and games that compromise to compensate? Are we ruining games for ourselves?

Talking to in-game characters has long been a pipe dream for many developers. Often used in sci-fi movies as a way displaying just how futuristic technology can be interacted with, it has remained on the outskirts of possibility for years; the tech failing to comprehend the complexities of speech or just plain not working.

Not that it hasn’t at least been attempted; occasionally a few games come along that point the way forward using voice or speech recognition in new and interesting ways.

Online titles like Façade or even Ubisoft’s EndWar have both made strides in these areas, but have been left behind as interesting, failed, experiments.

Even with Microsoft’s Kinect, we took another step towards vocally engaging with our digital worlds. It’s succeeded in the recent output of Kinect games, of sorts, but is still viewed by many as a work in progress, with the big hitters like Mass Effect 3 and even Bing, yet to truly so how the technology can be utilised.

But all of this discounts Sega’s Binary Domain. A title so far remembered for a particularly gruesome trailer that sees a person rip off their own face, revealing a robot underneath, it’s charms lay elsewhere. Namely in the shooting and dismembering of robots, few have been expecting voice control to be its distinguishing feature. And that it would be substantially more ambitious than the ‘speak to replace the A button’ that BioWare is employing with the voice control in ME 3.

To help wrap our heads around this ambitious conceit, we tracked down Binary Domain’s producer, Masayoshi Kikuchi, who’s also worked on various Yakuza games, to find out exactly how players will be able to interact with characters by using just their voices…

“One of the things that we wanted to deliver to users within this game is, even when you’re playing through the campaign mode on your own, we want people to immerse themselves in the team dynamic.

There are characters that journey alongside you throughout the whole game and obviously in single-player, the AI controls characters, their personalities and traits. There are various points in the game where you can respond to them in different ways that will affect your relationship with them.

We really want people to interact with the NPCs, some people may find themselves emotionally attached to one or two of them and then choose them over the others.

We want to be emotionally stimulating throughout the story so this is where the Voice Recognition comes in. Obviously, you can play with button presses, choose different responses and call-outs that you make to them with your buttons.

But with Voice Recognition you can make that part of the game more natural, you can think about how you might call out to them, thank them if they’ve saved you with a health pack or something. It doesn’t even have to be ‘thanks’ or ‘cheers’, you can tell them to leave you alone.

It’s a feature included to make people interact with the characters more naturally and therefore make it easier for users to be emotionally engaged rather than just seeing words on a screen then pressing them with buttons.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you liked the Binary Domain trailer, you should also check out some of 2012′s best trailers or Nowgamers top 50 best gaming moments ever.

If you liked this article, there’s plenty more where that came from. You can download the latest issue of 360 Magazine (also available in all good newsagents) through iTunes to your iPad or iPhone for just £1.99 per issue. Bargain!

Or go here for the United States iTunes store version.

360 Magazine: There seems to be a real sense that BioWare is ending Shepard’s trilogy in the most explosive and ambitious way possible, is there a sense that series should go out with all guns blazing?

Casey Hudson: Our main goal is to ensure that everyone – long-time Mass Effect fans and players new to the series – are able to experience the absolute pinnacle of the Mass Effect experience as we bring Commander Shepard’s journey to a close.

For new players that means the beginning, and the end, of a full-scale galactic war.

And for players who have been with us since ME1, it will be the satisfying conclusion of the plots and character arcs that they’ve been following for years.

360: It’s clear now that the universe is in the midst of an all-out war, how has that effected the way you approach the design from everything from the missions, characters and locations?

CH: It is initially daunting, but we always look for historical reference to ground the story.  With many difference regions fighting their own wars and experiencing their own struggles, we realized that on some level it’s a World War II story.

We needed to find a way to make sense of how people can still go to a bar for a drink in an occupied town, or how one region might fall to the enemy while another remains well-controlled.

Many of these answers are found in WWII, and having a historical reference point for war on that scale helps create storylines and situations that are realistic even though they exist in a futuristic setting.

360: Was there ever a danger that this third game would have to repeat the basic story template of the second game (roaming the galaxy and building a kick-ass team)? How did you ensure what you created was new?

CH: No, each story is really a different act in the trilogy, and has a different function.  Now that we know that the Reapers are real, and they have arrived to capture our world (and many others) with overwhelming force, it creates a different kind of story structure.

There is more time pressure, but at the same time the scale is much greater and Shepard’s allies have access to a whole new level of war assets.  So ME3 is much more about how an entire civilization wins a war, versus collecting a team for a covert mission.

360: Mass Effect 3 has already been described as the end of Shepard’s trilogy, but how much of a conclusion can players expect? Is there a definitive ending and how much of the individual choices players have made over the three games impact the conclusion?

CH: Yes, everything we’ve been working towards is geared towards giving players a spectacular, satisfying, and definitive ending to their story as Commander Shepard.

360: Each Mass Effect game has promised hugely divergent choices for player’s that has always been represented through the characters Shepard interacts with. Has there been a technical or writing limitation on how far this idea can be taken in the third game?

CH: With Mass Effect 3 we are in a unique position of being able to let the player’s decisions have greater consequences than ever before.  In previous games we had to be careful to leave certain story threads intact so that they could be continued in the next game.

But knowing that we are approaching the end of this storyline, we’re able to let players make decisions on a scale that we’ve never been able to before.

360: Why attempt multiplayer? How exactly does it tie into the singleplayer and what was it about co-op, specifically, (and not deathmatch) that attracted you?

CH: There are obvious benefits to having a multiplayer aspect to a game – it extends the playability, adds value to the offering, and lets you share something you enjoy with your friends.

Even when we started working on ME1 it was clear that games were moving towards various forms of integrated multiplayer but we just weren’t able to find a way to implement it that made sense with the storyline and properly complemented the single-player experience.

But with Mass Effect 3, we realized that it finally made sense.  With the entire galaxy in a war for survival, it’s not just Shepard’s exploits that are interesting – there are battles all over the galaxy that would be cool to experience.

Letting players take part in that larger war effort was the concept that finally made sense in the Mass Effect universe.

360: Were you surprised by the reaction of fans to the multiplayer announcement?

CH: We knew it would be controversial, and we also knew that when people actually tried it they would understand why it’s a great addition to the experience.  But what really surprised us was how quickly concern turned into support once we started describing how it would work.

360: Why do you think gamers are precious over singleplayer, narrative heavy games attempting multiplayer and what should they be expecting from Mass Effect 3’s?

CH: I think people have been burned in a few different ways by games in the past.  Sometimes a game will add a player-versus-player deathmatch thing that doesn’t make any sense in the game’s fiction.  Other times a developer might take a good single-player experience and shoehorn a co-op feature into it which compromises the quality of the single-player story.

We absolutely refused to do multiplayer in a way that compromised quality, the continuity of the IP, or the single-player experience.  That’s why we hadn’t done multiplayer until now, and it’s what we think will be really unique about our design for multiplayer for Mass Effect 3.

Click here to view the embedded video.

360: If the multiplayer is tied into the singleplayer, will that limit players returning to it after finishing the story?

CH: No, it’s not tied to single-player in that way.  It takes place in the war timeframe of Mass Effect 3, but there is no story interaction except for one: the more you succeed in multiplayer, the more successful the overall war effort will be for you as a player in the Mass Effect universe.  This means that if you then attempt the ending of the single-player experience, you’ll experience a greater level of success in the ending than you would if you had never played multiplayer.

But it is ultimately about choice.  By doing other things, such as doing a very complete single-player play-through, you can achieve the greatest levels of success in the Mass Effect 3 storyline even without playing multiplayer.  This is all part of Mass Effect 3’s Galaxy at War system, where you can fight the galactic war not just through singleplayer, but multiplayer as well, in addition to games on social networks, mobile, and iOS.

If you’re interested in finding out BioWare’s exciting climax to its popular series, you can watch Nowgamer’s video interview with the studio or read one of our exclusive previews.

BioWare isn’t usually the sort of studio associated with controversial, headline grabbing decisions. Apart from some lacklustre reviews surrounding the release of its fantasy epic sequel, Dragon Age 2, BioWare could quite easily be described as the games industry’s safest hands.

But, that was before it revealed the closing chapter of its sci-fi shooter RPG would include a multiplayer mode, though.

When we quizzed Mass Effect 3’s Executive Producer, Casey Hudson, he revealed the studio was more than aware the decision to step away from the established Mass Effect-norm would earn a few funny glances from many, and out right derision from others.

“We knew it would be controversial,” admits Casey Hudson, “and we also knew that when people actually tried it they would understand why it’s a great addition to the experience.

“But what really surprised us was how quickly concern turned into support once we started describing how it would work.”

A risky proposition, considering how many narrative-heavy games have been released to less than enthusiastic responses over the years. You only need to mention Bioshock 2 and Dead Space to get the point across.

“I think people have been burned in a few different ways by games in the past,” continues Hudson. “Sometimes a game will add a player-versus-player deathmatch thing that doesn’t make any sense in the game’s fiction. Other times a developer might take a good single-player experience and shoehorn a co-op feature into it which compromises the quality of the single-player story.

“We absolutely refused to do multiplayer in a way that compromised quality, the continuity of the IP, or the single-player experience. That’s why we hadn’t done multiplayer until now, and it’s what we think will be really unique about our design for multiplayer for Mass Effect 3.”

You can read our full interview with Casey Hudson and discover why Mass Effect 3 will be the most ambitious entry into the series to date.

Since its reveal in August 2010, Irrational Games’ Bioshock Infinite has been inseparable with its leading lady, Elizabeth.

The picture of vulnerability, strength and innocence her relationship with the player-controlled Booker DeWitt is pushing the very definition of the player/protagonist role.

While so many games currently fall back to genre staples, such as relying on players ‘following the man’, what Irrational has created in Booker and Elizabeth, is nothing short of groundbreaking.

We recently caught up with Ken Levine to find out just how far Bioshock Infinite is pushing things with its ambitious new design…

“What we’re doing is creating this improv between these two characters and the rest of the world,” explains Levine. “Voiceover is a good way to support that and to keep them interacting with each other, even when you’re doing something else. Elizabeth can give you a tonne of information about the world. We have all these places where she can notice things and point out things to help you like that.

“The challenge for us is that she always wants to be useful and helpful to you in terms of the gameplay experience, while not oppressively bogging you down with information or sitting there silently. We have a lot of context in it. We have a system called a ‘pattern matcher’, which basically identifies things that happen in the world and then acts on them. It sends messages to the AI and to the player, then alerts Elizabeth. Like, ‘Hey! This cool thing’s going on, who can tell us about this?’ Maybe Elizabeth can mention that, or Booker can mention that?

“So it’s this weird thing where the player is playing himself and Booker, then Booker can know things, notice things that the player maybe hasn’t noticed and maybe Elizabeth can do the same. Making that feel really organic is a challenge, but it’s also super-exciting.”

You can read the entire interview with Ken Levine in Issue 93 of 360 Magazine. On sale now for only £2.99 in print and £1.99 on the Apple Newsstand, alternatively you can read about why Ken Levine thinks multiplayer in most games is a complete waste of time.

We recently had the opportunity to speak at length with Irrational’s creative director, game design legend and bloody amiable chap Ken Levine, who had some strong views on the trend towards multiplayer in games.

“You have to make sure you’re not compromising on the core experience for people who are drawn to that,” he said, before referring to Bioshock: Infinite’s own deliberate lack of multiplayer and focus on the core experience, “If we were to do a multiplayer game it would have to feel organic. But I think the mistake people often make is that they say, ‘You know, Call Of Duty and Halo do really well. Why don’t we take what they do and colour it green instead of blue?’ At the end of the day, nobody’s ever going to play a wannabee, they want an experience that’s fresh and new.”

With Electronic Arts being driven towards a multiplayer-dominated future by CEO Jon Riccitello and Activision leading multiplayer shooters with the Call Of Duty series, it’s reassuring to have a developer whose modus operandi is creating the best possible, original single-player experience rather than trying to cash in on a trend.

“I remember going online and checking out a reasonably big game that had just come out a few weeks before… I think four people were playing it on XBox Live and it was just heartbreaking… All that work, time and energy for something that’s not organic to the product, then no-one plays it. I think this is because – why would they play that instead of COD? It’s ‘I’m going to do what those Infinity Ward guys did and I’m going to do it better.’ Well good fucking luck.”