Farming Simulator comes to consoles; Outside Xbox is ready
Plus Watch Dogs, Dying Light.
Hello, Eurogamers! Another week, another hand-picked selection of videos from Outside Xbox.
The impending first wave of next-gen games favours the open world and new-fangled multiplayer, with linear, scripted adventure taking a back seat. Every game we played or previewed this week was open-world, except for Black Ops 2's new map pack - and the less said about our performance there, the better.
The bucolic pleasures of Farming Simulator are the ideal antidote to that triple-A console carnage. Mark our words, this open-world adventure in agriculture will find a welcoming niche on Xbox 360 and PS3 when it arrives next week. It's a bit like Minecraft, but with just the crop growing and animal husbandry and no exploding block monsters. In Show of the Week, we ponder this PC title's rebirth on consoles and which other simulation games could make the transition.
Watch Dogs is a likewise promising open-world game but with all the blockbuster flash. This next-gen effort has plenty of bright ideas - some all its own, some magpied from our favourite games. It lifts the radio tower capturing of Far Cry 3 and the social stealth multiplayer of Assassin's Creed, for instance, and installs them in a detailed city sandbox in the style of Grand Theft Auto. Fresh from a hands-on Watch Dogs demo, Andy and I talk it over.
Dying Light, meanwhile, comes from the makers of Dead Island and adds just a few new tricks to the developer's recipe for open-world zombie killing. There is free running and a day-night cycle in a ruined urban setting. Zombies no longer bleed numbers. But for the most part Dying Light is a next-gen iteration of Techland's Dead Island games, with four-player co-op and modded melee weapons. Andy talks to Techland bod Blazej Krakowiak in the video below.
For daily videos and shambolic Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 action from Clan Oxbox, pay us a visit at outsidexbox.com.