Author: John Robertson

There are all kinds of problems associated with the console real-time strategy (RTS) game, as the original Halo Wars demonstrated with aplomb back in 2009. The limitations of a control pad compared to a mouse and keyboard make camera movement and unit selection difficult. RTS games are typically more reliant on the CPU than GPU, so processing power is limited. And because RTS games have never really had much success on console, there's far more hand-holding required to relay the basics to players. Despite its problems, though, Halo Wars was workable enough to be a somewhat fun entry into what is a fiendishly difficult genus to crack.

Now Halo Wars 2 will opt for an even more difficult task: a simultaneous release across Xbox One and PC. No longer can the design team overlook mouse and keyboard users in favour of the pad player. In theory, both sets must be catered for equally; in practice, as I sat down to play a beta version on an Xbox One, that's not the case yet.

For the most part, this is a game that—eight months before launch, at least—has the same wider feel as its predecessor. Simplicity is the priority. Radial menus are still used to expand your base, construct vehicles, and train troops, while the units themselves have a wide footprint in order to make them easier to select using the analogue stick. There's also the returning Halo visual style, of course—a mishmash of sci-fi military and alien tech. Base management here is considerably more limited than other games in the genre.

I Am Setsuna is all about nostalgia. Sure, it doesn't rehash a familiar franchise, or dig up a cast of long forgotten characters, but it does serve up a mixture of PlayStation-era graphics and storytelling that harks back to the classic '90s RPGs that came to the West from Japan. The result, from the few of hours I've played, is a game that feels reassuringly familiar without being gratuitously mercantile in the process.

The story begins grimly, taking a more adult approach than is typical of the genre. You play as Endir, a warrior born into a tribe that pays its way through the world by offering mercenary services to whomever needs them. Following Endir's impressive feat of heroism in saving a girl from a monster (a sequence that acts as tutorial for the turn-based combat system), he is commissioned to kill another girl, Setsuna, who is about to turn 18.

Without straying too far into spoiler territory, it turns out Endir's mission is part of a series of regular sacrifices that are made to prevent monster attacks on settlements. Those attacks have been becoming more frequent, leading to more sacrifices. Before you can kill Setsuna, which Endir is more than ready to do given his sell-sword lineage, you're stopped by a small group seeking to end the cycle of teen killings. After some negotiation Endir becomes a reluctant member of the group.

The FIFA series has always tended be a touch exaggerated, like more of a rose-tinted rendition of the beautiful game as opposed to a wholly realistic one. Skills and tricks, favouring attacking over defensive solidarity, and building fantastical lineups through Ultimate Team—these are the hallmarks of the modern FIFA experience. But even they are about to outdone by what EA has planned for FIFA 17.

This season, you can take part in "The Journey," an interactive narrative in which you play as the young footballer Alex Hunter trying to earn his first Premier League contract. Through dialogue decisions, on-pitch performances (in which you control only Hunter), and lavishly created cut-scenes his story is told, influenced by what you choose to say and how well you play on the pitch.

No bones about it, this a wild departure from FIFA's tried and tested formula, particularly for a franchise that has tended to favour small yearly tweaks over grand reinventions. Having said that, as sports game fans will already know, The Journey isn't an entirely original exercise. The NBA 2K series, which has effectively made EA Sport's own attempts at a basketball game redundant, has a remarkably similar mode called MyCareer.

Pro Evolution Soccer is at a crossroads. PES 2016 was a stark improvement over anything the series had delivered since its PlayStation 2 heyday, with critics widely declaring that it outperformed FIFA 16—at least in raw action, if not shiny extras. Konami's challenge with PES 2017 is to continue the upward trend, and give FIFA diehards a truly compelling reason to switch.

Smartly, the advances and tweaks seen in PES 2017 do not revolve around what the competition is doing. PES 2016 took the series away from the showy theatrics and power fantasies of FIFA 16, edging it ever closer to realism. PES 2017 continues that approach. This is a game that knows exactly what digital football should look and feel like. As in real life, you might witness the occasional 30-yard bullet here and there, but the long-term rewards revolve around how diligent you are in understanding and practising the core strategies that underpin the world's most successful and respected teams.

Mechanics as simple as how players pass and caress the ball have been perceptibly altered. Even the shortest of passes feels important thanks to the authority with which players execute them. Almost completely gone is the pinball sensation that has plagued football games of the past, replaced by clever physics that make the ball its own individual entity. It no longer feels as though the ball has some form of magnetic attraction to a player's body—get a pass wrong, through poor timing or power, and you pay for it.

As far as understanding developer Polyphony Digital's ambitions for Gran Turismo and its PlayStation 4 outing GT Sport goes, there's only one thing you need to know: players will be able to earn a digital license that's recognised by the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile) and is valid at real motorsport venues in 22 countries. In other words, you take your tests in game, drive a race car in real life.

That might sound a little crazy, maybe even a little dangerous, but let's not forget that airline pilots train for the real thing in simulators, at least in part—and they end up responsible for more than their own lives at the end of it. Perhaps this license was always the ambition for a series that has forever styled itself as "the real driving simulator." It's simply taken 19 years for the world to catch up and take that ambition seriously.

The problem is, the vast majority of Gran Turismo fans are, well, gamers. And at this point, they've little to be excited about. Far in advance of mentioning the FIA license scheme, Polyphony Digital president Kazunori Yamauchi—on stage at an event in London—hurriedly glossed over single-player content in order to dedicate as much time as possible to explain the inclusion of tournaments aimed at professional-grade players drivers. Exactly what these tests will look like, how they're officially validated, and just how many doors a passing grade will open remain a mystery, however.

To outsiders, the Star Ocean series can be impenetrable, even downright adverse. Without digging into optional content, Star Ocean can easily take 100 hours to complete, while its many cut scenes—sometimes as much as 10 hours in a single game—are as confusing as they are long. Fans love it. But for Shuichi Kobayashi, producer of the upcoming Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (known simply as Star Ocean 5), wildly sprawling narratives and content for content's sake just won't cut it any more.

Star Ocean 5 is on a different path, one where even RPG newcomers can give it a try—and Kobayashi, visiting London on his first trip outside of his native Japan, knows just how to make it happen.

"The audience for games these days is made up with a lot of people that don't have that kind of time to spend with a single game," Kobayashi explains, "and they are put off by a game that asks them to put in 100 hours to get to the end and see everything. Because of that we deliberately made the pacing a lot faster than Star Ocean has seen in the past and that can make the game seem shorter, but maybe that is not what some of the core fans wanted."

On paper, a description of LawBreakers—the next game from ex-Epic and Gears of War developer Cliff Bleszinski—sounds niche at best, stale at worst.

"An exhilarating role-based first-person shooter where the laws of physics can be shattered, creating unprecedented gravity-based combat in an ever-evolving bloody arena," reads LawBreakers’ Steam page, sounding like something aimed at teenage boys with a penchant for the SyFy channel and a simple understanding of base adjectives.

Delve deeper though, and it's clear that LawBreakers is a game that the hyperbolic ad-speak fails to do justice to. As with the likes of basketball, baseball, and other successful sports, the entertainment factor doesn't come from a dry description of the rules—and let's face it, baseball sounds incredibly boring on paper—but from the presentation and minute details of the sport.

Hajime Tabata, the director of Final Fantasy 15, is surprisingly humble in person. He speaks softly, with a slight smile, and his dress sense is uncomplicated. He is also immaculately polite. Amusing it is, then, that I meet Tabata in a Los Angeles hotel that has been fully assimilated by a garish, faux-Renaissance design that envelops every wall, ceiling, and floor. East very much meets West.

The night before I meet Tabata, he takes part in an elaborate show at the Shrine Auditorium in Hollywood, California, a venue that has hosted everything from the Academy Awards and the Grammys, to the LA Lakers and Miss Universe. Some six thousand press, publishers, retailers, and fans were squeezed into the auditorium to watch Uncovered: Final Fantasy XV, cheer at FFVX's September 30 worldwide release date, and gawk at new trailers and the Hollywood stars that introduced them.

The clear message, within a venue synonymous with such large swathes of American pop culture, was that FFXV will engage with a Western audience more than any other game in the series. What's more, Square Enix believes that—after a string of so-so sequels and rocky product launches—FFXV is the game that will make make Final Fantasy great again.

Last month's announcement that Hitman would be adhering to an episodic release format, in which new locations and missions are released each month, was greeted with an understandable degree of anger by an audience expecting to get its hands on a full product this March. While episodic structures are nothing new at this point, the decision to change Hitman to an episodic release just two months prior to launch raised raised questions. Why was this not communicated earlier? Is the game unfinished? Are players eventually going to get all of the previously promised content? Will it benefit the consumer?

As Hans Seifert, studio head at Hitman developer IO Interactive tells Ars, going episodic was not a last-minute decision, at least from a development point of view.

"We started talking about it when we finished Absolution [in 2012], actually," says Seifert. "Six years passed between Hitman: Blood Money and Hitman: Absolution, and we thought that was too long a period for us to react to any feedback that we had off of the back of Blood Money. After all, every game is a child of its time. Tweaking the game after it has been released has become more and more important. When you look at the current games that are out there some have a very long life. A lot of these haven't relied on adding content over time, but the game itself has been tweaked after release. Then there are episodic games which do add new content, but the game itself hasn't necessarily been changed or improved."

There are two schools of thought when it comes to porting videogames between systems. On the one hand, you've got the supporters who believe that not everyone has the time, money, or inclination to purchase all available hardware, with ports giving them access to the most games. On the other, you've got the sceptics that believe it's not possible to get the most out of a game unless developers focus their efforts on a specific system.

The latter is perhaps why developer Kunos Simulazioni has faced such opposition to the console port of Assetto Corsa, a racing simulator so brilliant and so intrinsically tied to the platform it was developed on—it was launched on Steam Early access with much community input and mods—that many simply don't believe a console version will work. Since its launch in late 2014, Assetto Corsa has been widely lauded as the racing simulator, the game that petrol heads go to when the fluff of Forza's fancy weather effects grows stale and they fancy a real challenge.

It might not be as pretty as Drive Club, or sport the deep career mode of Gran Turismo, but Assetto Corsa has near everything else beat when it comes to replicating the simple pleasure of slamming a car round some tarmac. A racing wheel, by far a more popular peripheral on PC than console, is all but mandatory to get the best out of it.