One of the standout moments from Microsoft's XO19 event was the reveal of Everwild. Led by 20-year Rare veteran Louise O'Connor and a growing team within the legendary barn-filled Twycross developer, Everwild is a third-person adventure game set "in a natural and magical world".

That's not all Rare has on its plate at the moment, of course. While Everwild caught the eye at XO19, Sea of Thieves nears its second Christmas and development on the pirate adventure continues. Alongside these two games, Rare is working with the Essex-based studio Dlala on a new Battletoads. And, within Rare's famous barns, other things are afoot.

It's an exciting time for Rare, then, in 2019, the year before the launch of the next Xbox and with two cool games on its books. But it has not always been this way. Before Sea of Thieves met with success, and not long after Microsoft shut down fellow beloved UK studio Lionhead, there were serious questions being asked of Rare's future. And the studio's Kinect Sports saga had only fuelled the perception that the magic of old was lost. Things change quickly in the video game industry. Is Rare now back? Did it ever go away?

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PlayStation 4 adventure Detroit: Become Human comes to PC on 12th December, developer Quantic Dream has announced.

It'll be priced 29.99 on the Epic Games Store, where some of the studio's other games - Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls - have already launched. A free demo will also be available at the same time.

This PC version will offer 4K 60fps visuals and a new interface designed for mouse and keyboard, as well as gamepad controls.

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Like Doc Brown, I once hit my head and saw the future. I didn't come round in the bathroom having the idea for the Flux Capacitor, but I did bonk my noggin pretty hard in the office games room and sit back, dazed but delighted with what had just happened.

I was playing the Budget Cuts demo on Valve's room-scale VR. Budget Cuts is a game about infiltrating an office that's patrolled with deadly robots. Because of the room-scale VR, you're really there: your actual body is your in-game body. This means that the robots are the same size as you - which is terrifying - and it also means that when you have to duck your head through a missing panel in the floor to look into the room below, you really have to do it. Except that while the game floor might be missing a panel, the real floor isn't. Bonk. I did it. Chris Bratt, who had also played the demo, had done it. A day later, so moved by what I'd played I brought in a friend to try it out. They did it too. We all hit our heads and we all saw the future.

More than just the future of video games, I really felt like I had seen the future of one series in particular. I still think this. I still think that Budget Cuts is essentially the closest I've ever gotten to playing Half-Life 3. It's not set in the Half-Life universe, although its mixture of horrific technology and the banal and bureaucratic is not a million miles away. It wasn't made by a Valve team, although I gather the people who made it did end up working on the final game at Valve as incubees. Instead, it channels that magical thing that Half-Life has always done.

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It's a bit early to start thinking about Christmas, but since this season above all others is a thing of many rituals, it shouldn't be too surprising when the rituals start slipping forward a little. Last week Starbucks brought out its red cups, and this week, perhaps because of all that, I've been looking to Fortnite to do its special Christmas thing.

It involves the shrubbery scattered about the place. Shrubbery that, when I first started playing the game, was incredibly important to me. Before I knew what I was doing - I still don't know what I'm doing - I spent a lot of time hiding in Fortnite's many bushes. They gave me an elbow up on a game that seemed to be full of much more talented players. I could get inside the circle, park in a bush and then wait as the player count ticked down.

Then Christmas came, and the bushes were suddenly transformed. They had fairy lights strung through them, which made them festive, but also made them more visible. It was a trade-off I was happy with, though, because I like it when a game like Fortnite is able to note the passage of time. There has always been a little of Animal Crossing to Fortnite. Maybe this is where I first started thinking about that.

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Amy Hennig is joining Skydance Media, the Hollywood studio behind the likes of Mission: Impossible - Fallout and Terminator: Dark Fate, to establish a division that will work on "new story-focused experiences".

Hennig, perhaps best known for her work as writer and director on Naughty Dog's first three Uncharted games, will, alongside executive producer partner Julian Beak, be tasked with building a new team for Skydance, located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The studio's goal is to create "new story-focused experiences [that] will employ state-of-the-art computer graphics to provide the visual fidelity of television and film, but with an active, lean-in experience that puts the audience in the driver's seat".

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Back at the tail-end of 2018, and nine months after it shut down Torchlight developer Runic Games, publisher Perfect World Entertainment announced that a new game in the series, the free-to-play Torchlight Frontiers, was on the way and due to arrive at some point this year. You'll need to keep your waiting hat on, however, as that release has now been delayed into 2020.

Torchlight Frontiers, if you're wondering, is being developed by Echtra Games, the studio established by Runic Games co-founder Max Schaefer in 2016. It unfolds in the same universe as its predecessors, but sets itself apart from previous games by shifting the series' hack-and-slash dungeon crawling to a "shared, persistent and dynamically generated world". You can see a smattering of that in the early gameplay trailer below.

Although Torchlight Frontiers was originally expected to release this year - and its official website still proclaims as much - Schaefer has now confirmed in an interview with PC Gamer that the studio has revised its plans and is aiming to launch the game in 2020.

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Square Enix's acclaimed Minecraft-a-like adventure Dragon Quest Builders 2 will, after spending the last couple of months smashing blocks and bothering slimes on Switch and PlayStation 4, be making its way to PC on 10th December.

Dragon Quest Builders 2 delivers a much finessed version of its predecessor's block-crafting-meets-JRPG template, and once again sees players embarking on a charming story-driven quest to explore the land, slay monsters, gather materials, and construct a bustling kingdom.

New this time, however, are considerably beefier building options, including a greater focus on agriculture, co-operative building for up to four players, more robust community features, and a whole bunch of tweaking to eradicate the first game's more irritating elements, such as weapon and armour degradation and the need to start from scratch with each new chapter.

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Street Fighter is not, it's fair to say, a series that's shy about repackaging itself up for another turn, and now Street Fighter 5 is primed to receive its third release, this time in the form of the Champion Edition, which comes to PS4 and PC on 14th February next year.

The Champion Edition, which follows on from last year's Arcade Edition, includes almost everything so far released for Street Fighter 5. In total, that amounts to 40 characters, 30 stages, and over 200 costumes, although Fighting Chance costumes, brand collaboration costumes and Capcom Pro Tour DLC will not be included.

Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition is getting a physical and digital release on PlayStation 4 and will also be available on Steam, with all versions costing 24.99/$29.99 USD. Additionally, those that already own a previous edition of Street Fighter 5 can purchase the Upgrade Kit for 19.99/$24.99 USD. It's available now and grants immediate access to new Championship Edition content ahead of February's launch.

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I really want Google's Stadia to be the Netflix of video games. Google insists it isn't, and it's right. It's not. Not at launch, anyway, when you have to fork out 119 for a Founder's Edition to play. But it should be, and I think Google knows this too.

As it stands, Stadia's bizarre business model means the tech is swimming upstream at launch. Let's say you're convinced by the tech (more on that over at Digital Foundry), and fancy dipping in. What you want to do is pay nine quid a month for access to a library of games that work at the push of a button. The reality of Stadia at launch, unfortunately, is very different.

Not only do you have to pay 119 for the Founder's Edition, which gets you a Chromecast and a controller (which at first looks like the cheap third-party controller you made your younger sibling use when you were playing local multiplayer but after some time feels quite good in your hands), but you then have to pay for games on top. Then you go on the Stadia store, which you access from your smartphone only, and the true horror of Stadia's business model is laid bare.

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Ubisoft has named an all-star cast for Assassin's Creed: Gold, a new audio drama series coming exclusively to Audible.

Star Wars: Rogue One's Riz Ahmed and Buffy's Anthony Head join No Offence's Tamara Lawrance and long-time Assassin's Creed voice actor Danny Wallace in an all new story for the franchise.

As detailed by Syfy, Gold will tell a tale of murder and politics set in both Isaac Newton's 17th-century Britain and today.

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