Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter was a launch title for the Xbox 360 in 2005, followed up by Advanced Warfighter 2, two years later. A reasonable time frame for a sequel then, but there have been half a dozen delays since GRAW2 and the third Ghost Recon game of this generation, Future Soldier, is only just due this May.

That’s a fairly long time in the video games industry and a hell of a stretch in this generation so we caught up with Ghost Recon’s IP development director, Adrian Lacey and Creative Director Jean-Marc Geffroy to find out what Ubisoft has been doing with Future Soldier to bring it up to date.

Apparently, the studio has been working with genuine Navy SEALs, “I think even in terms of the technology and stuff, it made us realise it had to be a functional tool, and all these futuristic items that everyone would love,” Adrian told us.

“The Navy SEALs were like ‘Yeah, that’s doable and actually in progress but it’s gotta work’. They brought us back down to Earth and as Jean-Marc always says, reality sometimes creates more innovation than fantasy and it really proves that. It made us focus more on that characterization, more on the motion capture and how you work and react to the team with the AI and how they support you.

Then you’ve got the ‘tag-‘em-and-bag-‘em’ feature so it couldn’t be clunky or ‘Alpha 240, please go over there’. The SEALs were like, “It should be ‘Get the f**k over there.’ They should be over there anyway because they know they should get behind cover.’

“It was interesting because there was this one point where it’s a bit stupid to tell them to go over there because they are trained for that,” said Jean-Marc. “But what we need is two things: firstly, to know where the threats are, which we add and grow and have tried to make better for this game. The second was to know the situation, what the threats are, the quality of those threats and if we are going to eliminate part of the threat easily in order to trigger the fight, when we want the fight to be triggered.

“It’s interesting because whether it’s tough missions or level design, you accept that the player plays as they want and trigger the fight when they want, so the AI reacts to every threat even if it’s not the player but another Ghost. They’re not player-centric. The team AI has to know that, like you, they are a threat so we don’t have to script the game like a rollercoaster. The consequences of these one or two choices are something we have to work on and getting this AI right takes time. There’s been a lot of work done on the controller too to make it very, very precise, accurate and responsive.”

You can’t keep anything secret these days. The internet has made sure that even the faintest of whispers can lead to mass speculation and even the merest of rumours can spread faster than wildfire. In today’s gaming world, announcements are foreshadowed by months of industry chatter and as such, you can get a pretty good idea what’s just over the horizon if you keep your ears close enough to the ground. It might not all be right, some of this will just be wishful thinking, but most of this could be hitting a 360 near you very soon.

5) Half-Life 3

Half-Life 3 has been in development so long that the appearance of a website teasing something called ‘Black Aperture’ was enough to send the internet into a frenzy. In true Valve fashion the teasing single page offered nothing more than a logo and the mere promise of more information to come.

The name ‘Black Aperture’ hints at the proper joining of the facilities seen in Half-Life (Black Mesa) and Portal (Aperture Science) respectively, something that’s only been hinted at before. What’s most important about all of this, though, is the simple fact that Valve has begun talking.

Half-Life 2 became notorious for its continuously delayed development, helping enormously to make it one of the most hyped games of its time. Today’s gamers are a little savvier and, though excitement has certainly peaked, it will only begin to truly grow when Valve starts opening the floodgates.

And unfortunately, that depends on when its latest game is getting a release. The further into 2012 we get, too, the less likely whatever it is Valve has planned will see a release in the same year, but we live in hope.

Percentage chance: 47%

4) Tiger (working title)

Bungie’s next game promises to reach players in a way Halo barely touched on. Though Halo’s success could never be described as anything other than stellar, Bungie’s elusive new game promises to be a industry-shaker very much in the same way as it’s breakout hit for Xbox.

Though you could derive any number of meanings from the studios various hints and cryptic nods, there is very little concrete information around, but that hasn’t stopped us speculating wildly on the smallest of clues.

Bungie has hinted that ‘Tiger’, like almost every single one of its other games, will offer players the chance of exploring the stars, but whether this means we’ll be donning super-soldier armour isn’t yet clear. Bungie’s history with Halo’s innovative Forge mode and multiplayer indicates that the studio could be setting its sights on the lofty ambitions of creating an experience that requires a heavy emphasis on social networking and player co-operation.

A game that utilises the MMO genre’s most inclusive traits could hint at the direction Bungie is headed, or it could just be a game where a guy wearing armour shoots purple aliens that go ‘weraagghhh’.

Percentage chance: 26%

3) Kinect 2

Kinect has hit a number of issues since its launch in 2010, from technical limitations, creative confusions and a plain old lack of general support from the industry.

It’s easy to understand why many have been reluctant to involve Kinect in anything more than sports/dance/kids games since its release; it’s really rather difficult to include Kinect in traditional gameplay without crippling the player’s input in the process.

All of this could change with the increased accuracy of the rumoured Kinect 2, though. There’s been plenty of internet speculation talking up the possibilities of a successor to the Xbox 360 from Microsoft (and realistically, Kinect 2 could be a part of this), but for Microsoft’s motion control revolution to truly take hold, it seems the improvements a second iteration would bring are entirely needed.

The ability to lip-read and totally map body movements accurately, without delay, have been touted by some on the internet. It would certainly make a considerable difference, but until developers can wrap their heads around Kinect-only genres and ways of implementing the device unobtrusively into mainstream games, Microsoft’s motion controller will continue convince the hardcore.

Percentage chance: 51%

2) Assassin’s Creed 2012

Ubisoft’s adopted yearly release model for the Assassin’s Creed series has begun to creek under the weight of its over encumbered narrative. Where Brotherhood adapted and evolved the formula sufficiently, adding its own unique spin on to Ezio’s world, Revelations took the tiniest of steps forward making many wonder why exactly they needed another huge sprawling Assassin’s Creed adventure.

Perhaps yearly releases should be left to the sports franchises after all? This minor misstep is unlikely to put Ubisoft off, though, Assassin’s Creed, despite Revelations, is still one of the 360’s most bankable series and a new game for 2012 appears like a strong possibility.

Whether it’s a sequel along the same lines as the previous outings is open to debate, but a job listings on Ubisoft Quebec’s website could shed some light. According to its website, the studio is looking for an “experienced level designers to help create and populate the world for a triple-A MMO project.”

Hints at Cloud gaming also throw up the intriguing possibility that Assassin’s Creed is about to evolve into something far more ambitious than what we’ve seen before, or it could just be a job post for one of Ubi’s other major titles.

Percentage chance: 58%

1) Call Of Duty 2012

It’s Treyarch’s turn. What is it going to do, then? Black Ops 2? World At War 2? A whole new timeframe and spin-off? Well, the smart money’s on the studio returning to Black Ops and fleshing out a different war, taking advantage of its ‘deniable ops’ set-up that pretty much gives it carte blanch to do whatever it wants.

If Ubisoft is struggling to keep a new Assassin’s Creed interesting every year, the same is certainly not true of COD.

This is obviously thanks to its fantastic multiplayer and, with Elite now in place to offer a hub for the DLC and incremental changes, a new COD will more than likely remain largely unchanged in basic form to what we’ve had before.

Not that it’s too much of an issue, clearly the world agrees that the COD formula is working just fine, but just how many samey iterations does the series have left under its belt before it begins to feel stale?

Percentage chance: 85%

Follow The Man: It’s the most common objective in modern shooters, right behind ‘release nuke’ and ‘shoot one guy while I shoot the other guy’. Is it time, though, to put FTM to pasture?

It’s a matter of some disappointment for us here at the 360 Magazine office that there will soon be a generation of gamers for whom the term ‘videogame’ conjures up images of some decorated military man’s rear end, and a dot in the far distance.

For this is the first, the last, and it seems the intermediate command during the world’s fastest-selling videogame. And the three before it.

And a host of shortened, simplified imitators since. We can’t be the only gamers out there to now inwardly groan when that initial HUD command pops up, as we stare down what’s essentially a tunnel made of buildings.

It’s time to ask the big question: should this simplifying gameplay mechanic be put to pasture? Let’s look at the evidence.

During the course of this hardware generation, the Follow The Man (FTM) template has been responsible for altering console shooters in several profound ways.

For starters, it has single-handedly diverted the Battlefield series from the team-based, expansive combat it had so gracefully mastered, towards the same barely explained, globe-trotting blockbuster experience Call Of Duty offers purely, it seems, out of fear.

Speaking more broadly, developers have clearly felt the pressure to compete with this industry benchmark and in so doing reduced experiences as varied as the invasion of America by North Korean forces, James Bond’s comic exaggeration, and an assault on modern-day New York, to feeling like exactly the same videogame.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In short, this highly regimented gameplay structure has succeeded only in homogenising each shooter’s experience – as heading to point Y with character X and killing everyone in sight changes little along barriers of race, setting or culture.

This comes before you consider the stalling effect on a game’s pace, including mechanics that allow more and more content that would previously have been categorised as pure exposition to be deemed gameplay instead.

All because we’re setting down the injured, sprinting through a war-torn village with which we cannot in any real way interact, or just listening to an NPC’s inane conversation during scenes during which we’re supposed to be concentrating on stealth.

Naturally, being led by the nose through a series of set pieces reduces the load an intuitive level design would otherwise bear and sacrifices huge quantities of player agency for the sake of a Pavlovian reward structure.

Game rings bell, you eat food. If the 360 Magazine forum is any measure, public opinion is beginning to sway against its inclusion.

Despite such obvious advantages as a uniformity of experience for each individual player, the lack of irritating screen furniture and the fact your game can be understood by a cake of less than average intelligence, surely it’s now time developers explored alternative delivery methods?

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.

With Microsoft and Sony currently unwilling to break cover on their next-generation hardware projects and the games they’ll support, it’s left to speculation as to what the coming years will bring. Unless, of course, you have an Intel-powered crystal ball and a soothsayer with the training to use it. Which, as fate would have it we do, although he’s a Microsoft-trained soothsayer, so he’s only capable of telling the future of XBox gaming. Still, we’ve got him for the day, so let’s see what his thoughts are on the key points of 2012 and beyond.

1 January 2012

Industry analyst Michael Pachter says that another Call Of Duty game will be announced this year and that it will sell “lots of copies”. He also states with unsual specificity that an asteroid 100Km wide at its thickest point will veer from its predicted trajectory and on 12 December at 0043:29, it will smash into the South Pacific Ocean near Easter Island and cause the extinction of nearly all species on Earth, including 98% of the human population.

6 March

Mass Effect 3 debuts in the States: it’s the best-looking Mass Effect game so far and though it’s not quite as good a game as Mass Effect 2, it sells 10 million copies in the first minute of its launch. In the game finale, Shepard sloughs his human-Spectre form and is able to mollify the Reapers as some kind of transcendental human-alien consciousness. Also, to the bitter disappointment and horror of thousands of fans, Tali’Zorah actually turns out to be a very effeminate gay Quarian. Fans play the multiplayer game for a week, then lose interest and go back to playing their COD Elite accounts.

3 May

Game Informer Magazine’s big scoop on the new Microsoft console is leaked onto the internet in the form of several crumby page scans on a half-arsed blog site. The big unveiling is coming at E3 2012, apparently – according to Michael Pachter. He also states that it will have “better graphics than the Xbox 360, because it will be more powerful.”

6 June

Microsoft lifts the lid on its new console, the Xbox 1440: it’s twice as good as the anticipated Xbox 720! It will be launched with several new Kinect games, including Kinect: Kinect, where you control a Kinect player playing a game on Kinect.

7 June

N4G goes into meltdown as the site fills with inferno-rated Xbox console articles, while adolscent Sony and Xbox fanboys vent unmitigated hatred for eachother. The minority of 20-plus adults roll their eyes and stoke the flames a little, before leaving the site to cool down for a few weeks.

July-August 2012

The summer drought hits. Gamers worldwide shelter from the harsh UV in their bedrooms, finishing off another Mass Effect 3 DLC pack, playing Dark Souls new game ++++ and attempting to break Skyrim in new and unusual ways before posting their 203,148′th Skyrim blog article online. Hardcore gamers and game journalists down-tools to emerge for their annual dose of Vitamin D.

1 November 2012

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 is announced. Activision says that it will be released on 2 November 2012 and it instantly gets 50 million pre-orders. Activision hires out the entire Burj Khalifa for its launch event and flies the The Queen Of England out to Dubai to present MBEs to every one of its attendees. Copies of COD: Black Ops 2 are sent to a select few publications.

12 December at 0043:29

No-one pays this auspicious time any attention and without anyone watching, the world doesn’t end. Michael Pachter sweeps his failed prediction under the carpet of another prediction: that our Sun will go supernova in around 4 billion years.

2013 and beyond

The Xbox 1440 is launched and PS3 gamers claim that the Cell processor is still better, even though a certain rocket-scientist, game programming industry legend states that he could get more juice out of an Atari 2600. Launch titles Assassin’s Creed: Brothers In Arms Edition and Forza Motorsport 5 break new graphical boundaries, but Sony fans say they prefer Tomb Raider 1 and that Gran Turismo 2 still looks a better game. Onlive quietly swallows up every inch of Internet adverstising space available and while everyone squabbles, it takes over the industry.

By 2020, we’re playing on lightweight, licensed emulators loaded onto flash memory integrated into our TV sets and unbelievably, people now hate games that are bad and not because of some stupid partisan attachment to a brand.

Like this? Check out Will GTA V Delay Next-Gen, Five Series In Need Of A Rest and The Xbox 720 Won’t Stream Games Online

Have you really thought about what you’re doing in Skyrim, when you’re making new armour or collecting herbs? You’ve always hated MMOs for the hours of borderline insane grind involved, yet Bethesda seems to have exploited a loophole in our gamer psyche that taps right into the obsessive-compulsvie within us, and compells us to grind anyway. The whole point of an MMO is its community though, so surely you can’t be playing an offline MMORPG – because that would be really… sad. Right?

Crafting

Whether you’re smithing jewellery, weapons and armour, enchanting items or brewing potions, there’s no avoiding it: you’re crafting. Just like you would in an MMO. Getting Alchemy, Smithing and Enchanting up to any respectable level involves a lot of practise and there’s no way you’re convincing anyone that you’re going to need 24 pairs of iron-shod boots, unless you’re going to role-play a shoe salesman. They’ll be useful for practising your enchantments on though, so that will involve humping a load of soul crystals (and possibly some potions/apparel that enhances enchantments) over to a town with an Arcane Enchanter… so don’t pretend you’re any different from the WoW crowd. You’re not.

Farming

Of course, all that offline MMO crafting you’ve been doing will need materials. So, it’s off to your favourite farming spots to pick flowers, shoot deer and mine Moonstone. Then, a return visit when you think they’ve respawned. You’ll spend hours in a Dwemer ruin, hefting great lumps of scrap over to smelters where they can be turned into Dwarf Iron, then back to the ruin to fill your backpack to the point where you can’t run anymore and have to plod at a painfully slow pace to the nearest exit. You are playing this game for fun, right?

Houses

You’ve just got your first house. Quite a big deal in the real world, but to a Dragonborn whose awesome powers enable him to circumvent the economic and social structures of Skyrim, fleecing houses and stashing thousands of gold pieces-worth of goods before making peace with everyone by paying a 25 gold fine, it’s all in a few minutes work. The real work comes in choosing where to put that vase, whether to arrange your bookshelf in alphabetical order according to author or title, and what set of furniture defines you as a slippery-fingered female Khajiit. And while the clothes remain unfolded, the pizza boxes pile up and the dust gathers in your real-world house, you’ll be the proud owner of a ship-shape virtual home that no-one will ever see, even through the eyes of another avatar.

Inventory Management

Finally, you have a house, whose primary function should be to provide a reliable and safe place to sleep and store items. They should definitely not reset and consign your material possessions to the void, anyway. But a law of human nature is that, given any space, we’ll expand to fill it. So you’ll take time to organise your possessions in storage, in such a way that it makes it easier for you to retrieve and store an item at any time. You’ll hoard so much stuff though, that eventually you’ll have spent hours simply moving items around. There’s probably a useful mod being made for PC right now that automatically sorts all this for you, though it probably accidentally reverses your stats at the same time and will kill several major quest chains on the next official patch update.

If you liked this Skyrim article, you might also like Skyrim: 48 Hours Of Funny Glitches, Skyrim’s Top Five Most Fantastic Locations and Skyrim’s Five Hardest Jobs.

Continued from yesterday’s ‘Skyrim: 48 Hours Of Funny Glitches – Part 1‘

30 hours - A load off

Around this point in my playthrough I’m starting to notice the loading times. Fast-travelling to big areas is definitely taking longer, pulling up menus takes a fraction of a second longer than it did at the start and there’s sometimes a delay even when pressing buttons to activate things. This is shortly before the launch of Skyrim on 11 November and at this point there has been a update which I assume must be the 1.1 patch.

36 hours – Still dragging on

My favourite bug yet! I’ve accidentally fast-travelled to Winterhold village rather than the College (they’re very close on the map) and I arrive in the centre, only for both my spooky dragon skeleton friend and its equally weird new companion to drop out of the sky and into the main street. They twitch around for a bit while the villagers blithely walk through their dead bones as if it was just another shower of snow that had fallen from the heavens.

42 hours – The flying tea set

Skyrim seems quite fond of defying the laws of gravity, though up until now I only had colleagues’ word of its surreal, Alice In Wonderland happenings. Then, on a wide valley path, I find a teapot, two mugs and some bottles suspended in the air several feet above my head on an invisible (and insubstantial) shelf. Anyone for an al fresco cuppa?

46 hours – The Ultimate Jabberwang Of Cool-Killing Sexiness

In the bowels of Riften, we return to the Ragged Cat – a focal point for the Thieves Guild headquarters – to return four books that we just grafted out of a freezing, undead-infested Necromancer’s (who’s a necrophiliac, to boot) ice cave leagues north of the town. Quest completes, barman is satisfied and thus gives me… nothing. Although to be fair, he doesn’t take the four books off me either, but they’re pratically worthless to me, while the Ultimate Jabberwang Of Cool-Killing Sexiness (or whatever it was he was going to give me in exchange) could have been handy.

48 hours – Conclusion

So, that’s it really. Unlike many other Skyrim players (particularly those playing on PS3, apparently) I’ve encountered nothing that has significantly upset my adventure in Skyrim on the Xbox 360 so far. That reward-killing bug doesn’t bode well, I wouldn’t want anything like that to happen at a critical point in the main quest, for example. And those load times/delays are bearable – for now.

However, that’s just 48 hours of playing Skyrim, which is about a tenth of the total time I anticipate spending in this world. Taking into account the inbound patch Bethesda’s VP of Marketing, Pete Hines has spoken about recently, plus the barrage of inevitable updates over the next few months, it feels like a bit of a lottery: consuming Skyrim at this fairly voracious rate, it does seem like a matter of time before I hit another bump and that may be the one to completely derail my game, forcing me to start again.

I believe that in my case and any like it, Bethesda should be given some slack anyway. Skyrim is an enormously ambitious project with many times the value of its closest competitors, but more importantly, these niggles wither into insignificance compared the incredible time I’m having playing it. This is my very individual experience of it, of course and some people may have it a lot worse. But I feel if I was to complain about things falling out of the sky and minor quest-killing bugs, it would only be because I’m a little bit nuts about Skyrim and I’d want such stunning achievement to be as polished as possible.

As a member of the gaming press, I’m often priviledged to have access to my most anticipated titles several weeks before it’s on the shelves. In this case, a retail copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim arrived on my desk the morning of 31 October and I immediately: took the phone off the hook, stopped writing, cancelled all appointments, told Ken Levine, Shigeru Miyamoto and John Carmack to interview themselves. Then I locked myself in a dark and smelly room with an XBox 360 and my coveted copy of Skyrim, and played non-stop without pausing for food, water or bio-breaks for TWO WHOLE DAYS…

…alternatively, I could have just played Skyrim that evening then every day for a few hours in the last fornight, but that’s just not video gamer-romantic/cool/nerdy enough. Anyway, in light of the recent problems some PS3 owners have experienced, I thought I’d reflect, chronologically, upon the relatively minor glitches I’ve experienced on the Xbox 360 version of Skyrim, two days of play into it.

5 hours – (and all’s well)

I’m well past the Dragonborn brush with the executioner’s axe, I’ve picked up the main quest in WhiteRun and now I’m bumming around Skyrim nicking things and generally making a nuisance of myself. Absolutely nothing untoward has happened so far, not that I’ve noticed anyway.

7 hours – Pop out for some pop-in

Plenty to see out in the valleys in the centre of Skyrim: mammoths, giants, forts, bandits, mountains and… texture pop-in! Quite a bit of it actually. But look at that draw distance, you can hardly expect high detail textures to remain that way when Bethesda is already pushing the upper limits of the hardware.

13 hours – Not Oblivion, oblivion

I’m quite some time into Skyrim when I encounter my first actual bug. It’s on top of The Throat, outside the Greybeards’ retreat. My character starts to clip into the mountainside and I get a brief glimpse of the surreal inside-out Skyrim, complete with the  bottomless oblivion (that’s the frightening existential state of nothingness, not The Elder Scrolls IV) that I know is below, before I haul myself back into the real world. Close call.

17 hours – HouseKarl Pilkington

My companion, a housecarl the Thane of WhiteRun has assigned to me, was more hindrance than help. She ran headlong into battle when I’m trying to stealth attack my enemies, her timing was impeccably bad when it came to avoiding my line of fire as I’m casting destructive spells and worse, she stubbornly blocked my way in narrow passages. She’s only good as a mule and even then, when she died, she left me with a load of gear to haul back to a nearby merchant. She’s still in the bottom of a cave somewhere, abandoned, stripped naked of her armour and most definitely not being ressurected.

25 hours – Dead Dragon Dragging

My destiny has taken me to the college of Winterhold, where I’ve completed a few quests for the magi within and also killed a Dragon that attacked the college. Its huge skeleton twitches unnervingly whenever I’m near and now that I’m fast-travelling to the college on a regular basis, it seems to be progressively moving out of the atrium and through the college walls a little bit more every time I appear. It’s quite freaky, really and now that I’ve killed a second dragon in the College, it’s got a friend to accompany it.

Part II continued On 360Magazine.co.uk tomorrow

You’ve done Daggerfall, marched all over Morrowind and seen all Cyrodiil has to offer – so who says the wintery world of Skyrim is going to trump all that? We do. Here’s our top five favourite places in Skyrim and why you should make a beeline for them as soon as you possibly can:

5. WhiteRun

Location: Smack in the centre

Look Out For… Mammoths, Giants

All roads lead to Rome, so to speak, and if you follow Skyrim’s natural course you’ll quickly find yourself in the city of WhiteRun. It’s a fortress of sorts, a massive quest hub and a great place to sign up with some of Skyrim’s various factions. There’s also a stables just outside where you can buy a horse and a caravan that will instantly transport you to other major locations, allowing you to mark them on your map for fast-travel in the future.

4.Riften

Location: South-East Skyrim

Look Out For… Skeeva, Sabre-Cats

The south of Skyrim is much milder than the frozen north, and Riften is a rather pleasant Venice-like city on stilts. Don’t let its looks deceive you though, this is the headquarters of the Thieves Guild. Delve into the sewers to sign up with these vagrants – and discover why they’ve fallen on hard times…

3. Markarth

Location: North-West

Look Out For… Bandits, Hagraven

Markath is famous for its silver mines and its ruling faction, the Silver-Bloods. It’s cut into the sheer face of a mountain and boasts soaring towers. It’s also hoe to several temples, including the godess of love and beauty and a certain nasty Daedric God, whose altar is hidden away from prying eyes.

2. Winterhold

Location: Far North-East

Look Out For… Ice Wraiths, Dragons

Winterhold is one of our favourite places in Skyrim for two reasons: it’s winter wonderland – completely frozen, surrounded by raging snowstorms and glaciers dropping off into an icy sea. It’s also home to Winterhold College, a centre of excellence for Magi. The College is an impressive sight, suspended on a pinnacle of rock joined to the mainland by a crumbling bridge.

1. The Throat Of The World

Location: Just east of WhiteRun

Look Out For… Trolls, Ice Wolves

The top of the Throat is home to the Greybeards, a group of scholars who will help you develop you Dragon Shout talents. By far the highest point in an already mountainous region, it’s also an incredible place to do a bit of sightseeing. To climb it is the closest video-game equivalent of climbing Everest: it took us an hour just to go from the base to get this screenshot of the peak. And yes – you can climb all the way to the top.

You’ve probably already got at least an idea of how you’re going to play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, what race you’re going to be and which skills you’re going to specialise in. A warrior perhaps, with heavy armour and two-handed weapons, a mage with a bent for the destructive magical arts, an assassin with a high proficiency in backstab and light armour or a mace-wielding cleric with healing powers. More likely, you’ll broaden your skill-base to incorporate lots of different abilities – it doesn’t cost anything to have a go, after all. Skyrim is good like that. There’s no reason for a one-handed weapons specialist not to learn a beserk spell, for example, to augment his battle strategy.

But it’s easy to play that way. The real challenge is to pick a career and actively level your character exclusively using a small skill set. Here are five non-martial jobs NPCs do all over Skyrim that players will find hard to scape a living out of (we recommend you don’t try any of these first-time round, folks):

5. Hunter

Skills: Archery, Sneak

Hunting is one of our favourite pastimes in Skyrim and there’s a lot of game on offer, from fluffy bunnies to mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers. There isn’t much competition from other hunters and you’ll do well out of the meat and pelts gathered from the bigger and tougher animals. With a high archery and sneak skill you’re quite capable of defending yourself too, but just don’t let them get too close, eh?

4. Thief

Skills: Pickpocket, Lockpick, Sneak

The mandate of the Thieves guild is to avoid detection and killing if possible – they’re not the Dark Brotherhood. So, if you aspire to be the Guild Master you need to prove you’re capable of turning out pockets and getting into places without anyone knowing you were there. Train that sneak skill and no-one will know any different until it’s too late.

3. Alchemist

Skills: Alchemy, Speechcraft

Alchemists are shopkeepers looking to turn a buck from potions and plants. It looks like an easy life, until you realise that most of their ingredients are gathered in places where Imperial guards would think twice about going alone. Brew some stamina potions and keep a keen eye out when foraging, because you’re no fighter and at the first sign of trouble, you’ll have to run

2. Blacksmith Skills: Smithing, Enchantment

You can create fine steel blades, repair and refine high-quality glass armour and enchant weapons with the best of them. You’re just not very good at swinging a blade or comfortable wearing full plate. Keep a pickaxe on you at all times and stick to the South West of Skyrim, where the silver ore practically falls out of the rocks.

1. Cook

Skills: N/A

The hardest of all specialist careers in Skyrim because it requires no skill. Anyone can cook, so your life will be spent as a scavenger, foraging for leftover kills, stealing vegetables from gardens and picking berries while always on a lookout for a spit or cooking pot to create a tasty dish.

Does anyone else out there find it faintly ridiculous that gamers must continue to hand over their hard-earned cash for the right to play online? Don’t get us wrong – it’s not the quality of the service that we object to, nor the fact that our credit card details aren’t currently the hot topic of various warez sites. More that the cost of gaming seems to be spiraling upwards, almost unnoticed, pricing many honest players out of the market.

Take CoD Elite for instance. It’s a plain fact that the number of Call Of Duty copies in existence today is a huge 70 per cent of the number of Xbox 360 consoles worldwide. Heck, twenty-five per cent of 360 owners have Black Ops under their television somewhere. Will it continue to sit with this generation of CoD boxers that they must pay this tax to the king of gaming? One might even call it a ‘Windows tax’. If one was up on one’s medieval humour.

Secondly, we’re about to be advertised to more intrusively than ever before, thanks to Kinect-enabled NUads. Sure, commercial messages dominate television, newspapers – even the side of milk cartons, but do such flyers assess your every movement, working out whether your flinches mean you fancy a Mars bar or not? This could very well happen.

Then, of course, there’s the wealth of premium DLC services that have debuted since EA first decided that they didn’t much like second-hand games. Sure, offering players added value in the sports area makes at least a little sense, what with the possibility of online stat updates and all, but Mortal Kombat? Need For Speed? Just about any non-sports title, in fact. If this business is to sustain, surely the screws must be loosened elsewhere.

Penultimately, a free to play model is actually pretty lucrative. World Of Warcraft’s tried it, facebook game specialist Zynga is now rumoured to be worth more than EA, pedalling virtual crops to your mothers and sisters, so why not lower the entry barrier in search of a slice of this pie? Rumours are that’s the way the industry’s going, anyway.

Finally, and in related fashion, if you’re expecting gamers to piece together their own experiences MX vs ATV style – a title that requires more grinding than Tony Hawk to progress anywhere without opening up that wallet – won’t gamers start to feel short-changed when being charged for the privilege of spending further money?

Surely the time has come, eh readers?