Multiplayer combat gaming is dominated by titles that enfold players in quasi-realistic modern war-zones. The action and the perks and the zombies-on-the-moon modes may be pure fantasy, but the settings are rooted in the real world of multi-terrain combat boots and SA-58 clips.

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The first time you play it, it has to be fair, but also it has to be fair on the hundredth time and the thousandth time.

By contrast, Halo 4 is pure fantasy, a sci-fi dreamscape of weird colors, strange weapons, variable gravity as well as Ghosts, crazed AIs and abandoned deep-space mining vessels. Publisher Microsoft wants its key multi-billion-dollar franchise to sit at the heart of inter-human gaming.

Developer 343 has delivered what is arguably the best Halo ever made, and one key component to this is multiplayer, described by IGN reviewer Ryan McCaffrey as “golden” with “immaculate weapon balancing” and containing “an impressive collection of outstanding battlegrounds.”

343 hired Austin, Texas-based development house Certain Affinity to help out with modes, maps and map-creation tool Forge. Why? The company was founded by Max Hoberman, who spent a decade at Bungie, crafting the Halo series’ multiplayer experience.

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I'm dying to see what crazy things people come up with.

Certain Affinity is also responsible for working on MP sections of recent Call of Duty games and on Left 4 Dead. In short, these guys really get multiplayer, and they have a long and intimate relationship with the Halo universe. 85 team-members spent 18 months working on Halo 4’s multiplayer, in close association with 343.

Hoberman says the starting point for refining and evolving Halo 4’s multiplayer modes has been making it available to as many people as possible.

He explains, “That was 343's approach across the board. How do we make this better by letting more people enjoy it? We started by smoothing off some of the rough edges on areas that could be great, but just weren't quite there for accessibility reasons. That can be really difficult, really challenging, especially when you're trying to develop something that has some inherent depth. How you balance depth and accessibility is always a challenge. But that has absolutely permeated all of our decision-making.”

Certain Affinity worked on some of the War Games modes, many based on old favorites that have now been tweaked. For example, Dominion is a team-based mode in which each side attempts to capture and defend a series of bases which, over time, sprout defensive upgrades, culminating in a ‘last stand’ slaughter of the team that’s failed to secure defensive positions.

Oddball is the classic game mode that wins players points for holding onto a ball, with an added twist of being able to throw the ball. When this one feature was first shown, at PAX, it drew enthusiastic whoops from the crowd.

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When you're designing for multiplayer, you have to be selfless.

Part of the responsibility facing Certain Affinity, and all developers that specialize in multiplayer, is the intense relationship players have with the modes and maps they play. Unlike single-player games, which are experienced once or perhaps a few times, multiplayer games are experienced again and again. They are lived. They are also very public testing grounds for people who take their skills very, very seriously.

Not only, but also, through map-editors like Forge, players understand the fundamentals of multiplayer level design. Ten years ago, players might have enjoyed a multiplayer map, without stopping to think about the subtleties of sight blocks and cover positions. These days, they intuite sloppy design.

Hoberman says, “We’re very aware of the gravity of our responsibility. We're creating this content that people are going to play time and time again, sometimes thousands of times, for one map or one game mode. It feels like a massive responsibility. We mandate internally that we play this stuff over and over. We have to be fans of our own work and we have to put it to the test day in and day out.

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We're creating this content that people are going to play time and time again, sometimes thousands of times.

“We insist that our developers participate in daily playtests. It can be tough. Our artists, for instance, they have a big to-do list, but we make them take an hour out of their day to playtest. We think that's invaluable. Fans are going to pick these things apart. They're passionate about every detail. It's critical that everyone working on these things is also passionate about every detail and understands how these things are going to be experienced by the players.”

He points out that in single-player modes, the story embraces the player as well as the characters in the game, but only the actual player is having a real emotional experience. But in multiplayer, it’s about everyone who is on screen.

“When you're designing campaign levels, you're inherently designing something asymmetrical. You're designing for the player. You don't need to care about how the enemies feel. You don't need to care about how the Covenant feel about their experience. When you're designing multiplayer, you have to care about everybody.

“What you're designing is inherently balanced and symmetric, even if it's physically asymmetric. It has to be balanced. It has to be a fair experience for everyone. The first time you play it, it has to be fair, but also it has to be fair on the hundredth time and the thousandth time. It takes a different mindset to design for multiplayer. I'd say it also takes a different personality sometimes. When you're designing for multiplayer, you have to be selfless. You have to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. If you're just concerned about designing a good experience for yourself, then you'll never be a great multiplayer designer.”

One of the massive projects undertaken by Certain Affinity was Forge, which allows players to make their own multiplayer maps. This tool has been around for some years but in Halo 4 has been drastically overhauled.

New features include better looks through dynamic lighting and gorgeous native environments; greater ease-of-use via neat gadgets like item-lock, duping and magnets; and local effects called player-trait zones which give designers all sorts of freedom to play around with their invented worlds.

Hoberman says, “Forge is interesting, any map editor is interesting, because so many people benefit from it whether they actually use it or not. Everyone benefits from the creations that come out of it. The accessibility improvements that we made and some of the feature additions are ultimately just going to mean that new users will find it easier, but because Forge is inherently a pretty sophisticated tool, the creations are going to be that much more inventive and novel.

He adds, “You always do something and you think maybe you’ll see a dozen interesting ways people use it. In reality, over time, you end up seeing hundreds of greats ideas. I'm dying to see what crazy things people come up with.”

Don't forget to make use of IGN's massive Halo 4 wiki.

For daily opinions, debates and interviews on games you can follow Colin Campbell on Twitter or at IGN. 

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The reasons for today’s invigorating renaissance in PC gaming, for the triumphant return of so many of its best development heroes, are threefold...

First, the guys who made those classic games, mostly in the 1990s, are now frustrated creators with a pent-up desire to deliver amazing new experiences.

Second, through crowd-funding, they are suddenly able to sail around the frigid limitations of the publisher-model and deliver those games to the public.

Third, because the people who enjoyed those games are still gamers. We want to re-experience those old game-styles in a 21st Century mode. Our passion raises funds and interest and inspires younger gamers. When it works, it’s a virtuous circle.

Chris Roberts and his famed project Star Citizen is one of those projects. It’s a dazzling, high-end PC game offering space combat and exploration on a monumental scale. This is not the kind of game that would likely get a green-light from a major publisher, but through KickStarter and other crowd-funding outlets, it’s attracted millions of dollars, enough to guarantee enough moolah to magic the game into life. Star Citizen might be two years from launch, but it remains, undoubtedly, one of the most warmly anticipated PC games currently in development.

If you were a serious PC gamer in the 1990s, you probably played one of Roberts’ games, most likely a Wing Commander 3D space shooter or one of his more ‘explore-and-trade’ games like Freelancer or Privateer. These games were central to PC gaming. They were gorgeous and they were great fun. They always made the covers of PC Gamer and its ilk. They were the big-sellers of their day.

Time moves along, most especially in gaming. Today, they look primitive and slow. They also took an unfortunate turn into the world of Full-Motion Video, with grand stories starring Mark Hamill, which seemed like a big deal at the time, but turned out to be a dead-end for gaming.

As the '90s drew to a close, Roberts had fallen in love with filmmaking and went off to be a director and producer for a while. Now he’s hungry again to create huge game-worlds, space-epics pitching alien races against one another, bulking starships spewing streams of buzzing battle-fighters.

The games make the promise to put you in the dog-fightin’ action-sequences reminiscent of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica with the option to toddle off and live a quieter life at the edges of space, trading, exploring, perhaps dabbling in a spot of casual piracy.

Roberts is not afraid to embrace his past and to admit that Star Citizen is an amalgamation of his best previous work, with the added bonus of modern computing power and honed game-design techniques. (There will be no FMV sequences.)

He tells IGN, “If I was going to make another Wing Commander, a lot of what I'm doing now would be in that game. I feel like the tools and technologies have moved on so much that you could go back and do a reboot, the same way they did with Batman or with Star Trek, where you tell the same story again but it’s a different experience. The way that you can present it is on a whole new level.

“For me, there were a lot of things, when I was making Wing Commander or Freelancer or Privateer, that I would have wanted to be able to do, but I was limited by the time and the technology. Now I don't have the same issues. I'm getting to go back and revisit those old ideas and concepts, but greatly expand them in a way that I couldn't in the past.”

He adds, “In the past, you'd build these cool pre-rendered cinematic sequences and you'd do it in high-end software on SGIs. You were always thinking, ‘If only I could do this in real time, it would be amazing.’ That's where we're at right now. You can do a lot of that in real time. It's amazing, and it's fun.”

Star Citizen’s story is typical space-opera. Its single-player campaign, called Squadron 42, puts you in the front-line of a galactic dispute and you’ll do yawing, spinning, turning combat in order to gain enough cash and experience to beef up your ship and / or go gallivanting around the galaxy, raising hell or gathering space-shekels. (The thing to read is Anthony Gallegos’s preview.)

So 3D space-combat is the game’s central mechanic and, of course, this is where it gets interesting. Because videogame and movie space-combat is not quite the same as probable, actual real space combat, and this causes a disturbance in the minds of those who desire not merely physical realism, but absolute realism.

Roberts has clearly given this some thought. When I raise the issue, he is unapologetic. “The model of space combat isn't what it really would be, because it would be at ridiculously high speeds. You'd never see your opponent. It would all be done with computers. You'd basically be flying big spheres around. You’d wait for a blip to appear on the radar screen, lock your missile, hit a button, and watch it blow up.

"But that's not fun. The model is really World War II dogfighting in space. Even though we're doing a bunch of things on the physics side that are actually accurate, we do do things like limiting speeds because it's really the only way where you can have much fun dogfighting. So we take a certain amount of license to bring it down into the fantasy realm of space combat.”

Despite his wanderings in Hollywood - as well as directing the failed Wing Commander movie, he produced a number of films, including Lord of War - Roberts has remained a gamer. There are elements of game design’s evolution that he believes mark a wrong direction, specifically, a lack of consequence for failure.

Clearly, players who invest days into building a snazzy spacecraft, all 25th Century conveniences with a bursting cash-box under the cockpit, are not going to be happy if their life’s work is nabbed by some lurking scumbag space-pirate. And so, anyone venturing into the cosmic badlands can purchase certain insurance packages. Even then, getting blasted in Star Citizen is not going to be a good experience.

“I do miss a certain amount of difficulty in playing games,” he says. “I feel like my sense of achievement in beating a level or beating a boss is almost nothing now, because I know that no matter what I do, I'm going to respawn two seconds before I died. Games like Mass Effect or even Uncharted, I play them all, but I bully my way through the story. I don't really pay that much attention to whether or not I'm running into a room and getting killed in a hail of bullets, because I know I can just do it again.

“I thought Demon's Souls had a really nice, balanced setup. It was hard, it was challenging, but at the same time, it was fair. If you learned what to do and what the techniques and pitfalls were, it was always your own fault if you died. It wasn't an arbitrary thing. There was an immense sense of satisfaction.

“I'd say that Demon's Souls is more difficult than I would want to make one of my games, but it's reminded me of the idea that you should have some level of challenge in your game. It gives you much more of a sense of satisfaction and personal achievement than something that lets you quickly restart like the current generation of console action-adventure games.”

Even if you’re not a massive fan of space-combat, there’s little doubt that Star Citizen is representative of hardcore PC gaming’s rebirth, of the confirmation of PC as a core gaming platform for the future. in his Kickstarter pitch, Roberts makes this point again and again.

“The PC represents constant change and innovation. It doesn't stagnate. It's always challenging you. As someone that likes cool new stuff, I'm much more into it than a platform that's going to be the same for six or seven or 10 years.

“I like the fact that there's a more powerful video card every year, and maybe there's something new I can do that I couldn't have done last year. It's one of the reasons I think I was successful when I was doing the old Wing Commander stuff.  It got to the point where I could see that, alright, it can really do what I want to do now. And, yes, it inspires people to buy new hardware and really geek out. It's all about building the most immersive, cool experience.”

For daily opinions, debates and interviews on games you can follow Colin Campbell on Twitter or at IGN. 

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This morning during Apple's iPad Mini event, Zynga employees began taking to Twitter en masse to report on significant layoffs at the troubled social gaming giant. Zynga has yet to make any official announcement and have not yet responded to our request for comment.

Individuals close to the situation are reporting that Zynga Austin bore the majority of cuts, with more than 100 jobs lost at that location. The entire Zynga Bingo and theVille teams have reported been let go, leaving only teams developing mobile products left at the office.

Gamasutra is also reporting layoffs or perhaps the closure of Zynga Boston and Zynga Chicago. TechCrunch reports that the San Francisco office is not seeing any layoffs today.

More Zynga employees have reported that an all-hands meeting has been scheduled for later this afternoon. A more solid picture of the extend and location of the layoffs is likely to follow.

Today's layoffs are the latest in a growing line of bad news for the social game maker. SuperData Research noted today that Zynga has less active players now than it had two years ago. Social game players are increasingly leaving Facebook in favor of mobile play. Most analysts agree that Zynga has failed to make the mobile transition rapidly enough.

Justin is Editor of IGN Wireless. You can follow him on Twitter at @ErrorJustin and on IGN.

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Every self-respecting football and gaming fan has a Championship Manager/Football Manager story - like that time you almost won the Champions League with Torino but lost to a last minute penalty by a regen called Francesco Della Morte, or that other time your housemate at university took his Birmingham team to the FA Cup final and he actually wore a suit for the occasion (both of those are true, and it really was my housemate, not me, honest). It has punctuated our lives with such regularity over the years that it at times almost feels as important as football itself. It isn’t, but when there’s no football on the TV it’s a bloody good substitute.

In short, there is a reason that Football Manager is so popular: It has transcended the world of football management sims like no other game before it, and has moved from a game to a cultural phenomenon. It’s no coincidence I remember those two incidents better than I remember the majority of my university education; I spent more time playing it than I actually did studying.

So what’s new about FM2013? Well, lots actually. There are two new game modes in addition to the usual Football Manager and Online modes. The first, Challenge, drops you into a variety of different scenarios and challenges you to make a success of them. Some of them are interesting, some of them less so, but I imagine they’d be of great intrigue to FM completists, or for players that are looking to break up the rhythm of how they play the game.

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There has now clearly been an admission at FM Towers that somewhere along the line, the game became a bit too complicated and time-consuming for the casual gamer.

The second merits more attention: Classic Mode. There has now clearly been an admission at FM Towers that somewhere along the line, the game became a bit too complicated and time-consuming for the casual gamer. Obviously, the players who grew up with the game are now older and probably have more demanding jobs and/or a family and so don’t have the time they once did to dedicate to a computer game. The Classic mode scales back a lot of the detail required of the main game, and also in turn makes it more accessible to the newcomer. This is a shrewd move by Miles and the team, Classic is the mode I will likely play more often than not now, despite having played FM for years. There is only so much time one can spend filtering out qualifications of prospective new coaches (another new feature of the main game).

In the main game, there are some nice new touches that really do make a difference: the assistant coach comments throughout a match add another veneer of authenticity to proceedings and make the hiring of a good assistant even more important. The ‘body language’ feature during a game gives you even further insight into your players and allows you to make more informed decisions tactically.

Aesthetically, the game looks sharper; the windows slide in and out when you hit continue and there is an option to split-screen the match coverage with stats. The match engine itself is more realistic; the movements of the players are better rendered and the surrounding paraphernalia like stadiums, benches and match officials seem somehow more complex and therefore more immersive.

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The beauty of this FM though is that yes it’s deeper and more complicated, but you can tailor your game-playing preferences accordingly.

The astonishing level of detail of what seems like just about every player in world football is still a mainstay of the game and really is worth pointing out. It is a mark of how consistently good these games have been over the years that all of us take for granted the depth and detail on just about every player playing professionally in the western world (and beyond) that seems to exist here. We are no longer surprised by this. We expect it. And yet again, it's delivered.

The beauty of this FM though is that yes it’s deeper and more complicated, and the level of detail in training now is enough to throw your Andre Villas-Boas-sized dossiers into the fire in despair, but you can tailor your game-playing preferences accordingly. The Classic mode, the option to use your assistant manager should you need to and the adding of a new Director of Football who can pick up a lot of the more menial jobs mean it really can be adjusted to how much time you have to dedicate to it.

Football Manager 2013 is out on November 2nd, and we'll have a full review on Monday 29th. Keep your eye on the ball.

Luke Moore is a writer and broadcaster and the co-founder of The Football Ramble. He has contributed to regularly to BBC Radio 5 Live and has featured on Radio 4, ESPN, The Guardian, Betfair and, of course, IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

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