No one does hype, better than E3. Or at least nobody did, back when the show was an unstoppable juggernaut that could convince you to wake up at an ungodly hour just to see Ubisoft’s annual acid trip that was the Just Dance showcase. E3 in its prime, was a lean and mean marketing machine that was the place to …

Say what you like about Microsoft, but nobody makes a video game controller like Team Green. Sony may have come up with the standard design for a controller, but Microsoft perfected the concept with the Xbox 360 controller and sharpened it to an absurd edge with the Xbox One generation. For the Xbox Series X era, not too much is changing on the surface, but under the hood there lies a whole new status quo for what these devices will be capable of.

The Xbox Series X is coming out later this year. We’ve seen a few target renders (including a fake one used by AMD) and later, a diagram showing the rear ports of the machine. Now, some leaked images of the Xbox Series X prototype – likely used for software development – have leaked all over social media (via NeoGAF).

We don’t know very much about the next generation of Xbox machines. We know that Microsoft is taking a double-pronged approach with its Project Scarlett family of Xbox devices. Anaconda will be the more powerful of the two, a beastly machine that’ll make the Xbox One X seem silly by comparison, and Lockheart, a possibly discless, less powerful machine with more palatable pricing.

For ages now, it’s been rumoured that the next Assassin’s Creed game will give us a look at the Vikings. It’s interchangeably been called Kingdom and Assassin’s Creed Ragnarok – though it’s likely one of them is a codename and the other is the name of the game. Earlier “screenshots” of the game were proven fake, but the rumours have persisted. While Ubisoft hasn’t confirmed anything of the sort, I’d put money down that the rumours are on the money, and that we’ll see a Viking-based Assassin’s Creed next year.

Wherever there’s a new console to be launched, you can bet your toastiest of buns that Ubisoft will be there to spread their specific brand across any hardware that’s fresh out of the box. Next year sees two new consoles arrive to herald in the next generation of gaming: Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s next Xbox which is currently operating under the codename of Project Scarlett.

You can bank on the PS5 being more focused on streaming than ever before.

The current consoles – at least their upgraded, more powerful counterparts – have 4K as on of their great big, back of the box marketing bullet points. And it’s true! Both the PlayStation 4 Pro and the more powerful Xbox One can push out 4K graphics, natively and using fancy rendering techniques to lighten the load. While it’s easy enough to find games that are rendered in 4K (with concessions, of course), it’s a lot harder to find games that are both 4K and run at the fabled 60 frame per second.