Returning home on Thursday afternoon, I was stopped by two 10-year-olds standing at the top of my road. “Are you playing Pokémon Go?” one asked. When I said I was, they went wild.

“Preparing all-out war,” says the starting screen as Battlefield 1 loads up. It’s not kidding.

When Jason West and Vince Zampella set up Respawn Entertainment in 2010, they had one ambition: to produce a new first-person shooter that would have as massive an impact on the genre as their previous creation: the Call of Duty series.

In 2015, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gave an interview in which he argued that the world’s first trillionaire will be somebody who successfully mines asteroids.

At the E3 games conference two years ago, the creative director of Forza Horizon, Ralph Fulton, was trying to communicate the visual beauty of the game’s sequel. During a demo session for journalists, he explained how road surfaces in the game would gather rain water after a storm, and that the resulting puddle would be truly reflective, mirroring the chassis of passing cars, and reflecting sunlight.

It begins with a flashback – or at least that’s what it seems. While children are heard laughing and playing in the background, the camera approaches some sort of golden artefact half buried in the sand.

For all their talk of realism and authenticity, video game developers rarely seek to reflect modern society, or the lives that most of us are living. Grand Theft Auto V produced a ribald, frenzied pastiche of LA, complete with vacuous movie stars and social media millionaires, but most of its skits and giggles were just dirty jokes wrapped up in the veneer of social commentary.

The much anticipated Playstation 4 game No Man’s Sky has been delayed. One of Sony’s key releases for the year, the ambitious space exploration adventure will now be released on 10 August in the UK, several weeks later than planned.

Warhammer is a range of tabletop strategy games; Total War is a series of historical battle simulations. Combining the two should have produced a black hole of nerdiness so unapproachable it would crush all mortals. Strangely, however, this is probably the most accessible each game has been for years.