My background came from God of War … I've never worked on a shooter, and you need a different team to do that. You might as well be asking me to make a racing game. And eventually over time, we built that trust to the point where we ended up calling [the franchise] Jedi." The much contested Jedi eventually became Cal Kestis, first introduced in Jedi: Fallen Order. His original reveal saw a slew of criticism for being, well, a little bland, but four years on, it's hard to deny that Cal has won over both gamers and Star Wars fans alike. Case in point: in a recent Disney poll, asking fans to vote on which lightsaber from the Star Wars universe they'd like produced for retail, Cal beat out legendary characters such as Anakin Skywalker and Qui-Gon Jinn. Of course, making the main character a Jedi isn't just a play to Star Wars fans – it's also a clever game design move, given that the well-documented journey of a Jedi developing their skills perfectly mirrors that of a player progressing through a video game, something Asmussen describes as "one-to-one storytelling". "I was hoping that we could come up with a character that the player could go along on the ride with," he expands. "So, he starts off kind of raw.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. Like a lot of people interested in video games, I have spent most of the past week rampaging across the Lands Between on a phantom horse, slaying trolls, exploring castles and being repeatedly stamped on by giant boss monsters. The critical consensus is that Elden Ring, a new open-world fantasy adventure from the makers of the Dark Souls series, might just be one of the greatest games ever made. It is extraordinarily beautiful to look at, it's incredibly challenging and it encourages players to discover its secrets however they see fit.

On Thursday, games publisher Square Enix announced it had signed a multi-game partnership with Marvel to produce a series of Avengers titles. Two studios, Crystal Dynamics (Tomb Raider) and Eidos Montreal (Deus Ex) will be working on the project, so we can perhaps expect big, open world action adventures with a smattering of role-playing depth. So what legacy will this tie-in have to contend with? Is there a glorious history of super hero games? Here are our top twelve, please add your own in the comments section.

Earlier this month, game designer and programmer Brie Code wrote an interesting opinion piece for GamesIndustry.Biz. Entitled "video games are boring", the article questioned pretty much all our assumptions about what games are, how they work and what they can do. Her argument was that a huge number of people are locked out of playing games because of age-old conventions, mechanics and assumptions. If you look at the major output of the big publishers, it's all first-person shooters, action adventures, sports sims and 100-hour role-playing epics, filled with complex controls, assumed knowledge, violence and dextrous challenge. But even if we accept those genres and conventions as a given, games could do a lot more to be approachable and intuitive to a wider audience.