Given the deluge of bad news emanating from the games industry over the past 10 months, it was somewhat reassuring this weekend to sit in a crowd of 20,000 happy, passionate fans, watching the biggest event in the esports calendar: the League of Legends world championship finals. The event, at the O2 arena in London, was the culmination of a globetrotting five-week competition to discover the best team in the world. Never having attended before – mostly because the final is usually held in Asia, where the best players tend to come from – I wasn't really sure what to expect. Would I be able to follow what was happening? It turns out the answers to those questions were "sort of" and "hell, yes".

Before becoming a household name in gaming circles, he cut his teeth working on the studio's long-running Armored Core series, serving as a planner on 2005's Armored Core: Last Raven and then as director on Armored Core IV and Armored Core: For Answer. Following the success of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, FromSoftware went on to release two more Armored Core games, though Miyazaki wasn't directly involved in those projects. Since then, the studio has been busy building on the Souls series, culminating with the runaway success of Elden Ring. Now, for the first time in nearly a decade, From is revisiting its mech franchise. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon also marks the directorial debut of one of the studio's most promising up-and-coming talents -- Masaru Yamamura the lead game designer on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and a designer on Bloodborne. Armored Core VI is not a Soulslike, but a lot of its best ideas feel informed by Sekiro and Bloodborne.

After years spent pursuing a career in game development, Italian coder Luca Galante had given up. Uprooting himself from a comfortable life in Rome, he flew to England in the hope of finally making his childhood dream a reality. Yet after countless rejected job applications, Galante found himself flipping Big Macs in Thornton Heath McDonald's. Dejected, he gave up on his digital dream, leaving what he says might be "the worst McDonald's in the UK" to code slot machines for a gambling company. Now, 10 years and one bedroom-made game later, Galante is the proud owner of two Baftas.

Dark Souls (FromSoftware's most recognizable action role-playing series), "Bloodborne" and "Sekiro Shadows Die Twice" are all brutally punishing games. Despite this, the studio's work is widely cited as a major influence on dozens of other titles such as "Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order," "God of War" and "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt." Many gamers and critics have asked FromSoftware to add difficulty settings to its games; the studio has steadfastly refused so far. FromSoftware's award-winning creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki said that the uniformly intense challenge in his games is meant to provide players with a sense of accomplishment. This polarizing design philosophy has won FromSoftware a devoted following -- but also a small cadre of detractors who have described the company's games as alienating.

The first sequel has a bad reputation, and it's perhaps the most famously mismanaged of FromSoftware's projects. It started out far too technically ambitious (it famously had to eschew a complicated lighting system because it was too much for the seventh generation of video game consoles), and it's the only game in this list not directly helmed by series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki. It lost one of its directors partway through development, leaving co-director and longtime FromSoftware developer Yui Tanimura to not only direct the game himself, but salvage an incomplete project from whatever assets were built for the initial, graphics-intensive vision. You can feel the strain in "Dark Souls 2" as it literally stretches itself across many regions; it barely makes sense geographically. The game is choked with enemy encounters, pushing the boundaries of acceptable difficulty.

Elden Ring is the front-runner for 2022's game of the year. Reviewers are fawning over it. It's the title the entire gaming community is talking about and that everyone wants to play. The hype sounds like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild all over again, and that one ended up being so beloved it became one of the best-selling video games of all time. Elden Ring, however, will never achieve that status--the gameplay is just too grueling to appeal to every player.

A film's themes, or its plot, can be misconstrued by a lazy viewer. Only a video game, however, can punish an audience's faults. If a player mistimes a jump, falls to an adversary, or fails to reach the end of a level, a game can deny them access to the rest of the work, halting progress until they pass the test or resign in defeat. The video-game director Hidetaka Miyazaki, who's in his late forties, has punished more players than perhaps anyone else. In Dark Souls, the 2011 fantasy game that made him famous, you play as a loin-clothed wretch, racing through sewers and cowering in forests.

For a few months in 2016, you couldn't go anywhere without seeing people swiping at their phones, trying to catch a Psyduck superimposed on their local streets. The news was full of reports of people mobbing hotels or parks to find virtual critters. But Pokémon Go was more than a fad: it showed us a new way for video games and real life to combine. Friendships, communities and rivalries formed over the years as people went on cross-country or global trips to catch'em all. But this is an extraordinary and gripping game, where the rules of entry are constantly shifting and where lives perpetually hang in the balance.

In video games, there's probably no studio that generates more excitement than FromSoftware. Founded in 1986, the Japanese studio rose to fame through video games such as Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, role-playing epics which earned praise for their level of detail and high degree of difficulty. Naturally, fans have been eager to learn about From's next project: an action video game collaboration with George R.R. Martin, author of the "Game of Thrones" series, called Elden Ring. The action role-playing video game is scheduled to launch on Jan. USA TODAY recently watched the game in action. Here's everything we've learned about Elden Ring so far.

Ah, the Electronics Entertainment Expo, or E3 for short -- that time of the year when the video game industry gathers to tell us all about the incredible games and projects it's working on. From a Breath of the Wild sequel to Keanu Reeves taking the stage and calling us all "breathtaking," this year's E3 has been a whirlwind of stellar moments and exciting announcements. The biggest moment and the coolest game of E3 came courtesy of Polish developer CD Projekt Red's first-person shooter RPG, Cyberpunk 2077. Set in Night City, California, Cyberpunk 2077 is an open world sandbox where players fight against evil mega-corporations using body augmentation. That's cool, but CD Projekt Red delivered the best moment of E3 when it revealed Keanu Reeves is in the game.