The studio behind Nioh plans to take PlayStation fans on an adventure through Bakumatsu-era Japan. On Tuesday, Team Ninja -- not to be confused with Ninja Theory -- announced it is working on a new action-adventure game titled Rise of the Ronin. Set in 1863, about a decade after Commodore Matthew Perry ended Japan's isolation from the West, the game grounds the player in an era of dramatic technological and political change. You'll play as a wandering Ronin navigating a fractured country. This being a Team Ninja project, expect stylish third-person melee combat.

It took me four tries to beat the first major enemy in our Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice ($60 preorder on Steam) demo. Just a slightly more powerful soldier than the mobs around him, a named Samurai General commanding nameless hordes. Time and time again I marched towards him though, having dispatched his troops, and was killed by the sweeping swings of his sword. As much as it's tempting to lump all of From Software's games into a "Souls-like" umbrella, the studio's proven skilled at reinventing what that term means--from Demon's Souls to Dark Souls, Dark Souls to Dark Souls III, and to the faster-paced fan favorite Bloodborne. Sekiro has plenty in common with its brethren, to say nothing of Team Ninja's Nioh, and yet it's also uniquely Sekiro, and that means going through the entire Souls learning process once again.

The start of a new year is a good time for reflection, and as we head into 2018 I think it's time to take on a big one: How much do a game's graphics actually matter? Around the time of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launch I remember a lot of discussion about whether we needed new, more powerful consoles. That was four years ago and even then the conversation was old. And as a PC gamer primarily, I can understand the counterpoints--there's a thrill to good-looking games, to those "Can it run Crysis?" But 2017 marked the confluence of two opposing trends coming to a head, and as such is a uniquely appropriate moment to resurface the discussion. On the one hand, you had the industry's giants resorting to underhanded monetization tactics (mostly loot boxes) to ostensibly offset the ballooning costs of development.

"Nioh" is getting its first paid downloadable content soon. Apparently, Japanese publisher Koei Tecmo has revealed more information about "The Dragon of Tohoku," including its release date. Just this Monday, Japanese publication Gamer reported that it has learned directly from Koei Tecmo that the first paid DLC of "Nioh" is scheduled for release on May 2, 2017. On the same day, the company is also launching a free update that will implement online PvP in the action RPG. According to Koei Tecmo, "The Dragon of Tohoku" will come with new scenarios, new characters, new stages, new weapon types, new guardian spirits and new yokai.

Samurai don't tend to be something you be, but something you see. And that's best done from afar, given the amount of blood and guts that they have spilled in popular culture. But with the release of Nioh, the new but long-awaited action game for PlayStation 4, that's about to change. The game puts you right in the middle of the life of a samurai – with all the mystery, training and beautiful violence that you'd expect. That's done largely through the main character, based on William Adams, an Englishman who was one of the first ever from his country to reach Japan and the first known western Samurai.

For some time now, my colleague Dave Thier and I have argued back and forth about the merits of an'easy mode' for notoriously challenging games like Dark Souls. So the debate continues with Nioh, Team Ninja's excellent new Samurai action-RPG which draws a lot of inspiration from such infamously challenging games as Dark Souls and Ninja Gaiden. Dave's argument essentially boils down to this: Nioh's difficulty will turn off more casual players or players who don't have the kind of time to sink into such a challenging game. This is both foolish (as it limits sales) and snobby (as it leaves the game accessible only to the hardcore audience) and would be easily mitigated by the inclusion of an easy mode, making it more accessible to all while leaving the core experience unscathed. Every game we play sets out to do something different.