Creative Assembly has been making the Total War games for twelve years, and I am sure they will deliver on their large-scale turn-based/real-time hybrid gameplay.  The question is whether or not the senate portions will be equally intriguing, or at least interesting enough to produce a compelling narrative.  The Creative Assembly has certainly chosen a both historically dramatic and well-documented setting, so we can only hope they exploit it properly.

Those who pre-order the game will also gain early access to a exclusive gameplay mode called “Sniper Challenge”. This downloadable standalone mode challanges the long-range prowess of gamers and features a online leaderboard.

The game will be available for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Windows PC on November 20th 2012.

The traditional gaming sector is under an enormous amount of downward pressure at the moment, and it will require a strong catalyst to shift that momentum.”

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said while GTA V could accumulate $700 million in sales, it would still only amount to “less than 10% of the expected overall software sales this year,” industry sales are down more than that, year-to-date.
While it’s been suggested GTA V could release during T2′s financial year ending March 31, 2013, the firm has yet to confirm when it plans to release it. Going by past releases in the franchise and from Rockstar in general, it will release “when it’s ready.

Moreover, and perhaps there is no way to convince our fans of this considering the magnitude of the betrayal many are feeling, but we are not doing this out of malice or a desire to control,” reads the statement.

“Persona 4 Arena achieves a number of triumphs for our North American publishing house. For years, our fans have asked us to include dual language audio in our games. Finally, with P4 Arena, we were able to deliver on that desire and include the exact same content as the Japanese release for our North American fans. Moreover, our North American community is often forced to wait months for a localized release (a plight our friends across the Atlantic can relate to).
Again, with P4 Arena, we’re able to release within two weeks of Japan. We pushed hard for these things. We know our fans want them–well really, EXPECT them–and we did our best to get as much for our release as possible.

So you could look at it that thanks to Microsoft and Sony and the length of this generation, it helped the emergence of other platforms and helped them get strong before the next hardware comes out.”

Merceron’s comments came as industry analyst Wedbush Morgan predicted a 34% year-on-year sales decline in the industry’s performance for June.

Analyst Michael Pachter pointed to the lack of innovation and over-reliance on sequels as key factors contributing to the industry’s struggles.
“In this unprecedented eighth year of the console cycle, we believe there are few new intellectual properties to reinvigorate interest in the games sector/ Consumers have been offered a never-ending series of sequels, and have been offered fewer choices each year for the last several years, with the result being waning interest in new software purchases and an unprecedented three years of software sales declines,” Pachter said.