There may not have been one blistering innovation for gaming in 2015, but it has been a year of progress both on and off of the screen. Technically, emotionally and culturally, video games are (slowly) growing up, as if this multi-billion pound industry has realised its responsibility. Though the relationship between the art of creating games and their roles as money-spinning ‘products’ is more uneasy than ever, with full-price games crowbarring in microtransactions, the ambition and skill of developers has never been more potent.

You can see it in the technical whizz of gaming’s new breed of open-worlds. Complex, reactive locales that, no matter how fantastical, give a believable sense of place and order. Even back in February, Techland’s Dying Light gave us the fictional Middle-Eastern city of Harran, overrun with shambling undead. Despite the well-worn setting of a viral apocalypse, Harran built a convincing split between the ramshackle poor quarter and the city’s more affluent part. Both areas are adapted by the city’s survivors, with make-shift hideouts and boarded paths across the rooftops to keep the ‘runners’ off of the zombie-infested streets. A day-night cycle that shifts the balance of power towards your quarry enhances the sense that this is a dangerous, writhing city.

Bloodborne

Dying Light may have been the year’s first example of splendid world-building, but it wasn’t the last. Or the best. Bloodborne’s city of Yharnam was a fearsome gothic labyrinth, rich in detail and suffocating atmosphere. As you prowled the streets, fighting Yharnam’s denizens was a test of aggression and resolve. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games are traditionally tough nuts to crack and, even though the game shifts the balance of power towards the player when compared to Miyazaki’s Souls games, Bloodborne’s overwhelming force is no different. A triumph of grisly artistry and technical excellence.

In May, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt gave us a phenomenally dense and reactive fantasy land. As the ostracised Geralt of Rivia, you hunted beasts and helped Temeria’s citizens, only to be derided as a freak. As you go about your business for good or ill, you are able to shift perception, the game’s characters warming to you or recoiling in fear. Yet for all your influence, The Witcher’s best achievement is in making you feel a small part of a larger picture. The city of Novigrad and village of Crow’s Perch recognise your presence, but are not bound by it, as the occupants go about their daily business.

The Witcher III: Wild Hunt

Similarly, the parched sands of Afghanistan in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain are punctuated by military outposts, soldiers adhering to routines until you, as Venom Snake, come around to ruin their day. Each soldier has their own personality and skills, which you can harness if you send them to your fully-customisable Mother Base. Their individuality contributes to the sense of place. A place with its own eco-system, plants to harvest and animals to rear. Everything matters in this series best, an achievement made all the more remarkable by the behind-the-scenes drama which saw creator Hideo Kojima leave publisher Konami and form his own independent studio.

Even away from that big-budget arena, open-worlds have become more sophisticated. Worthy of mention is Ostrich Banditos fabulous Westerado: Double-Barreled, a lo-fi spaghetti western that casts you as a cowboy hunting down his family’s murderers. You travel the dustlands, gathering information through force or persuasion, if you gun down a key character, they stay dead. It’s a similar kind of player influence that made Bethesda’s Fallout 4 –one of the most anticipated games of recent years-- so compelling, with players able to weave their own stories within the expertly crafted nuclear wasteland.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

But while such open-ended tales formed many of the year’s highlights, it has been a splendid 12 months for authored video game narrative too. The kind of smart writing that weaves a blistering yarn while taking advantage of gaming’s most powerful tool: interaction.

Telltale continues its prolific output of branching video game narratives, with both Game of Thrones and Tales From the Borderlands providing sharp scripts and tough choices. Telltale have felt like the premier stable for video game stories over the past few years but many other develpers have begun to catch up. Dontnod’s exploration of collegiate America in the time-bending Life is Strange certainly had its issues with dialogue and cohesiveness, but its success came in its script placing science-fiction as background noise to a more personal tale. As photography student Maxine Caulfield you had to come to terms with the ability to rewind time, using it to negotiate the social battleground of a preppy US college as much as solve the game’s central mystery of a missing girl. Its themes of teenage friendship, communal responsibility and the potentially fatal pressure of young adulthood are not oft-explored in the world of video games. Flawed, for sure, but the chemistry between Max and her best friend Chloe is the beating heart of a game that, thematically, may well be the year’s most important.

Until Dawn

Tough decisions abound in Life is Strange and Telltale’s games, with you able to alter the story’s path in a split-second. But there is not a more successful game at building a tangled web of choices than Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn. Its appropriation of slasher flick cliché – horny teenage dumbos travelling to an isolated mountain cabin in the dead of night-- may seem like pastiche, but that is just one of the game’s many successful misdirects. It smartly deconstructs the horror by giving you control over who lives and who dies, with seemingly innocuous decisions shredding relationships and having huge ramifications farther down the line. One of the sharpest surprises of the year.

Almost as surprising as one of the year’s best games primary interaction being a simple search box. Sam Barlow’s Her Story has you sifting through archived videos of police interviews with a young woman whose husband has gone missing. As she recounts the tale, snippets of information spark questions in your mind. To reveal more videos, you enter search terms --an innocuous comment, the name of a person or a place—and the truth reveals itself through a tangled but beautifully coherent tale. Viva Seifert is exceptional as the woman on-screen, a performance of nuanced empathy that surely makes her a shoe-in for a BAFTA nomination next year. The real genius, however, comes in the fact that you will be revealing videos and plot points in an almost entirely random order, yet the narrative still crackles with pace and surprise. The twists and turns coming as naturally as they would in a purely linear story, if not more so. A real triumph.

Viva Seifert in Her Story

Supermassive are Guildford-based while Barlow resides in Portsmouth. A splendid year for British video game storytelling, then, further bolstered by Brighton's The Chinese Room. Its first-person exploration Everybody's Gone to The Rapture channelled a Wyndham-esque end of the world in the richly detailed village of Yaughton. Set in 1984, the game presented an immaculate rendering of 80s small-country living, while its sparse, spiritual storytelling recalls a compelling radio play. The Archers do the Apocalypse, if you will.

British developers also had a key role in the unlikely comeback of the plastic instrument game. While the US's Harmonix revived the multi-instrument party antics of Rock Band, Leamington Spa's Freestyle Games threw the genre forward with Guitar Hero Live. Its live-action career and always-on streaming music channels were two halves of a progressive whole. The latter Guitar Hero TV, in particular, brought the game into line with music fans used to Spotify and Apple Music.

Online, as is increasingly the case, continued to be the driver for many games. One of the outstanding multiplayer games of the year came with Rocket League, a fizzing and brilliant interpretation of car football. But this year provided a pleasing variety for online shooters, an often over-saturated and tired genre. In short, developers have stopped just trying to be Call of Duty.

Guitar Hero Live

Except for Call of Duty itself, of course, with Black Ops III's snappy futuristic leanings making for an interesting progression of the series. CoD continued to chase e-Sports recognition, as did Halo 5: Guardians. With its muscular, fizzy sci-fi blasting, Guardians served some of the best multiplayer of the series, splitting itself between the competitive quick-fire arena and more sprawling and adventurous Warzone. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege, meanwhile, differentiated itself with its variety of operators, focus on teamwork and delicious tactical sharpness. Tough and uncompromising, yet still boisterous enough to be accessible. Though not as accessible as Star Wars Battlefront, a tremendously entertaining pick-up-and-play pick-n-mix of multiplayer modes with an authentic Star Wars skin.

Even in the light of these excellent games, the most inventive shooter of the year came from Nintendo. The Japanese giant always seemed unlikely to turn its attention to a multiplayer blaster, but brought its customary brilliance to the energetic Splatoon. This is a game in which you play as kids and squids, splatting paint at each other and using your own colours to traverse the map. A splendid invention you feel only Nintendo could have conjured.

Splatoon

Splatoon’s excellence aside, 2015 has not been a kind to Nintendo. While the Wii U continues to sporadically host superlative games –Super Mario Maker and Xenoblade Chronicles X to name two- its commercial performance continues to be abysmal. It has led to the revered company expediting the release of its next console (codenamed NX, on which we expect to hear more in early 2016), and turning its attention to mobile games.

But infinitely more important, more devastating, for the company and its staff was the tragic death of Satoru Iwata in July due to a tumor in his bile duct. The entire industry mourned a great man responsible for some of Nintendo’s boldest manoeuvres. A man with the acute desire for the company to plough its own furrow. A direction often mistaken for naïveté. Often, it seemed, with the singular edict for Nintendo’s games to simply put smiles on faces, making games that were inclusive and inventive. Under Iwata’s leadership, Nintendo did just that. His legacy will honour him.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, who sadly passed away in July.

And what of 2015’s legacy? The games have been superb, offering genuine variety that I hope has already been communicated here. But more importantly, 2015 felt like the year the industry took a step forward in its representation of women. The industry still is hardly a paragon of inclusiveness, but there was a perceptible shift in attitude this year that suggested things are headed in the right direction. After the grotesquery of 2014’s Gamergate, it was important that the industry took a stand.

Thankfully, many did, with representation both on and off screen notably improved. Many of the games mentioned already here feature a female lead (Life is Strange) or main character (Until Dawn, Her Story, Halo, Rainbow Six Siege) or gives you the option to create an avatar with your gender of choice (Fallout 4, Bloodborne, Call of Duty, Battlefront). They are not the only games to do so either. Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is the first game in the series to feature a female protagonist in Evie Frye, a ruthless and smart assassin who outshines her co-lead sibling Jacob. And Lara Croft, long gaming’s most recognisable heroine, has been tuned into a fearsomely capable, complex character in Crystal Dynamics’ thrilling Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Lead writer for Lara was Rihanna Pratchett, one of many talented women breaking out in this traditionally male-dominated industry. For more examples of women making their presence felt, you need look no further than this year’s E3 press conferences. 343’s Bonnie Ross, Mojang’s Lydia Winters, Beyond Eyes developer Sherida Halatoe, DICE’s Sara Jannson and Sigurlina Ingvarsdottir, writer of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Mary DeMarle. These are just some of the women who presented at the show. And beyond that, at publisher Electronic Arts, Amy Hennig is writing a new Star Wars game, while Jade Raymond has been given the job of heading up a brand new studio. Not to mention the scores of women at triple-A and independent developers, as well as journalists, YouTubers and players that are firmly challenging the perception that the games industry is a boys-only club.

Let’s not get carried away. There is still a lot of work to be done before gaming can consider itself truly inclusive. And it is important to note that gender imbalance is far from the only representation issue that the industry faces. Nevertheless, 2015 was an important step in the right direction in more ways than one. It is no coincidence that the most diverse lineup of games in recent years was one of the best. Long may it continue.