Huh. It turns out Quantic Dream, makers of such decision-heavy dramas as Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, haven’t just been tinkering with their long-teased Star Wars: Eclipse. They’re also taking a sharp turn into competitive multiplayer, announcing Spellcasters Chronicles: a 3v3, third-person, free-to-play MOBA full of aerial magefights and big stompy demon lads. Huh>.

It's hard to imagine a starker departure from the studio’s previous work, or a riskier one. The modern Multiplayer Online Battle Arena isn’t so much a genre as a graveyard, with League of Legends and Dota 2 ambling around and occasionally sharing a knowing look between the headstones. Still, Spellcasters Chronicles seems determined to try, offering shorter, punchier matches and bigger maelstroms of hero-shooter spectacle.

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Unionised EA workers and senators have spoken out against the Battlefield 6 publisher's recently announced acquisition by US and Saudi-backed investors, which (assuming it's approved by regulators) will leave the resulting privately-owned EA with a $20 billion debt. The two sets of complainants appear equally cheesed-off, but for mostly different reasons.

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The lawyers in Sony and Tencent's ongoing legal fracas over alleged Horizon homework-copier Light of Motiram continue to dish out the words. Letters, phrases, and sentences are being flung to and fro with reckless abandon. Sony are the latest corp to take a swing, not only calling Tencent's defense "nonsense", but accusing the Chinese conglomerate of playing shell company hide-and-seek.

If you need to catch up on the tale of this copyright clash, it began in July, when Sony brought about legal action accusing Tencent-published post-apocalyptic open worlder Light of Motiram of being a "slavish clone" of their Horizon series. Tencent battled back, filing a motion to dismiss the case last month. "Sony's effort is not aimed at fighting off piracy, plagiarism, or any genuine threat to intellectual property," Tencent claimed at the time. "It is an improper attempt to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture and declare it Sony's exclusive domain."

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In Crisol: Theater of Idols, you fire bullets of your own blood at frenzied wooden puppets while exploring an island saturated with unpleasant Spanish folklore. As elevator pitches go, I like the immediacy of this one's trade-offs. Blood? But I need that stuff inside my body to convey oxygen and vital nutrients to my trigger fingers. Surely there are other fluids I can fill the bullets with. I get that it would prompt the less sexy kind of revulsion, but Norman Reedus did> get away with lobbing cannisters of piss and dribble in Death Stranding.

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Another group of workers at Microsoft-owned Blizzard have voted to form a union, with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) set to represent them. The CWA say that this union will be made up of "nearly 400" workers across Blizzard's platform and technology department.

Their action follows the formation of a number of other unions at Blizzard over the past couple of years, with developers on World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Diablo all having recently secured representation.

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The future of GZDoom, the community-updated engine behind many thousands of brilliant Doom mods, is in doubt following a bust-up over the lead developer's use of generative AI to create code. The fracas has seen a number of GZDoom developers announce plans to splinter off and maintain their own engine, UZDoom.

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Around the time of Hollow Knight: Silksong's release, the Metroidvania's Simplified Chinese translation was flagged as being a bit stilted, with Team Cherry quickly promising to rectify the "quality issues". They've aimed to take the first step in doing just that with the game's fourth patch, which is now live in Steam beta with a fresh translation, but early impressions from players are largely negative.

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I can't remember the first time I felt "immersed" in a videogame, but I can remember the first time I got stuck under a swimming pool float as a kid, scratching at a scabby foam ceiling roamed by mocking silver jellyfish of air. I can remember the first few times I drowned in videogames, fighting the waterlogged handling in Sonic's Labyrinth Zone, or operating the agile sarcophagus that is Lara Croft in Aztec print grottos of antiseptic blue.

I find the continuing use of "immersive" to describe believable videogame worlds weird and a bit alarming. Partial immersion would be one thing - the videogame as nice hot bath at the end of the day, the videogame as splashing around in a stream of thought, the videogame as a kind of apple-bobbing. The "immersion" of the "immersive sim" is a different matter entirely: it's a box of clockwork you're invited to tease apart, not some hyperreal enclosure. But the "full" or "total" sensory immersion repeatedly offered by big-budget, photoreal 3D games seems a lot like suffocation.

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