Another week, another Eurogamer News Cast! Join Eurogamer reporter Emma Kent, news editor Tom Phillips and me in the video below as we dig into the headlines that matter.

This week we discuss Microsoft's new plan to beat the console scalpers. It's letting certain people buy an Xbox Series X/S through an Xbox One only. It's a clever plan, but will it work? And should Sony follow suit and sell PlayStation 5 through PlayStation 4s?

Meanwhile, we discuss Ubisoft's latest delay of Skull & Bones, as well as its promise not to abandon paid AAA games while making free-to-play versions of core franchises.

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Whatever you think of Mass Effect 3's final moments, it's fair to say BioWare's third chapter brought the trilogy to a close in style. Over the course of the game, every squadmate past and present gets their turn in the spotlight, major story arcs get revisited and tied off, and Shepard is prepped for their last big mission.

But how did BioWare begin planning Mass Effect 3? How much was set in stone already? And how did the studio start tackling the headache of (potentially) killing off everyone in Mass Effect 2's extraordinary Suicide Mission? To celebrate the release of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, I sat down for an extended interview with lead writer Mac Walters to discuss how the game's story was set down - and some of the things which changed along the way. Read on for new details of cut ideas and swapped missions, plus an early idea for an Easter egg which would have ended the whole trilogy in the first half hour of Mass Effect 1.

Fair warning: if you've not yet played the Mass Effect trilogy, this article discusses plot points from throughout.

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Fall Guys' 80s-themed fourth season has reached its mid-point, meaning, as is now tradition, the arrival of a brand-new content update designed to freshen up the second half of the season with a variety of new gameplay twists and additions.

As detailed over on the Fall Guys subreddit, Season 4.5, which is out now on PC and PlayStation 4, introduces two brand-new rounds - Slimescraper and Button Bashers - as well as a total of 55 variations across 12 rounds. Slimescraper is described as spiritual successor to Slime Clime, tasking players with outrunning slime and mastering "multiple floors of mayhem", while Button Bashers is a 1v1 round in which players are split into duelling pairs - the winner being the one with the most points when the timer runs out.

As for those new level variations, a full list isn't available, but developer Mediatonic has confirmed low-gravity versions of Hex-a-gone and Thin Ice.

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Is there a more ridiculous faction in the world of fantasy Warhammer than Chaos? There probably is actually - this is Warhammer after all, land of sneaky rats and lizard folk. It is nothing if not broad. But none of those other myriad factions and races and creeds has the word "Nurgle" in it, does it? So Chaos wins.

Anyway, Total War: Warhammer 3. This is "the Chaos one", by the looks of things, featuring four different Chaos factions aligned to their respective gods: Khorne (the "blood for the blood god" one); Slaanesh (the naughty excess one); Tzeentch (the magic one); and yes, Nurgle, the god of looking like you'd smell absolutely disgusting.

Alongside these Chaos forces comes a couple of other new factions, Kislev and Grand Cathay, and a new kind of battle. In fact, there are several new types of battle, as we learned from talking to game director Ian Roxburgh ("more detail later" on those) but for now there's one headliner: survival battles, the boss fight-style mode that we've played for a good couple of hours, albeit streamed over an occasionally wobbly Parsec.

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Apologies for getting sentimental about nothing more worthy than a corporate logo but still, there's something warming about seeing the Konami logo on boot-up of a new game once again. For all the understandable frustrations about Konami's approach to traditional games in recent years - and even if the company's flat red modern splash screen can't match the iconic dashes of the 90s iteration - it's wonderful to have them back doing something they used to do so very well in the past: making straight-up, hard-edged action games.

This new roguelike platformer that's just hit Steam Early Access today is a return as surprising as it is inspired, a bonafide deep cut of a thing that reaches into Konami's peerless back catalogue and pulls up not Gradius, Castlevania, or Silent Hill but this: Getsu Fūma Den, a remake of a 1987 side-scrolling action platformer that never made its way out of Japan, and something even a wide-eyed devotee of Konami's 80s output can't pretend to have played before.

Not that there's too much similarity between the two; rather, this remake builds upon the bones of the fairly stark 2D action of the original, its multitude of weapons and crunchy combat providing the perfect backbone for everything you'll know from the modern roguelike: upon every run you're picking a build from items and artefacts you find on your way, subject to RNG and some fairly brutal enemies that might take a half dozen swipes from whatever weapon you might find in hand.

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A handful of Logitech peripherals are on sale for Amazon Gaming Week, including one the learned folk of Digital Foundry consider to be one of the best gaming mice.

First up there's the Logitech G502 Hero SE for £36.98. This old favourite remains one of the most popular gaming mice in the world - and it's easy to see why. It's very affordable, comfortable for extended use and packed full of useful features including an infinite scroll wheel and 11 programmable buttons.

Unlike many other gaming mice it isn't an eyeball-assaulting RGB-fest - unless you customise it to light up a room - but a slick and slim design that does exactly what you need it to do. This latest deal is only £2 more than the price it dropped to over Black Friday last year.

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Last month we heard that, rather unsurprisingly, this year's E3 will be an online-only event due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. We now have an idea of how that's going to work in practice, as the ESA has announced an online portal and app for E3 2021.

In a press release, the ESA described the online portal and app as "a key hub for the duration of the show". It will feature hosted events, virtual booths, online forums, video conferencing, and even profile and avatar creation. The exhibitor booths will have special events along with VOD content and articles, and will act as "hubs within the portal for key announcements and game information tied to each exhibitor". It gets weirder from here - the app will also have lounges, described as "gathering spots for all E3 attendees," along with leaderboards. The leaderboards are apparently "gamified show elements that can be collected and displayed, encouraging fans to interact in as many ways as possible". Learning about games is a game now, I suppose.

The portal and app will also show the E3 live broadcast, complete with interactive overlays featuring viewer polls and tweets. That makes a change from watching thousands of people demand Elden Ring in Twitch chat - although it's worth noting the broadcast will still air on the usual range of platforms, including E3's YouTube channel, Facebook, Twitter and Twitch.

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A couple of months ago, we published a video for People Make Games that investigated working conditions at two outsourcing studios in Southeast Asia. These companies, Lemon Sky Studios from Malaysia and Brandoville Studios from Indonesia, are both routinely hired by AAA publishers to create huge amounts of art assets for some of the biggest video games in the business, from Gears of War 5 to The Last of Us 2.

And according to that investigation, these studios are also relying heavily on excessive overtime, or crunch, in order to get this work done. Based on the accounts of 19 current and former employees, the video details working environments in which artists have little choice but to volunteer for unpaid overtime in order to meet unrealistic deadlines.

"That's the thing, the company never asked for it," said one anonymous former Lemon Sky employee. "Therefore, they do not have to pay for our OT (overtime). But we weren't given enough time to complete our task."

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As the world continues to struggle against the coronavirus pandemic, Humble has launched the Heal Covid 19 Bundle to support a number of charities aiding the hardest hit countries such as Brazil and India as well as the global medical effort to save lives.

In total, you can get 35 different games, books, comics and software for just £15. All of the money raised will go to the charities Direct Relief, Doctors Without Borders, International Medical Corps and GiveIndia.

As for the specific contents of the bundle, it's mainly comprised of games that many would consider some of the best indie and AAA releases in recent years. Honestly, if you had someone completely fresh to PC gaming and wanted to show them the impressive diversity of games on offer this would be a terrific place to start.

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Robin Hood is the quintessential English folk rebel. He's also a total chameleon. The man (if he was a man) has undergone endless reincarnations, merry and not-so-merry, stretching back over 600 years of fact and fiction. Go on, pick your poison - no-nonsense Yorkshire highwayman or pantomime aristo? Crusading commoner or blueblood cheated of his birthright? Proto-socialist agitator or just a nickname given to any bandit of a certain repute? Errol Flynn or Russell Crowe?

The character has found a new lease of life overseas: I grew up not far from Robin's old stomping grounds in South Yorkshire, but the version of his story I fell in love with as a child was Disney's 1973 adaptation - Sherwood Forest by way of Kansas and the Jungle Book. Over time, sadly, this once-celebrated rogue has become something of an establishment figure. Robin's reinvention during the 19th century as the secret heir to a noble estate has less to do with historical evidence and more reconciling him with England's rotten class system - a rebel no longer, but simply the "better" kind of toff trying to muscle his way back in.

What idea of Robin Hood is appropriate to the England of today, with its draconian anti-protest laws, plateauing wealth inequality and murderously incompetent ruling elite? A thoroughly grim one, of course, and on that count, Hood: Outlaws & Legends amply delivers. A lean multiplayer heist game from the team behind Eve: Valkyrie, it blends the murkier Robin myths with a very contemporary dread of a status quo that seems final and inescapable. The game isn't strictly set in England but a silent, shadowy composite of sunken villages, coastal forts and churchyards populated only by soldiers and gibbets. It feels more like Chernobyl than Sherwood, and like Chernobyl, it is a place out of time, ruled by a nameless, ahistorical State that is both crushingly tangible and strangely without form. Its castles are caught between periods - broadly medieval in design but with a hint of latter-day fascist architecture, made up of vast, square monoliths that seem beyond the era's technology.

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