It's GDC week, and conversations are being had about AI. Ubisoft have blundered into this, in classic Ubi style, by revealing that they've had an R&D team beavering away on a project called NEO NPC. It's the usual pitch. "Have you ever dreamed of having a real> conversation with an NPC in a video game?", asks Ubi's official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is "Erm, probably no, actually?"

Still, the internet made good hay from the prototype image Ubisoft shared on Xitter, as many people took the opportunity to make fun of the dialogue from Bloom, a prototype man in a prototype beanie who wants to be your friend.

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Bungie have announced a change in director on their upcoming revival of their classic shooter Marathon, amid reports the studio is once again shaking up its creative leadership. Former Valorant director Joe Ziegler confirmed his appointment on Xwitter last night, replacing long-time Bungie designer Christopher Barrett in the role.

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Eight years after launching, Stardew Valley just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Update 1.6 arrived yesterday, with enough changes that the patch notes are 7308 words long. It bumps the farm-o-life sim's co-op player limit to eight, adds hundreds of new items, opens up a new progression system for "powerful perks and items", adds new events, lets you drink mayonnaise, and so much more that. Best of all, it lets you have more pets. New pets. Pets wearing hats.

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Generative AI is all over the entertainment industries right now, and lots of people in games are making excited noises about finding new ways to integrate it into their products, from game developers and publishers such as Ubisoft and Square Enix to platform holders and hardware firms such as Epic and Nvidia. This new industry obsession is still taking shape, and there are lots of questions still to be answered about how much it might cost in the future, who will have access to it, and what it will actually help with, not to mention fears about job losses and other harms. But there’s a bigger question bubbling underneath all of this that threatens to burst the wobbly generative AI bubble: is the entire boom built on stolen labour?

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Just when I thought I was past being surprised by games adding battle royale modes, Blizzard today announced one for World Of Warcraft. Plunderstorm will drop 60 pirates onto the Arathi Highlands to fight monsters, loot chests, level up, acquire abilities, and beat the hell out of each other as a storm closes in. It's initially due to run only for several weeks and will use wholly separate characters, though you can unlock cosmetics for your main wizards.

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By this point you’ve probably had enough of hearing what I think about this month’s RPS Game Club game, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. But what say you>, dear readers? Once again, the Game Club liveblog looms, and as with Cobalt Core, we want your thoughts, feelings, and questions to shovel into the conversational fuel furnace.

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Later this week, Payload Studios' open world vehicular survival builder TerraTech Worlds launches into early access. As the name implies, it's a bigger, bolder and more ambitious take on their still very popular sandbox game TerraTech, but according to Payload's founder and CEO Russ Clarke, they're viewing this new version as more of a successor to TerraTech than a full-bodied sequel. "The overall quality of experience is really a huge leap forward," Clarke told me during a press presentation last week. "We're not calling it a sequel because we felt that making it a sequel would be a bit too constraining." Rather, it's "more of a reimagining" of the original game, says Clarke, with a change in engine and fresh investment from Tencent allowing them to reach the full potential of their original vision.

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I didn't have any particular expectations for Heart Machine's open world roguelike Hyper Light Breaker, but I wasn't expecting it to feel so... broken-up, I guess. In this sequel to 2016's alternately wistful and frenzied action-RPG, you are a debonair-looking sod with a hoverboard, paraglider, blades and guns, sent out into the procedurally generated realms of the Overgrowth to kill Abyss Kings, eat stat boosts and extract with loot.

The aforesaid hoverboard and glider, together with the streaking neon visual direction, suggest a game of fluid acrobatics, akin to the studio's last release Solar Ash, which, to quote Ed's review, "has you rollerblade around shattered worlds like a post apocalyptic gazelle on wheels". Perhaps that game exists deeper within Hyper Light Breaker, but during my 20 minutes with the game at GDC, I found myself stopping and starting and struggling to build momentum using a combat system that felt both deliberately challenging and stilted.

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Microsoft have confirmed the waves of games coming to Game Pass in late March and early April, headlined by the expected addition of Diablo IV. This is the first Activision Blizzard game coming to Game Pass since Microsoft's ridiculous $69 billion acquisition, with more due to follow. Beyond that, look forward to games including mech-riding farming game Lightyear Frontier and the colossal alien invasion strategy game from the XCOM Long War team, Terra Invicta.

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Cyan Worlds today announced plans to launch their fancy real-time 3D remake of Riven later this year, coming with support for both VR cybergoggles and standard meatspace screens. Riven: The Sequel To Myst was the 1997 sequel to Myst, the 1993 pre-rendered adventure game which sold a million CD-ROM drives and launched a thousand specks of spittle from John Walker's mouth. The remake previously had a longwinded name of its own, Riven: New Discoveries Of The Lost D'ni Empire, but now is simply named Riven. They should rebrand again and call it Riven: The Sequel To The Myst Remake.

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