I have been sort of enjoying former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah's reinvention as a Youtuber who trades insider BioWare anecdotes for merch. He's got an actual T-shirt line, including a T-shirt for babies upon which Mark threatens to "pump NFTs" unless you buy his gear. Respectable Crazy Uncle energy. Maybe don't invite him to your kid's baptism. But maybe do watch his new video about what might happen to EA's many development studios in the wake of the company's $55 billion acquisition by Donald Trump's son-in-law, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and the gilded suits of Silver Lake.

The tl;dr/tl;dw is that Darrah thinks EA's various sport game teams, like Madden and EA Sports FC, are probably fine under the new privately-owned EA. Those games bring home a lot of bacon, after all, and EA's new dads in Riyadh are keen on sports in general. He's less confident about the studios clustered under EA Entertainment, and especially those such as Darrah's old joint BioWare who might have more pronounced cultural objections to the new ownership, based on the kinds of stories they tell.

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Ananta, whether it ends up being a good game or not, is clearly a confident one. You have to be brave to so blatantly, we'll say, borrow from so many different games. Like many anime-esque games of its ilk, it will live and die by its characters (which, by the way, you won't have to gacha roll for), of which it seems to have in spades judging from that first gameplay trailer. These characters will all play differently too, and according to Ananta's producer Ash Qi, the dev team wants you to think of them like Avengers members. Comparing your new thing to an older, widely loved thing is always a safe move!

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"Deserts, deathclaws, and raiders", alongside a "New Vegas feel" with Walton Goggins’ Ghoul as the face. These are the main ingredients for Fallout 76’s Burning Springs map expansion, which is set to arrive in early December this year.

In case you weren’t clear as to how Bethesda are pitching it, a hands-off preview attended by RPS saw 76 creative director Jon Rush introduce Burning Springs thusly: "Based on the success of season one of the Fallout Show, we can expect to see several million players returning to Appalachia for season two. People [who] have seen the show and want more of that storytelling, more of that New Vegas feel will get it all in Fallout 76: Burning Springs. Burning Springs is in total tonal tandem with season two."

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