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One indie game which caught my eye during tonight's Summer Game Fest stream was Planet of Lana, a beautiful side-scrolling platformer coming in 2022.

So there is a big Vampire: The Masquerade video game coming out this year after all. Except, it's not an RPG like Bloodlines 2, it's a free-to-play battle royale. I know that sounds strange but I've played it, and it's better than I expected. It's a pretty impressive production, actually. It has a studio of around 200 people behind it: a newish Swedish studio called Sharkmob, led by Ubisoft Massive (The Division) veterans. And they've made something dark, handsome and atmospheric. Something entirely in keeping with what you expect from a Vampire: The Masquerade game.

Sky: Children of the Light, the acclaimed "social adventure" from Journey and Flower developer ThatGameCompany, will be making its way to Switch on 29th June.

Gearbox has announced Borderlands fantasy spin-off Tiny Tina's Wonderlands.

Death Stranding is coming to the PlayStation 5 in the form of a Director's Cut.

Former Call of Duty: Black Ops developers are making a brand new IP for PlayStation.

This year's slightly disparate, slightly odd E3 kicks off in earnest with Geoff Keighley's all-singing all-dancing Summer Game Fest. Here's all the news as it happened.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War gets a number of new multiplayer maps with the launch of Season 4 next week.

Dotemu and Leikir Studio have announced Metal Slug Tactics.

Koch Media has announced a new publishing label called Prime Matter - and a new Painkiller game.

Stray Bombay, the studio formed by Left 4 Dead and Portal writer Chet Faliszek, and Riot Games designer Kimberley Voll, has revealed its new game The Anacrusis.

Two Point Studio's recently-leaked Two Point Campus has now been officially confirmed by publisher Sega.

Last week, Epic released Unreal Engine 5 for early access, along with a sample demo project - Valley of the Ancient - for developers to explore. Crucial to UE5 are two fundamental new technologies: Nanite, which aims to deliver something akin to 'infinite detail' and Lumen, a state of the art global illumination solution. At its maximum 'epic' settings, the demo targets 1080p at 30 frames per second on PS5 and Xbox Series X. However, another new technology - Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) uses smart upscaling to deliver a convincing 4K presentation. This is cutting-edge stuff and having now spent some time with UE5 on PC, we have some impressions and initial performance numbers.

Control is free on the Epic Games Store.

Earlier this year, developer Iron Gate released a pretty ambitious roadmap for Valheim that included several major updates and a host of smaller improvements: but as the months passed, it began to seem less and less likely that Iron Gate would meet all these targets. Sure enough, the Iron Gate team has confirmed that it's had to revise its roadmap for 2021 - and that includes a trimmed-down version of its update schedule.

Capcom has detailed exactly when you'll be able to tune in to its E3 showcase: Monday, 14th June at 10.30pm UK time.

Playdate, the mini monochrome handheld with a crank, will become available for pre-order in July priced $179 (UK price TBA).

You may have already seen some mutterings about this on social media, but E3's online portal opened up to press this week - and to nobody's surprise, it's a real mess. This year's E3 is all-online thanks to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and the portal is supposed to be some sort of substitute for the physical show, featuring virtual booths for exhibitors, online events, and a variety of articles and bits of content about games.

Bandai Namco will hop onto E3 2021's virtual stage next Tuesday 15th June at 10.25pm UK time, as part of the online event's livestream.

It's being touted, naturally, as the most ambitious Battlefield yet, and perhaps the biggest generational leap the series has seen to date with dynamic 128-player matches (on new-gen and PC at least - last-gen players will have to make do with 64 players) and a near future canvas that's brimming with all sorts of exciting tech.

After a string of rumours, whispers and leaks EA has finally lifted the veil of the latest Battlefield, seeing the flagship first-person shooter moving away from the historical setting of recent entries to a near-future backdrop - with this year's model subsequently called Battlefield 2042. In a break from other recent traditions, it'll also do away with a single-player campaign, and there are no plans for an accompanying battle royale mode.

Ahead of its E3 media briefing on Sunday, Microsoft has made a raft of announcements around Xbox Game Pass and its cloud gaming efforts.

Microsoft aims to release at least one new first-party game into Xbox Game Pass every quarter, it's said.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has issued a thinly-veiled dig at Sony over its PC strategy.

Beloved platforming mascot Spyro the dragon will ride again in the new season of free-to-play mobile game Crash Bandicoot: On the Run.

PUBG's bots have never been particularly popular with the community ever since they were introduced to public matchmaking, but a recent update transformed the bumbling bots into something far worse: horrifyingly accurate aimbots.

The idea of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti has obvious appeal. Positioned between the $500/£469 RTX 3070 and $700/£569 RTX 3080, the $600/£529 3070 Ti ought to offer noticeably better performance than the vanilla 3070 while being significantly more affordable than the 3080. The new card is also only $20/£0 more than the AMD's RX 6800, so there's potential here for Nvidia to offer equivalent performance in many games, plus better results in RT titles and a more mature feature set, at a broadly equivalent price.

Yesterday's big Battlefield 2042 reveal gave us our first glimpse at the game's near-future setting and confirmed its multiplayer focus. There will be no campaign mode (or battle royale).

The Ninja Gaiden Master Collection is out now - and its PC port has been found wanting.

You'll know the dictum, I'm sure, that says something about good artists borrowing while great ones steal, but isn't the truth simply that everyone's at it? How else to learn your craft without imitating one of the masters, learning what makes them tick and seeing if you can replicate some of that magic yourself?