Daily Briefing: Tuesday 29th June

Smash Bros. Ultimate's next DLC fighter is definitely its last

During the recent showcase for new fighter Kazuya Mishima, Smash Bros. game director Masahiro Sakurai reiterated that development work on the game will conclude once the next DLC character releases. Kazuya (of Tekken fame) is the fifth of the six fighters that make up Smash Bros. Ultimate's second DLC Fighters Pass.

• Sakurai is a tired man. Speaking during the showcase he outlined that, while gathering all these characters into a singular product means a lot to him, he's essentially been working for ten years straight. Sakurai also mentioned that "it'll be a while" before the next character is announced but they'll still release this year as planned despite the team working remotely. Everything will wrap up soon, then.

Battlefield 2042 will add bots to keep games populated

EA confirmed this week that the upcoming Battlefield 2042 will add up to 64 AI-controlled bots in order to keep games populated. There are currently no plans to let players opt-out of this functionality, but real players will always take priority so it's entirely possible peak time players will never see a bot.

• Other online multiplayer titles employ bots to keep games going when things are quiet but EA are planning it on a pretty large scale. The company have made a big deal about how Battlefield 2042 boasts the biggest maps in the series, but what was the point in scaling everything up if they weren't confident they could fill games? Still, at least bots will mean that games are always full, and won't just be 64 real players running around maps built for 128.

A new Mana game is officially in the works for consoles

The confirmation comes directly from producer Masaru Oyamada during the series 30th anniversary livestream this week. We don't know anything substantial about it just yet, but Oyamada asked fans to wait "a little while longer until the proper announcement." So development has a ways to go, but it is coming which is nice.

• It's been a while since we saw an entirely new Mana. Heroes of Mana launched on the DS back in 2007, and 2006's Dawn of Mana was the last new instalment to hit a home console. Last year's Trials of Mana (a remake of the 1995 title of the same name) did a decent job of reestablishing the franchise - so full speed ahead to this new one.

Xbox Cloud Gaming beta hits PC and iOS

The service is available now for on Widows 10 PCs and iOS devices for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers - and can be accessed via a web browser. Microsoft also formally announced that they have upgraded their datacentres to run on Xbox Series X hardware rather than Xbox One S - which means quicker load times and improved framerates.

• This road to beta has been a long and bumpy one for Microsoft, especially on iOS devices. They originally launched a test version of cloud gaming in an iOS app last year but Apple famously blocked it for being a violation of App Store policy - which is why it's now browser-based. Xbox want to rule the world with cloud gaming, and this is another step towards that.