In my mind's eye, every hero in every Far Cry game from now until the end of time will be a meathead in a Hawaiian shirt. You might envision him differently. You might even envision him as a her, and if so you'll be probably less than thrilled to find out that you came tantalizingly close to actually playing Far Cry 4 that way, before "workload issues" brought it all to a halt.
Seeing a synchronised murder squad butcher their way through an 18th Century Parisian ballroom was my first ‘wow’ moment of E3. I watched Microsoft’s press conference huddled around a TV in our office with staff from various magazines and web sites, and as the hooded assassins continued cutting a swathe through French noblemen, a female colleague from our video department noted that at least she’d be able to play as a woman in the co-op mode. Another colleague made the point that it still meant playable female characters were being segregated outside the main mode, or only allowed to star on niche formats like PSP. It turns out they were both being too optimistic.
If you're part of the world's non-male population who likes to play as non-male characters in video games, then you're out of luck: Assassin's Creed Unity will not feature female playable characters in cooperative mode. That's as confirmed by Ubisoft creative director Alex Amancio, who told Polygon that the lack of female representation comes down to studio resources.
Ubisoft kicked off its E3 2014 press conference with the first five minutes of the upcoming Far Cry 4, and then showed us some of its new cooperative action in a lengthy gameplay video. We've played it, and PC Gamer Editor-in-chief Evan Lahti spoke to Ubisoft's Alex Hutchinson at the event about what the developer is adding to its successful FPS formula.
After getting duly excited about yesterday's big reveal of Assassin's Creed: Unity's four-player co-op mode and NPC-packed setting, we sent Sam sneaking past the guards at E3 to bring us more info. He spoke with Alexandre Amancio, creative director at Ubisoft Montreal, about the changes Ubisoft is making to the way Assassin's Creed handles freedom and complexity. Here's the transcript of that interview.
Ubisoft brought Rainbow Six back in a big way yesterday. But as the saying goes, if you want to make an omelette, sometimes you have to break a few faces. And so it went for Rainbow Six: Patriots, announced all the way back in 2011, which fell victim to what Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said was an industry-driven shift away from single-player game development.
We got a Far Cry 4 cinematic trailer via the first five minutes of the game earlier today at Ubisoft's conference, and at Sony's conference just now, Ubisoft showed off some proper gameplay footage—which includes co-op. Assassin's Creed Unity, The Division: I'll go out on a limb and say there's a trend here.
We’re only a day in, but Rainbow Six Siege may stand up as the most pleasant surprise of E3. We’d heard that Ubisoft was moving away from the direction we initially saw in the now-cancelled Rainbow Six: Patriots, but we weren’t sure what to expect from its second crack at rebooting the franchise. What Ubisoft showed at its E3 press conference was absolutely encouraging, but here’s the catch: if players can’t build their own content in what is presumably a systems-driven, multiplayer-focused shooter (we do know that it’ll have a campaign), can we really expect Siege to have a long lifespan?
It's been awhile since we last had the opportunity to play a Rainbow Six game, but Ubisoft looks set to make up for that lost time with the Rainbow Six: Siege, a team-based showdown between the elite counter-terrorism force and the heavily-armed evil-doers who make their job necessary.
A new trailer for Valiant Hearts, the World War One puzzle game, was shown at Ubisoft’s E3 event today, exploring more of the stories inspired by real-life letters sent home from the Great War.
Ubisoft showed Assassin's Creed: Unity co-op gameplay earlier today at Microsoft's E3 2014 press conference, but outdid that demo at its own conference with both a hyper-dramatic cinematic trailer and a long single-player gameplay demonstration in Unity's "systemic open world."
Ubisoft unveiled a new cinematic trailer for The Crew, its massively multiplayer racing game, at the publisher's press conference today at E3 2014. Even better, we now have a date for when The Crew will hit PCs, as well as news of an upcoming beta for the racer.
Ubisoft began its 2014 E3 press conference with the opening cinematic to Far Cry 4, a lengthy, sweary introduction to the sharp-dressed, short-tempered villain known as Pagan Min. The cinematic represents the first five minutes of the game, according to Ubisoft.
Ubisoft showed off new footage from Tom Clancy's The Division at E3 today. As opposed to the gameplay we saw earlier today at the Microsoft event, this trailer dove deep into the human stories that lie behind the broken buildings in the New York post-apocalypse.
Fresh footage of The Division was shown at the Microsoft E3 press conference at E3 2014 today. A squad of four players navigated the snowy streets of dilapidated New York, battling what appeared to be NPC enemies on the way to a huge safehouse. Flamethrowers and strobe grenades were involved.
A few Assassin's Creed Unity details leaked earlier this year, causing Ubisoft to announce it early. This is how it must have intended to reveal it: a gameplay demonstration at Microsoft's E3's press conference which shows off four-player co-op, a first for the series.
Between Microsoft and EA we're well into E3 2014's trailer assault by now, but wait, there's more! Ubi always put on an odd show, but it'll worth enduring the onstage awkwardness if we get another good look at Assassin's Creed: Unity and its four-player co-op mode. We're expecting Far Cry 4 to break cover as well, and Ubisoft also showed its promising apocalyptic survival shooter, The Division, at the Microsoft conference. There may also be some breakdancing and a cabaret of some description, because Ubisoft. Prepare thyself.
Watch Dogs launched with some performance issues on PC that cause serious stuttering and lag on some systems. Ubisoft is still working on a patch to iron out those problems. To see how the game performed for us on ultra settings, we threw Watch Dogs at the LPC and recorded some open world driving, hacking, shooting mayhem with Nvidia Shadowplay.
Ubisoft is struggling to fix another problem with Watch Dogs, this one related to the redemption of uPlay Rewards content that can prevent the game from loading. The short version is that if you download certain Rewards – Eurogamer says the golden D50 gun and the Papvero Stealth Edition car are the culprits – you may find yourself staring at a loading progress bar that gets to around 90 percent and then refuses to budge.
It's a fun quirk of PC gaming that, going into a new game, you're never quite sure what will happen. Take Watch Dogs: I've had no issues with it, whereas, if Tom drives fast enough, this can happen. It can be hard to gauge exactly how prevalent a problem can be, but enough are experiencing lag and stuttering issues that Sebastien Viard, the game's graphics technical director, issued a series of tweets explaining the problem and committing to an upcoming performance patch.
