Claude Guillemot, one of the five Guillemot brothers who co-founded French publisher Ubisoft, has died in a plane crash.

Reported by Oest-France (via Kotaku), a Cessna 421 light aircraft crashed in the French commune of La Baule-Escoublac, within the Northwestern department of Loire-Atlantique, on Friday afternoon.

According to reports from Loire-Atlantique's SDIS 44 fire and rescue service, Guillemot was one of two people killed after the aircraft crashed near the La-Baule aerodrome, alongside the aircraft's owner and operator.

The mayor of La Baule, Franck Louvrier, issued a statement following the crash. "It was a Cessna 421, a twin-engine propeller, with eight seats," Louvrier said. "The plane was on approach for the landing phase, when, according to witnesses, it made a turn and crashed."

Guillemot co-founded Ubisoft in 1986 along with his brothers, Michel, Christian, Gerard, and the publisher's current chairman CEO Yves. From its origins as a software distribution business, Ubisoft grew into one of the biggest videogame publishers, and has developed numerous world-renowned series including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six.

Claude Guillemot sat on Ubisoft's board and was executive vice president in charge of operations. Since 1997, he was also chairman and CEO of the Guillemot Corporation, which owns the Hercules digital audio brand and the Thrustmaster accessories label, and through which the Guillemot brothers maintain their stake in Ubisoft.

Ubisoft confirmed Guillemot's death in a press release, stating that it had learned "with deep sadness of the death of Claude Guillemot, co-founder of the Group and President of Guillemot Corporation, in an accident. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time. No further statements will be made at this time"

Claude Guillemot was 69. The cause of the crash is not currently known, but French aviation authorities are expected to open a formal investigation.

Ubisoft is closing two more studios, in Winnipeg and Belgrade, and making more layoffs throughout the company as part of its ongoing effort to reduce costs and keep the lights on. A source familiar with the matter said the cuts will see up to 380 people put out of work.

The layoffs appear to have landed particularly heavily on Ubisoft's Barcelona studio, which an Insider Gaming report says will see 51 people let go. Mataoui Chakib Souleyman, a programmer at Ubisoft Paris, said on LinkedIn that the number represents 28% of Ubisoft Barcelona's workforce. As part of the restructuring, the studio, which had previously worked on a wide range of Ubisoft properties including Assassin's Creed, The Crew, Ghost Recon, and Immortals: Fenyx Rising, will also shift its focus exclusively to the Rainbow Six franchise.

The closures and layoffs are the latest bad news for Ubisoft employees, coming amidst an ongoing restructuring in which the founding Guillemot family is struggling furiously to retain control of the company while hundreds, and probably thousands, of rank-and-file employees lose their jobs. At the same time, Ubisoft is leaning ever-harder into AI, and investing heavily into generative AI in particular, despite continued pushback against the adoption of the technology in videogames.

The reorganization has Ubisoft divided internally into five "creative houses," each responsible for a portion of the company's properties; the largest creative house (and the only one with a proper name), Vantage Studios, is headed by Charlie Guillemot, son of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot.

The shakeup has also seen the departure of a number of high-level creatives, including former Assassin's Creed franchise boss Marc-Alexis Côté, former Assassin's Creed Hexe creative director Clint Hocking, and former Assassin's Creed Hexe game director Benoit Richer. Côté later sued Ubisoft for nearly $1 million, alleging that he was fired improperly.

A report by French site LesEchos claims that further cuts at Ubisoft's American operations are expected. We'll update with any further developments as they happen.

The free-to-play shooter The Division Resurgence has taken another step on its strange journey, as Ubisoft announced today that it's set to launch on Steam later this year.

The Division Resurgence was announced in 2022, with a release target of 2024, but in typical Ubisoft fashion there were delays, and it didn't actually go live until March 2026. Just a month later, with pretty much zero warning, it quietly dropped onto PC as well, in early access, to enable "technical testing ahead of its official launch in August."

It was something of a surprise: As PC Gamer's Shaun Prescott noted at the time, there was no hint that Ubisoft had any plans for it beyond mobile platforms, and had in fact emphasized its mobile-focused nature: "Our objective in bringing the Division universe to mobile, is to enable more people worldwide to enjoy this open world experience whenever and wherever they want. We feel very lucky that the mobile market has evolved to the point where we can develop such an ambitious game."

But just as Blizzard opted to bring Diablo Immortal to PC, Ubisoft decided to broaden The Division Resurgence's base as well. And after a little over a month of being available on Ubisoft's own storefront, it's now up for wishlisting on Steam.

"Over the next few weeks we will be hard at work polishing the last elements of the game for a truly seamless experience, whatever your preferred platform may be," The Division dev team wrote. "The game is fully cross-platform and cross-play, meaning you can continue your journey in The Division at any time."

The announcement doesn't get into why Ubisoft decided to make the move to Steam just a month after dropping it on its own storefront, but we can make a pretty good guess: Despite everyone's best effort, Steam is where it's at. Just like everyone else, Ubisoft came crawlin' back in 2024, and whether it wanted to take one last kick at the flying solo can with Resurgence, or just needed a little more time to get its ducks in order, it's not really surprising that if it wants the game on PC, it wants to do it on Steam.

Rayman Legends, an extremely solid platformer from 2013, is getting a fully-fledged remake with 3D graphics—as announced during tonight's Playstation State of Play—dubbed Rayman Legends Retold. And, more to the point, a whole new soundtrack composed by both Rayman OG Christophe Héral, but also industry veteran Grant Kirkhope.

You might know him from his work on Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64, but he's continued working until the present day on games like A Hat in Time, Yooka-Laylee, and more. I had the pleasure of speaking to production director Alessandro Arndt Mucchi and animation director Marco Renso about the game itself—but also what it was like working with such seasoned talent.

"I think [Kirkhope] is very in line with the humorous tone that we have in Rayman," says Mucchi, "He really gets that. If you look at the past history of his previous compositions and games he worked on, I think he has that feeling.

"He also managed to work very, very well with Christophe Héral, the original composer of the Rayman soundtrack … We have a lot of new compositions, and having these new compositions made by those two super talented musicians, it's brilliant."

Mucchi, who has worked with Kirkhope before on the Rabbids games, seemed glad to have him on board again—but for Renso it's his first time working with the man, and he had some effusive words to say about his quickdraw composition speed:

"Grant is insanely fast as a composer. It's crazy, like just in so little time he comes up with something amazing, it's outstanding honestly, it's very surprising.

"He comes in one day later with something unbelievable, like he's super fast to react, and it's crazy. I mean—I guess it's talent, of course. But I'm constantly amazed by the quality achieved, how fast he can create the music, it's just outstanding."

Rayman Legends, the original 2013 game, is a beloved platformer for a reason—it's very good. We gave it a stonking 90 in our Rayman Legends review, which puts it up there as an all-timer. In fact, it's so good that Ubisoft has decided to remake it in its entirety, swapping out 2D graphics for 3D worlds and throwing on some extra sauce.

I was invited to sit down and play the thing with Ubisoft for a few hours—progressing through several levels—and while I wouldn't say 3D is inherently prettier than 2D on principle (especially with a game that has such a distinct art style as Legends), Retold is still a deeply gorgeous game.

Developed by Ubisoft Milan and Montpellier, the level of work here is more comparable to something like the Spyro remakes from Toys for Bob—we're talking a top-to-bottom recreation.

It almost seems billed as a soft reboot for the franchise writ large. At least that's the impression I get from production director Alessandro Arndt Mucchi, who says "In terms of story and world building, we felt like there was room for tying everything together, because there's a lot in it but it's a bit all over the place—and we wanted to set the starting point for the future of Rayman."

That tying together includes added voice acting, cutscenes, and overworld maps to connect the levels.

"If you remember, in the original Legends, you were jumping into paintings from an art gallery," Mucchi said, "so you didn't have the feeling of being really in the Glade of Dreams, but now the hubs from which you enter into the portals leading you to the levels are set in the actual world of Rayman."

It all certainly seems more cohesive. Even through the slight latency of a remote preview (that is, having the game streamed to me through the Ubisoft client), Rayman Legends Retold feels like it carries the same solid foundation of Rayman Legends without compromising on the platforming.

And the visual upgrade is deeply charming. Retold is a vivid reimagining—not just putting 3D assets over a 2D landscape, but recreating, re-scoring, and tweaking old levels to bring them up to snuff. The game's justifying its existence with a few new features, too.

Retold will have an entirely fresh sixth world dubbed The Land of the Livid Dead with a new platforming power to mess with, as well as rehashed musical levels that, I'm told, will take advantage of the 3D perspective to do some delightful nonsense. There are also dragon riding segments, because why not.

I got to play one of these, and while it was emphasised that they're a huge work in progress, I'm of two minds: They're gorgeously-made and spectacle-filled rail shooter romps where you get to bob and weave a fat little dragon, doubtless a delightful addition if you're looking at the game as a fun little couch co-op time for the family.

Where I felt a little worried was the fact that the health system on these levels are the Teensies themselves—each time you get hit, a Teensie gets flung into the void. Which is all well and good, but it's so easy to get struck by a stray bit of level geometry or bullet that I can imagine completionists are gonna tear their hair out trying to score a no-hit run.

Still, they're a huge work in progress, and there's every chance Ubisoft might make them less obnoxious for 100% gamers before release. Rayman Legends Retold plans to release October 1.

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era's strategy of building on the series' peak—the 1999 classic HoMM 3—has paid off. In a single day it broke even, shifting 250,000 copies. And in less than a month it managed to climb up to 1 million.

That's a heck of an achievement for the new game in a series that largely seemed to have been forgotten by owner Ubisoft—HoMM 5 came out in 2006, and since then it's been left alone. And nobody can tell me otherwise.

It's definitely earned its popularity. As I said in my Olden Era early access impressions, it's not some wild reinvention, it's simply riffing on the best version of HoMM, giving the vets what they've always wanted: a return to the good old days of HoMM 3. But at the same time, this isn't a remaster or remake—there are new ideas here, with big changes introduced to the magic system and the addition of some fancy new modes.

Speaking of new modes, there are more coming. To celebrate the 1 million sales milestone, Unfrozen and publisher Hooded Horse have shown off a roadmap detailing what's to come as the game makes its way through early access.

There's some good stuff coming this year, like teamplay and observer modes, along with replays, class reworks and a hero skill rebalance, but the meaty parts will be coming closer to the end of early access and beyond. That's when we'll get things like a thieves guild, underground terrain and, perhaps not that surprisingly, a roguelike mode.

This new PvE mode is still a bit of a mystery, unfortunately, with Unfrozen promising "more information later". But it's an exciting prospect all the same. The only issue with Olden Era hewing so close to HoMM 3 is that the veterans have done it all before. But the last time we got a good HoMM, roguelikes weren't really a thing (yes I know Rogue came out in 1980).

So I'm genuinely excited to see this very '90s game get a very '26 mode.

The good news is that if you can't wait for it to hit 1.0, the early access version is already brilliant—and pretty full-featured too. The campaign only has a single act at the moment, and higher-tier magic and monsters are yet to come, but none of that has stopped it from feeling like a return to greatness for the series.

I love a good game about skulking through the shadows, but it isn't an activity I get to do much in virtual worlds anymore. Even within the already sparse genre of stealth games, most modern sneak 'em ups are based around lines of sight rather than levels of light.

I always figured this was because such an approach is simpler for players to parse—especially given most games that feature stealth are not exclusively stealth games. But according to Clint Hocking, director of the second-best stealth game ever made—Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory—it might have something to do with the nature of virtual shadows themselves.

Speaking to FRVR, Hocking explained that the shift from baked lighting and dynamic lights with hard edges, to softer shadows and ray-tracing lighting models, may have had an impact on players' ability to assess their own stealthiness.

"I actually think one of the difficulties with modern stealth games is the sophistication in the rendering has made lighting so much more realistic," Hocking told FRVR. While this sophistication results in a more authentic-looking scene, it makes the play space for a stealth game "so much harder to read" than in the days of Chaos Theory and the Thief series.

"When you think about those old school stealth games because of their baked lighting, the lighting is very clean and readable and very understandable for the player," Hocking elaborates. "But once you get into this diffuse and ambient occlusion and all of the stuff that comes with it, it gets very hard to tell what's light, what's shadow, what's dark, what's safe, what's dangerous and all of that stuff."

I can certainly see why this added nuance would make a light-based stealth game more challenging to make. But it's also fair to say that nobody has really tried. As I mentioned, stealth generally forms part of a broader experience rather than the fundamental core of games these days, and those stealth mechanics tend to be very simple so players can shift in and out of stealth easily.

Because of this, Hocking reckons that making a fully-fledged stealth game with modern graphics techniques would involve some challenges. "I think there would be some learning if we wanted to really use these modern lighting techniques to have a really pure stealth experience," he added. "And people who go ahead and make that game, I think, need to do some really deep thinking."

While I'd certainly be interested to see a modern stealth game that went all in on shadow tech (and brought back noisy floors, while we're at it), the smattering of stealth games we've seen recently have been more interested in other forms of experimentation. Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow—the first game in the series in over a decade—sought to bring the venerable larceny simulator into true 3D with fair to middling results. And only this week saw the launch of Thick as Thieves, which has some promise as a cooperative stealth game despite launching in a stripped down package.

Ubisoft has been having a bad time of late. At the beginning of this year, it announced an enormous "restructuring" effort featuring cancellations, layoffs and, yes, generative AI, and all that following some rather dire preceding years. Via "voluntary" reductions and less-voluntary layoffs, Ubisoft has reduced its total number of staff by around 1,200 people over the past year, leaving it with an overall headcount of around 16,600.

Which is, of course, still a lot of people, as noted by Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2 director Daniel Vávra in comments on X. Vávra, who is currently working on a Kingdom Come film and who has been replaced as creative director on Warhorse's upcoming videogame projects by Prokop Jirsa and Viktor Bocan, wrote that "Ubisoft has 16,600 employees after layoffs. Ooops.

"That's about 70 Warhorse-sized studios. That could be 10 KCD2 sized games, each developed for seven years, released every year!" Vávra—who mentioned owning Ubisoft stock in March—jokingly asked readers if he should "buy the current dip?"

Vávra is habitually pugnacious, and I doubt anyone reading this needs reminding of the controversy he courted by aligning himself with the far-right Gamergate movement, nor of the polar-opposite controversy he ignited among his erstwhile allies in that movement by writing a (genuinely excellent) gay relationship and a prominent black Muslim character into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It's not uncommon for him to make fun of studios that seem to be doing worse than Warhorse at producing well-liked videogames despite having greater resources, as when he compared player counts between KCD1 and the then-recent Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

So it's some classic Vávra posting, but it's hard to disagree that Ubisoft has been catastrophically mismanaging its vast resources for a long time now. Is it completely fair to compare Ubi with Warhorse? Not quite. Ubisoft is an enormous, multinational corporation with offices across Europe, North America, and Asia, while Warhorse currently only maintains studios in Czechia.

Indeed, when I spoke to both Warhorse co-founder Martin Klima and Prokop Jirsa, both mentioned that operating in Czechia was far cheaper than working in other parts of the world. It's also, simply, less of a logistical challenge to coordinate work across studios in one country than to coordinate the great shambling behemoth of Ubisoft across continents.

But even with those caveats, Ubisoft has not been run well lately, whether you're talking about its NFT gambit, myriad layoffs, the rolling circus that was the development of Skull & Bones, or whatever the hell is going on with Beyond Good and Evil 2: the company has not seemed like it has any clue as to what it's doing for a while. Vávra's jabs might not be wholly fair but I can't say Ubi's leaders haven't earned them.

On top of a major graphical update, a new sword fighting system, and three new officers to recruit, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is touching up countless little things about the 2013 pirate game. Alas, it's not adding the one thing I really hoped to see more of—the coolest, and to my memory most challenging diversions to be found in the Caribbean. Those cursed legendary ships.

The video above, taken from the original game, shows a player fighting the apex predators of Black Flag. The level 75 vessels are far greater threats than most of the ships you'll fight throughout the campaign. There's El Impoluto, with its ramming attack; La Dama Negra with heavy side armor and dual mortars; the HMS Fearless and the HMS Royal Sovereign, who fought side-by-side; and the HMS Prince, which lurked in a fog so thick sailors took it for a ghost ship.

In later games, Ubisoft built on these legendary duels to spin up more creative, ultimately even mythological boss fights—like Assassin's Creed Valhalla's legendary animals. They're some of the coolest bits of these games anytime they show up. I'd take three more legendary ships to battle over Resynced's three new crew members in a heartbeat—but game director Richard Knight told me that Black Flag's five legendary ships remains a quintet.

"We still have the same originals," Knight said. "There's another really tough ship in the game that I won't mention, but we still have those guys back."

I also asked Knight about the decision for Resynced to skip over Freedom Cry, the acclaimed DLC focused on Kenway's former quartermaster Adéwalé, and the freeing of enslaved Africans. Ubisoft has said it decided to focus purely on Edward's story for Resynced, but could Freedom Cry end up as DLC once again?

"With Assassin's Creed as a whole, it's got all these compelling stories and characters, so I don't think you can ever rule anything out," Knight said. "But we really hope for now we can give you everything you wanted out of Edward's experience, and we'll see what the future holds."

There's no sign of the gleaming Abstergo Industries office that once served as the modern day framing for Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, but playing this game for the first time in 12 years feels a bit like time travel anyway. Before Ubisoft dropped Assassin's Creed's sci-fi conceit, each game was meant to be a strikingly immersive VR recreation of some past place and time, just as your character's ancestor would remember it.

Except, well, this time the ancestor is me circa 2014, and Black Flag Resynced has recreated the best Assassin's Creed just as I remember it.

My memory, it turns out, is about as accurate to the original game as Ezio Auditore da Firenze's battle with the Pope was to real 15th century Italian history. Before I sit down to play Black Flag, Ubisoft highlights everything that it's upgraded. Combat is totally reworked, with much punchier animations and perfect parries and dodges. Loading between cities and the open ocean? Gone now. Weather's dynamic, pirate-turned-assassin Edward Kenway has a crouch button, and you better believe that lighting is ray traced now.

But it still feels intimately familiar as I step aboard the Jackdaw or go parkouring across a lush island, climbing into the crook of a Y-shaped tree. The waves always looked this foamy, right? (They didn't). The sky and sea were always such a welcoming iridescent blue, weren't they? (They weren't). Edward always moved this cleanly from leap to roll to run, didn't he? (Of course not).

This is a textbook remaster: all the ways in which it's better graft cleanly onto the old bones like a top-dollar Hollywood facelift.

Anchors away

For the developers at Ubisoft, making Resynced has been less time travel, more archeology. "I like to say we feel like historians, working on this," says game director Richard Knight. "You dream about a bunch of things when you go through a remake. How do I modernize it, what kind of cool visuals and gameplay changes can I get. But the thing that always sticks with me the most is the quality of life features."

He gives a few examples. As introduced in AC Odyssey, there's now a button on the map screen to fast travel to the Jackdaw, so you don't have to spend 10 minutes swimming back to where you left the ship. There's a shanty player, so you can choose what song to ask the crew to sing. But much of the game remains either unchanged, or changed in ways consistent with the series.

"Sometimes we need to reinvent a system, like ground combat, and look back at the brand and go 'okay, what button was this feature on?' How many games had a blowdart, which one makes the most sense for us? Sometimes there are even animations from past games that we've added to combat for takedowns, where it makes sense. While other things we're like, 'nope, this works exactly as it should, and we should keep it.'"

Black Flag was the last AC I played start to finish, before Ubisoft declared them RPGs and slapped XP and skill trees onto an already stuffed open world frame. The subsequent decade of tinkering (or bloat, if we're being less generous) leaves Resynced strangely both throwback and palate cleanser. Ubisoft has only made it more like its RPG descendents in teensy ways, like an equipment screen with more outfit choices, and a dedicated button for manually raising or lowering the assassin cowl.

"Edward's journey and the gameplay itself is always about rushing forward," says Knight. "He's an action game kind of hero who happens to also be a pirate and an assassin, so it was critical for us to keep that spirit alive and not to change it. I love some of the RPG [Assassin's Creeds] as well, but they go in a different direction, and we want to stay true to Black Flag's direction of always driving forward."

The art of a remaster, in Knight's words, is as much about capturing the emotions of the original game as the facts of it—a perfect analog for tall tales from the Golden Age of Piracy. This one's still waiting to be bettered.

Tom Clancy's The Division, to give it its full name, has a lot more staying power than anyone would have originally credited it with. The gloomy post-apocalyptic shooter spawned a sequel, a mobile spin-off, a third game is still in development, and there's even a movie in the works—though the latter has been in limbo for years.

And now the pandemic-themed live service romp is being adapted for our tables in the form of Tom Clancy's The Division: The Official Tabletop Roleplaying Game.

I found both main entries to be serviceable shooters with a few good ideas slightly elevating them above the deluge of live service games—but they're both a bit forgettable, especially if you're not that enthusiastic about American survivalist porn. Which I'm not.

But there's still a hunger for this kinda thing, apparently. The Division 2 is still hosting new events and cross-promotions with other Ubisoft games (nothing says post-apocalyptic survival like doing some Avatar cosplay), as well as spitting out major updates.

Still! I wouldn't have assumed there'd be much interest in a TTRPG adaptation. The Division's setting is not exactly evocative, and as an RPG it's very by-the-numbers, all the loot and stats and character progression without any meaningful roleplaying systems.

I was wrong, though, because the TTRPG has absolutely demolished its—admittedly humble—pledge target of $58,206/£43,394. With 15 days to go, it's already at $383,572/£285,960. That's from just shy of 1,500 backers. Which, granted, isn't a vast number when you compare it to the most popular tabletop Kickstarters, but combined with the amount pledged this does put it comfortably within the platform's current top 10 for tabletop campaigns.

But having checked out what's on the table, I get it. The TTRPG lets you build agents who get dropped into "hostile territory" for some scraps and misadventures, using skills from the games like automated turrets and experimental technology to achieve their objectives. But more interesting to me are the roleplaying opportunities.

"Beyond the firefights, Agents must navigate fragile communities, deal with desperate survivors, and make hard choices to help rebuild a shattered society," the Kickstarter pitch reads. "This is where the roleplaying experience truly comes to life—every decision matters, not just how you fight, but who you trust, protect, or abandon.

"While the Diplomat excels in forging alliances and defusing tensions, and the Technician helps restore critical infrastructure—from clean water systems to improvised power sources—every Agent can influence the world around them, shaping relationships, securing resources and changing the fate of those they encounter."

Yes to all of this! While The Division's world never felt particularly scintillating, it absolutely still held promise. With the breakdown of society and all the infrastructure that once propped it up, it leaves lots of space for heroics and pragmatic decision making—but the games never seemed interested in delving into that, at least not in a meaningful way that gave players any sense of agency.

So it feels like the TTRPG contains a missing piece, completing the grim fantasy that The Division sets up.

That said, there are already countless post-apocalyptic tabletop settings that do this, so I'm not going to be rushing to grab one based on an Ubisoft game just yet, but I can absolutely see the appeal here.

Tom Clancy's The Division: The Official Tabletop Roleplaying Game is expected to appear in October 2026.

In a not-so-alternate alternate timeline, actor Matt Ryan may well have ended up playing a growling, sweaty pirate on Black Sails, the improbably stellar 2014 TV series prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel Treasure Island. He would've been a good fit for it. But in this reality, he instead ended up playing the lead role of a pirate in 2013's Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, his first and so far only videogame credit.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Ryan said he ended up loving the experience of acting for a game—even though when he auditioned for the role, it was actually masquerading as a show to keep the Assassin's Creed sequel a secret.

"It was pitched to me via my agent as a pirate TV show," he remembered. "Amy Hubbard, a great casting director in the UK, got me into the room, and then they liked me. They asked me for a callback, and then they leveled with me. They were like, listen: this is a videogame. They said it was an Assassin's Creed, and I'd played the first one, so I was like 'great, that's a cool game.' But I didn't think it was mocap—so when it was mocap, I was over the moon. I get to be the character, in the body, you know?"

Ryan saw "all the seasons in Montreal" as he traveled back and forth from the UK and the Ubisoft studio where Black Flag was being developed. A year later he landed the role of John Constantine for a short-lived TV adaptation of the DC Comics series, which he's returned to for a number of animated films.

It was early into his run as Constantine that Ryan discovered how beloved a character Edward Kenway had become.

"I did my first Comic-Con, and that's when people would be coming up dressed as Constantine," he said. "And then there'd be all these Edward Kenways in line. I'd be like, oh, this is great. I knew it was a good game, because I played it, but it was around then that I started getting a sense for the fandom of the character, and seeing the amount of work they put into designing those costumes—some would take a year to build the costume, you know? They'd be coming to me and quoting their favorite lines.

"You know, as an actor, if you do a play, it's one performance it's gone, and there is something kind of wonderful about a performance that's fleeting. And with TV and movies, people watch it once, maybe twice if you're lucky, so they spend a bit of time with you. But with a videogame, they spend a lot of time with you… It's been really, really nice after all these years to be invited back to this role, and to feel that this character is as beloved as it is."

Here we are again with a bucket of new info about a Ubisoft game that wasn't supposed to get out. This time, the leaks are about Assassin's Creed Hexe, an upcoming game in the series that has only been vaguely described as a "darker" installment through official channels.

All of the new details come from a well-known Ubisoft leaker who goes by "Rogue" and has been compiled on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit. According to Rogue, Hexe will primarily focus on Würzburg, Germany at the time of the witch trials in 1625. Surrounding areas will be available to explore too, but it sounds like the bulk of the game will take place in the city.

Hexe's protagonist will be a woman named Anika who is a descendent of Claudia Auditore, who you might remember from Assassin's Creed 2 as main character Ezio's sister. This is important because Ezio will show up in Hexe as a sort of mentor figure for Anika. Dialogue snippets suggest he'll be around long enough to recite The Creed to her and to say, "Come. Leap with me. One last time for an old man."

Whether or not he sticks around for long is unclear, but other bits of dialogue make it seem like Anika will be alone as she runs from people who want to capture her for supposedly practicing witchcraft. Rogue says Hexe will have "lots of forests", as well as mission objectives like, "find the ritual sites" and "recover the stolen relics". And in case there was any doubt that this would be an Assassin's Creed game with climbing and a leveling system, there's apparently a skill that unlocks "tree-to-tree jumping".

The rest of the leak includes some miscellaneous details, like NPCs reporting suspicious activity immediately and voice lines that sound like pursuers trying to trap Anika before she flees. Rogue doesn't say it themselves, but to me, Hexe seems like it'll lean a bit more into stealth as a necessary survival tactic rather than an alternative to fighting out in the open. That feels like it would fit with the horror-ish tone Ubisoft is going for with it.

Nothing in Rogue's leak narrows down a release date for Hexe. Ubisoft announced the game in 2022 and hasn't really said much about it since then. Technically, the title is still a codename, so for all we know it could be given a new name whenever Ubisoft decides to finally talk about it.

Clint Hocking, a Ubisoft veteran who worked on the original Splinter Cell and Watch Dogs: Legion, was Hexe's creative director until he left earlier this year. At the time, a Ubisoft spokesperson told PC Gamer that Jean Guesdon, head of content for the Assassin's Creed brand, would replace him. Last month, Hexe also lost its game director Benoit Richer. IGN caught that Richer updated his LinkedIn with a new job and didn't hear anything from Ubisoft about who would be replacing him.

While Ubisoft is busy pitching everyone on the Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake coming in July, it hasn't said a word about what's going on with Hexe. You'd think that one of the two upcoming games would have more than a logo going for it, but here we are. The other new game, Invictus, also recently had a leak that Ubisoft claimed was "heavily altered (most probably with AI)," from a private test. If the leaks continue at this rate, Ubisoft is going to have to create a hall of fame for all the Assassin's Creed games that qualify as "gaming's worst-kept secret".

Just a few months after his surprise departure from Ubisoft, where he'd been serving as the creative director on the mysterious Assassin's Creed Hexe, veteran developer Clint Hocking has founded a game studio called Build Machine Games.

Hocking's new outfit is "lean and fast," he wrote on LinkedIn, but also "bold and ambitious."

"We aspire to expand the expressive range and power of the medium with emotionally resonant, socially relevant games that challenge players' perspectives, pre-conceptions and empathy as much as their reasoning and reflexes."

There's a similar aspirational-yet-smacking-of-LinkedIn vibe on the Build Machine Games website, where you'll see a list of "values" that includes things like "Lead From the Front," "Always Attack," and "Challenge to Improve." Of course, there's also a mission statement: "Our mission is to make great games that exceed expectations and elevate the form by empowering passionate developers with autonomy and accountability, and supporting them with inspiring vision, agile practices and cutting edge technology."

Okay, look: That's all very fluffy and corporate, and thus easy to poke fun at, but Hocking comes to the table with an impressive CV: He was a level designer and scriptwriter on the original Splinter Cell, after which he served as creative director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Far Cry 2, Crucible (for Amazon), and Watch Dogs: Legion. He also spent some time at Valve, possibly working on the still-waiting-for-it Left 4 Dead 3, and you don't get a gig at Valve unless you're really pretty good at your job.

That's also what makes Hocking's most recent split from Ubisoft seem cloudy. He was serving as creative director on Hexe, the codename for the supernatural-coded Assassin's Creed that was announced in 2022, but left without warning in February. Ubisoft thanked him for his contributions and wished him the best, using language that very much reminded me of the equally surprising departure, just a few months earlier, of Assassin's Creed franchise head Marc-Alexis Côté.

That split turned badly quickly—Côté quickly alleged that he'd been forced out, and sued Ubisoft over it in January—and while there's been no sign of such ugliness related to Hocking's exit, it sure does feel like there was a shakeup at Ubisoft (well, there undeniably was), and he didn't fit into the plan.

All of which is to say that, despite the highly-polished say-nothing of the Build Machine website, Hocking has a very strong background and I'm eager to find out what he's got cooking. No great shock that I've got a long wait for that: The studio is currently hiring for a "small number" of positions to start work on its first prototype. But there's more good news there, too. Hocking's studio is currently only hiring residents of Canada, so whatever's going on, you know it's bound to be cool.

Back in 2010, we gave the WW2 RTS Ruse an enviable 84% review score, applauding developer Eugen Systems for "doing something novel with one of strategy gaming's hoariest themes." Just five years later, it was gone—removed from Steam by publisher Ubisoft due to expiring license rights.

Now, in a surprise twist, it's back: More than 10 years after that takedown, Eugen Systems has relaunched Ruse on Steam with all previously released DLC attached, plus various technical updates and full Steam Deck support.

"While we developed and launched Ruse in 2010, the game didn’t officially belong to us," Eugen wrote in the re-launch announcement. "Sidelined due to distribution constraints, we could do nothing in the subsequent years to help the players who contacted us for assistance or tried to obtain the game. Recently, we received the opportunity to return Ruse to our catalog. This allowed us to re-release this pillar of the RTS genre, with some added extras!"

I don't see any specifics on those promised technical updates, aside from the verified Steam Deck support, and to be clear this isn't a remaster: The re-released Ruse is still a 2010 RTS. But, to repeat what we said earlier (that is, 16 years ago), it's a very good 2010 RTS.

The price—$30/£26.49/€30—has sparked a trickle of complaints from people who don't think a game of that vintage should cost so much, but more importantly, user reviews since the re-release are "overwhelmingly positive": 197 positive, compared to just two negative. It's not a huge number, but you have to like that ratio.

You don't see review charts like this every day:

Also note, speaking of price, that if you own Ruse already, the updates and DLC are yours for free—because again, this isn't a remaster or anything, it's just back on sale. Old saves and replays won't be accessible in the re-released version to prevent crashes, but they're still there too: If you want to use them, use the "Compatibility Branch" available in the Ruse Steam properties.

How this all came about is unclear at this point, although Eugen Systems is now listed as both the developer and publisher, meaning Ubisoft is completely out of the picture: Given Ubi's financial woes and restructuring, it doesn't feel like too much of a leap to assume that Eugen Systems was able to score the rights at a pretty good price. But hey, whatever: The important thing is, Ruse is back on Steam, and that's very cool indeed.

Ubisoft suck at keeping a secret. It's long had a problem with leaks, and the Assassin's Creed series has probably suffered more from that than its other series. Even Ubisoft has joked about Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced being "gaming's worst kept secret" following leak after leak. Much like the Age of Piracy in Black Flag, Ubisoft's age of leaks isn't over either.

Just yesterday, YouTuber xJ0nathan posted on X a supposed screenshot of Assassin's Creed's (codenamed) Invictus, a dedicated multiplayer spinoff. Honestly, there's not even much in the image to go off, just a character holding two weapons in an untextured liminal space. It's kinda exactly what you'd expect from a very, very early look at an Assassin's Creed game.

The official Assassin's Creed Twitter account responded to this leak, saying: "Nice try." While Ubisoft notes that the image "might have started as an image from our private test", it's since been "heavily altered (most probably with AI)."

If you're going to leak, do it well, I guess, as this hasn't got Ubisoft's stamp of approval: "Not great to spread misinformation."

Now, with little actual information on the game to go off, Ubisoft has promised updates on the project in the future, saying that "those genuinely curious" will hear more "when the time is right".

xJ0nathan has since followed up the original leak with a new, similar image that supposedly doesn't have any AI alterations, though there are some inconsistencies between the two images.

Either way, I'm all for a dedicated Assassin's Creed multiplayer game. Ever since its removal after Black Flag (there was co-op multiplayer in Unity, mind), I've missed its unique brand of social-stealth PvP.

Ubisoft has released the first of what it says will be "a series of deep dive articles" into the upcoming Assassin's Creed Black Resynced, serving up a close look at the smooth new moves pirate-assassin Edward Kenway will employ as he murders his way across the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy.

Parkour, stealth, and combat in Black Flag Resynced have all been—you guessed it!—"rebuilt from the ground up" to take advantage of advancements made in the series over the 13 years since the original Black Flag debuted. Creative director Paul Fu said the intent is "to honor the foundations of the original game while enhancing the experience for an action-adventure game."

Much of what's revealed in the showcase is what you'd expect from a remake of a game that's more than a decade old: Fenway's movement will be "snappier and more deliberate," for instance, while the "Observe" feature introduced in Assassin's Creed Shadows will enable him to more easily find clues and objectives, and to tag enemies. Tailing and eavesdropping have been improved so missions won't fail if you lose track of your target,

The update also digs into takedowns, environmental combat, and new "advanced attacks," and warns that "combat in Resynced is more demanding than before," as enemies will adapt to your behaviour, especially if you fall into predictable patterns.

"For example, wait around too much for a parry, and enemies will react by performing Unstoppable Attacks that cannot be parried," Fu said. "Abuse a kick too much, and enemies will quickly dodge them. The trick is to alternate between offense and defense. Varying your combos helps. Rotate between kicks, sweeps, rope darts, pistols and heavy strikes at the end of your attack combos to confuse enemies."

I wouldn't say that charging into a camp in broad daylight and loudly perforating a bunch of guys strikes me as the acme of professional assassination, but dead is dead, I suppose.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resyned comes out on July 9, and is available for pre-purchase now on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Though I have clocked up several dozen hours in Ghost Recon Wildlands, 2017’s open-world military shooter, it’s taken till now to notice that I hadn’t finished its first mission. Instead, I’ve fought the cartel sponging off Bolivia haphazardly, daisy-chaining disconnected missions together with the odd opportunity to kidnap a henchman and raid a hacienda, inviting mishap en route.

Chaos spirals quickly in the Wildlands. I only wanted to commandeer a convoy when my helicopter was shot down. Next, the minibus I hijacked was made undriveable by a road accident. The town I then entered to pump a random guy for secrets became a battleground when he pulled a gun on me, inspiring me to call in rebel reinforcements (and a mortar bombardment, why not?). Our helicopter escape crossed paths with another convoy, whose leader I kidnapped, drove away and interrogated. This unexpectedly fulfilled a task, leading to the location of a commander whose death marked the completion of a main mission I have no memory of ever instigating. A true deniable op.

Wildlands is a sequel in the tactical, squad-based Ghost Recon series which began in 2001. Typically, you issue movement and engagement commands to your team and use fancy gadgets. Wildlands is a bit different. Its creators identified the fun thing about the series—using your wits and gadgetry to navigate a hostile environment, to better attack the enemies therein—and built a sprawling world around it.

Bad company

The first missions Wildlands assigns you, which I originally absent-mindedly walked away from, don’t just offer a taste of the game. They are the game. They have us stealthily approaching targets, rescuing a man, stealing a car, hacking computers and finally bearing down on the local bigwigs at their hunting lodge. You’re equipped with a small armoury, night-vision, a drone and binoculars, and a Sync Shot ability to simultaneously shoot targets with your AI squadmates. In the course of these tasks, you’ll be reconnoitring, quietly dispatching, loudly raiding, and making helicopter getaways. Listen: my patience for wordy tutorials and massive skill trees are stretched thin. What joy, then, when the fruits of a game are offered to you in the first 15 minutes.

What makes Wildlands dazzle in regular diversions can, however, make it tough company over a longer duration. Its missions and targets lack variety. Its stealth is not particularly involved. Wildlands’ novel structure, letting you take on region bosses in the order you see fit, has little bearing on the game’s progression. More fatally, as an inheritor of Far Cry 3’s obsession with clearing outposts and marking enemies, and of Assassin’s Creed’s fondness for surveillance birds and a minimap chockablock with icons, Wildlands’ playbook of tech and tactics quickly slot into familiar routines.

And yet the chimeric Wildlands proves better than the sum of its parts. Having seen its tricks, I haven’t moved on. One idea of Wildland’s worth keeping around is the idea of extracting ‘intel’ from lieutenants. These are miscellaneous NPCs who drive around innocuously until they are T-boned from a mountain hairpin, pulled from the wreckage and interrogated. In gratitude for the adventure, they mark a set of collectibles in the locality on your map.

Going out and acquiring these collectibles—side-missions, weapon cases, or skill points—generally improves your situation in the game, bringing forth new weapons and providing the resources to improve your abilities. Abilities like thermal vision (cool but inessential), enhanced damage to vehicles (handy), and a skill that makes your AI squad-mates less embarrassing (vital). The contents of weapon cases are not disguised on the map, making some (folded buttstocks, anyone?) easy to ignore. This refreshingly diminishes the sense of FOMO that other games intensify. Moreover, you are kitted out, more or less, from the get-go.

Tom Clancy's HAWX

Hard to ignore is the hawkish Tom Clancy-ness of it all. You are Nomad, leader of an American special forces team fighting to effect regime change in a Latin American country. Have you heard this one before? In the helicopter ride in at the game’s outset, CIA spy Karen Bowman sets out the game’s unconvincing revenge arc. The Ghosts are in Bolivia for cartel boss El Sueño, and to help local rebels wedged between his Santa Blanca faction and the corrupt state forces La Unidad. You see, El Sueño killed an undercover American embroiled in foreign affairs, and that’s ruffled our feathers. This isn’t WWIII we’re trying to avert here. It’s a side-plot in the war on drugs.

If this doesn’t push your buttons, they work for your uncomplicated protagonist, whose naff patriotic rejoinders are delivered with bland solemnity. “Sometimes I think about the bad things we do for the good of our country,” Nomad soliloquises, uninvited, at some point. “I’d do it all again. In a heartbeat.” Great! But I do wish you’d stop saying this out of my avatar’s mouth.

Wildlands’ version of Bolivia is a fabulously inviting depiction of a landscape, whose physical environments are enchanting enough to keep you exploring. Atmospheric effects shepherd changes in mood and the chirps of biome-specific creatures help plant your feet in the virtual soil. It is also a bombastic caricature of a country more at home in the Just Cause games, which have the grace to fictionalise their settings.

Ubisoft abstracts real places into games all the time, usually with the tactful application of historical distance. But there’s something odd about how Wildlands thugs outnumber its non-combatants. Where regular people appear, they are quaking or fleeing or otherwise lingering in a town, unbothered by the presence of American soldiers. The decorating of interchangeable settlements with gruesome corpse displays is also worryingly unremarked upon, not least by locals taking the air. Any residual sincerity is undercut by the armed helicopters all over the place, flashing notifications of “UNIDAD PATROL NEARBY” and the suspicion that your explosive conduct must surely be more a hindrance to local people than a help. The game Ubisoft made, between the caricature and the self-serious chauvinism, is confusingly cartoonish.

Mission fail

On a tactical level, there is enough to keep you busy. Just enough thinking around a problem is required to accomplish your goals. Can’t enter a gate? Parachute in. Anti-aircraft nearby? Blow it up first. Compound is alarmed? Shoot its power box. Your surveillance gadgets mean it’s normally easy to evade guards. But they’ll investigate a gunshot, and an alert will ring out on a discovered body. When you’re spotted, it’s time to embrace the mayhem.

When Wildlands forces stealth rules, it’s a mission fail. A mission released as an update links you up with Tom Clancy franchise stablemate Sam Fisher, alias Mr. Splinter Cell. You must rendezvous inside an enemy base between 9pm and 4am, without being spotted or killing anybody.

My first attempt is foiled while trying to crawl under a trailer. On my second attempt I’m casing the joint when my squadmate cries, “We got a man down!” He walked into a speeding train. The third attempt fails because I leave the mission area, which I dispute, and the fourth fails after I’m spotted by a guard before I can grab him. Finally on my fifth attempt I go through a gap in a fence, obviously a prescribed route, and find Sam as he triggers a massive armed response by hacking a laptop. I hold off the attack until an escape is possible through the jungle towards a hijacked car. Devastatingly, I turn to see a helicopter shooting rockets not at me, but at Sam, still plodding through the base to my getaway point.

This is no meticulous espionage simulation. It doesn’t have much resemblance to reality, nor a story worth sticking around for. I’m here for the moment plans slide into chaos, and I know Wildlands has that in abundance.

Earlier this week writer and director Noah Hawley, who's previously been behind the Fargo series as well as Alien: Earth, spoke about his upcoming TV adaptation of Ubisoft's Far Cry. Hawley made some comments that caused a bit of a stir while explaining why he wouldn't be directly adapting any of the existing games.

"I'm not specifically adapting any of the games that they've put out," Hawley told Deadline. "I'm saying much as I did with the Coens or X-Men or Alien, 'Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is.'"

What really put the cat among the pigeons though was Hawley's contention that "games are built in a way that doesn't make for the best drama. When you play a videogame, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cutscenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline. That is death for a show."

The director of Far Cry 4, unsurprisingly, did not agree. "This is kinda pissing me off," Alex Hutchinson wrote on LinkedIn. "And I like Noah Hawley's work."

Hutchinson has now expanded on his thoughts in a new interview with IGN, saying that "gamers just want to feel their loves are respected, not dismissed, as they often were historically," before taking aim specifically at Hawley's claims about cutscenes.

"I think in certain genres a lot of people skip cutscenes," says Hutchinson. "Certainly the player story takes primacy, but story is a complex topic in games. Theme, setting, character are all key to story and are certainly drivers of player engagement so, even if they're skipping some cinematics, they are deeply engaged in narrative as they occupy a role and move through a designed space."

I'm not much of a cutscene-skipper myself (except on repeat playthroughs), and don't understand why you'd play something like Resident Evil Requiem, or indeed a Far Cry game, and skip the narrative context. It's also inarguable that the quality of production and writing across the industry has, generally speaking, improved massively over the last decade or so: I can genuinely call Requiem a well-written game with a straight face, which certainly wouldn't be the case with some of the older Resident Evils.

"The best Far Cry game to me is a fish out of water story," continues Hutchinson. "Dropping the player as a 'normal' person with limited knowledge into an extreme situation with a bunch of toys and challenges. Then the story acts as both asking the player questions and then providing reactions based on the player's input.

"My biggest problem is [Hawley's] dismissal of the game stories as pointless. His position isn't without merit, and his adaptations of Alien and Fargo also basically threw away history. This worked well in Fargo but less well in Alien, which turned into a kind of weird Peter Pan gets a dog story instead of remaining true to the best elements of the brand."

That's a rather brutal drive-by on Alien: Earth, though it's one I agree with: that show started fantastically well, but for me ended up in completely the wrong place. There's lots to enjoy in the first series, and hopefully Hawley can channel the best bits into a great season two, but that show's finale in particular was both absurd and unsatisfying.

But I don't want to come across as being too dismissive of Hawley's remarks (after all, he certainly knows more about making good TV than me). As PCG's Andy Chalk noted, "Far Cry at this point is a formula: A guy, some pals, and a situation that can only be resolved through the persistent application of extreme violence." A little like Bioshock and its lighthouse, you can start from that and tell any number of stories.

There's no further details about what to expect from Hawley's Far Cry series. Though if he does get it wrong, you can bet these comments will come back to haunt him.

1999 was an exceptional year for PC gaming. One of the all-time greatest, really. Age of Empires 2, Alpha Centauri, Freespace 2, Homeworld, System Shock 2, Planescape: Torment, Unreal Tournament, Dungeon Keeper 2, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun—we were eating well.

This was also the year of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which has long been considered the pinnacle of the strategy series—hence the questionable HD remaster in 2015—as well as a genre all-timer. Nearly 30 years later, it's still the gold standard. But Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is coming for it.

New age

Olden Era out in early access today, featuring the first act of the campaign, but plenty more besides, and it feels like it was plucked out of the timestream by a benevolent cosmic deity, giving strategy freaks of a certain vintage everything they could ask for.

This is not a remake—it features new factions amid the familiar ones, a brand-new campaign, systems both updated and completely new, and an art style that serves as a nod to HoMM3 without being beholden to it. This is a new game, but it's undeniably been made for those of us who played and loved HoMM3—as well as those who would have, had they been born.

Playing it over these last few days has been as comfortable as sinking into the sofa with a lovely, cosy blanket draped over me. Comfort and contentment. I might dabble in some Stardew Valley or Pokopia, but this is really my kind of cosy game. Yes, the vibes-based not-quite-genre of cosy gaming usually doesn't include things built on conflict and war, but Olden Era evokes many of the same feelings that cosy games tend to engender in their adherents.

The colourful, inviting maps; the overwhelming sense of nostalgia; the sincerity of the writing and light world building; even the clarity of its structure—they all contribute to this reassuring feeling of cosiness. Even with an apocalyptic threat bearing down on the world, this is whimsical fantasy at its core, but whimsy tempered by clear rules and achievable objectives. You get to experience the joy of knowing what to do every day. The real fantasy.

OK, a quick primer if you skipped the series and never dipped into adjacent games like Age of Wonders and King's Bounty. Olden Era is a turn-based strategy game divided into two phases: exploration and combat. Your hero traipses around a variety of vibrant fantasy realms with their army in tow, grabbing gold and resources, taking over buildings and bumping into foes—both the static kind, usually guarding some kind of treasure or useful building, as well as other roaming heroes.

Brawls take place on a hex grid, letting you command your units when it's their turn, which depends on their initiative and speed characteristics. Fairies, knights, dragons, banshees, horrible little frog-men—all the fantasy stalwarts are here. Your hero doesn't actually fight in the scrum, though, instead hanging back at the edge of the hexy board, where they can occasionally fire off an attack or cast a spell from their burgeoning magical tome.

So you ride around looting and fighting. Simple! But that's always been HoMM's greatest trick: making you think it's straightforward, until you dig a bit deeper, and then realise you're still digging hours later, uncovering all this obsession-forming depth.

The not-entirely-linear campaign is a great place to start as you ease yourself into your new obsession. Olden Era is usually a race, sometimes a marathon, often a sprint, but the game initially makes you the only hero on the map. This allows you to get to grips with things before its more intense, competitive nature is revealed. Eventually you'll be managing multiple heroes, and thus multiple armies, as you try to beat your opponents to unit-spawning buildings and bountiful treasure.

Being early access, though, means there are still wrinkles needing to be ironed out. In one mission, for instance, time simply stopped working.

Each mission is divided into days, weeks and months, you see. Every day lets you travel a specific distance (the number can be increased by skills, spells and shrine buffs), and at the end of the day you'll get gold and resources based on the buildings in your property portfolio. Certain points of interest that give you buffs or rewards will also reset after a week, and you'll be able to revisit recruitment buildings to get new units. So when time breaks, none of this happens. Reloading an autosave fixed this bug for me, so the mission was salvageable.

Mission accomplished

The odd bug or design quirk aside, I'm pleased to report that I encountered few speed bumps in my many races, leaving me free to focus on the important stuff: winning wars. That's easier said than done, though. Even in some of the more forgiving early campaign missions, you can find yourself in a seemingly unwinnable situation if you make a few missteps.

Enemy hero AI is extremely competent, quick and just the right amount of aggressive—it will gleefully give chase to try and murder you, but it can also get distracted by other priorities, giving you a bit of breathing room. It does mean you need to put thought into your plans for each day, though, even when you're not playing against a human opponent.

At first, you'll probably just be rushing towards the fantasy of commanding a big army. And they can get very big. While you're limited to only seven units, how many troops you've got in each stack is up to you. You can also split stacks into multiple units, sacrificing might for battlefield control. But big armies need big economies, and that's what might trip you up.

Don't worry, you don't need to pay for your army's upkeep, but to get the high-tier units, and to reinforce units that have taken a beating, you need plenty of cash. You also need specific resources to construct the buildings that generate them. And eventually you'll want to upgrade these units, which as always requires yet more cash.

See, while you can find buildings on your adventures that generate units for you to purchase every week, to get more control over your roster you'll need to invest in your cities—which are also where you can construct marketplaces, mage guilds, fortifications and economy buildings.

Some financial planning is required, then. Say you want to field some griffins. First of all, you'll need to either be a member of the Temple faction, or in control of one of their cities. Then you'll need to build a rookery, which costs 3,250 gold, five wood and five iron. This will immediately let you recruit a small number of griffins—seven, to be exact—for 1,785 gold.

A week later, you'll be able to recruit another seven griffins. If you want a larger pool to recruit from, you'll need some upgrades. The second fortification building project will bump the number up to 10 a week. To get that, you'll need to spend 2,500 gold and five iron on the first fortification project, and then 2,500 gold and 10 iron on the second.

There are plenty of ways to get passive and active income, but you've also got enemy heroes with all the same demands on their economies, and they'll be eager to take your cities and captured buildings away from you. So you'll need defenses to protect your stuff, and extra heroes so you can quickly reclaim anything that was stolen from you, which will also allow you to more quickly hoover up resources and treasure scattered across the map.

A bad week, heck, even a bad day, can be a real setback, giving your opponent everything they need to put you in the ground for good. But being smart about your priorities and not overextending will help you avoid these gloomy times.

X marks the spot

Olden Era is not a 4X game, technically, but it's pretty close. It's no surprise that Age of Wonders, which was originally inspired by HoMM, proved to be such a comfortable fit for the genre when it fully embraced the 4X pillars in Age of Wonders 3. If you're expecting something similar with Olden Era, though, you might be disappointed. There's no population management, diplomacy is simply a secondary skill that allows you to recruit neutral units, and there are no opportunities to develop a bespoke society.

Despite my love of Age of Wonders 4 in particular, and 4X games more broadly, I'm not missing these features here. Olden Era is a more focused experience, but one secretly hides an abyss where you can lose yourself in the nitty gritty, as you try to turn your realm into the most efficient, warmongering machine possible.

This can be done by fine-tuning your economy, making sensible picks when you level up and equip your hero, figuring out the best unit synergies and getting stuck into the law system. Each faction has two law trees full of boons, split into faction and army buffs. These can reduce recruitment costs, net you regular shipments of resources or increase the strength of specific units. It's through these laws that you can also increase the recruitment pool, so you'll get additional griffins to recruit every week.

There are so many ways to build and develop your armies, heroes and realms, even within the same faction, and while Olden Era rarely tries to limit you, the fact that it's a race encourages you to specialise more, to pick a specific strategy and focus on that. This even goes for your unit roster, as there are morale costs to fielding units from different factions, and high morale means units are more likely to act twice in a turn. But there are strategies that get around this, or negate its impact. You've always got options. This flexibility doesn't mean you should try to do everything; it just means you have the option to pivot when things fall apart.

When it's all laid out, Olden Era could seem daunting to the uninitiated, but the way it encourages this focus, and the way it's broken up into days where you might only be able to do a couple of things, actually makes the difficulty gradient pretty gentle. The magic system, though, could benefit from a bit more clarity.

Olden Era's magic system is great in practical terms, but not especially intuitive, and it works a bit differently from previous games in the series. You can construct mage guilds in your cities, and each unlocks a bunch of random spells—seven for the first tier, with each higher tier of building unlocking fewer but more powerful spells. Heroes then need to visit the city where the guild is located to receive the random spells that specific guild unlocked. Every hero can learn any of the lower tier spells, but they need proficiency in specific magic schools to cast the more powerful ones.

Every spell that's been unlocked, in every city, is collected in the Magic Observatory. Here you can upgrade spells using the resources you've collected, but you can also unlock new spells, as long as you have the appropriate guild constructed, at a limit of one per day.

Then you've got neutral magic, and each neutral spell has to be unlocked manually by spending a special resource, insight, which you can only get by generating enough astrology points, which you'll get from your cities. Even after you've unlocked them, your heroes will need to be at the appropriate level to actually learn them.

You'll have to go through a lot of steps and a lot of menus, then, but it's worth it. Magic in Olden Era is game-changing. At the higher tiers, you'll get access to apocalyptically powerful spells like Armageddon, which has a meagre base attack of 100, but adds 10 times the hero's spell power, and then hits every unit on the battlefield, including your own. Might be best to save that one for when you've got a lot of magic resistance.

Practical magic

Neutral spells aren't as flashy as the stuff you'll cast in combat, but they give you a lot of utility—flight, extra movement points, town portals. They're incredibly powerful, even if you won't be using them in a fight.

Dimension Door, for instance, allows you to teleport your hero to a location within eight squares. It's less powerful and cheesy than it was in previous games, though. In HoMM3 you could teleport to areas you wouldn't normally be able to access quickly because of geographical obstacles or monsters. This is still possible, but with more restrictions, as Olden Era's maps have borders protected by guardians that must be defeated before you can cross over, even if you have mobility spells. I miss the cheese, but I suspect it'll go down well with the PvPers.

Developer Unfrozen clearly knows its audience, because while Olden Era is still in development, it has all the features HoMM veterans could ask for. There are already five game modes, including the campaign, so you can dive right into a classic match, or shake things up with the single hero mode, and if you're more interested in simply trouncing an opponent in a duel, then you can pick the arena mode.

Olden Era utilises proc-gen maps, but lovers of hand-crafted adventures will be well taken care of as well. The campaign maps are hand-made, and once you're done with the first available act, you can dip into scenarios, featuring bespoke stories and objectives in more hand-crafted missions.

Even better, Olden Era has launched with a beefy map editor containing pretty much everything one would need to start tinkering away—despite the caveat from Unfrozen that it's "still in development and will be significantly improved". I've not created anything usable yet, but I am tinkering away on the monstrosity above. It's very on-brand.

When it comes to early access, I often find it hard to recommend anyone shell out for an unfinished game, especially when we have no idea what the future holds. It could get better. But it could get worse. You lose nothing by waiting. This will be true if you wait for Olden Era to hit 1.0. That said, it's already great. It's not a reinvention or a divisive reinterpretation: this is just classic HoMM, a bit modernised, a few tweaks here and there, but otherwise what you'd expect, and more importantly, what you'd actually want.

The Division Resurgence is a free-to-play mobile take on more-ish third-person shooter The Division. Announced in 2022, it finally hit iOS and Android on March 31. Now, with very little fanfare or prior warning, The Division Resurgence has launched for PC.

The quiet release could have something to do with it being in early access: according to Ubisoft the present PC release is "for technical testing ahead of its official launch in August". That's good for people who don't want to play the game on mobile, but it's surprising that the PC release is coming out at all: there's been no hint that it would, prior to its sudden appearance today.

Indeed, Ubisoft writes repeatedly in the game's "manifesto" about its mobile-only nature: "Our objective in bringing the Division universe to mobile, is to enable more people worldwide to enjoy this open world experience whenever and wherever they want," reads part of the spiel.

There's the possibility that Resurgence hasn't attracted enough players on mobile, hence the sudden pivot. Reviews haven't been super positive but nor are they damning: The Sixth Axis admired Resurgence's "well-rounded set of modes" and noted that "the tactical looter shooter grind is still pretty fun", but disliked its menus, "clunky" gamepad controls and bugs.

By dint of it being a mobile port, the recommended PC specs for the Division Resurgence aren't too steep:

At present, The Division Resurgence is only available on Ubisoft Connect.

Noah Hawley, the executive producer of the live action Far Cry series revealed (and then quickly unrevealed, but too late) last year, says he was attracted to the series because it's an "anthology" that tells a different story, with different setting, characters, and motivations, with every new game. And precisely none of those games will be featured in the series, because Hawley has other ideas.

"It was an exciting idea that we could build an anthology game adaptation where each season is a different story about civilized people thrown into situations where they have to become increasingly uncivilized," Hawley told Deadline.

"I’m not specifically adapting any of the games that they’ve put out—I’m saying much as I did with the Coens [Hawley was the chief creator of the Fargo series] or X-Men [he created FX’s Legion] or Alien, ‘Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is'." With last year's Alien: Earth, Hawley more or less ignored the series canon to tell his own story.

Hawley also pointed out the need for "a larger conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of adapting videogames," because of the way they're structurally different from television or films.

"When you play a videogame, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cutscenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline," Hawley said. "That is death for a show."

I don't necessarily agree with that take, and the idea of the Far Cry story being propelled forward by Hurk and me careening through rural Montana in a beat-up hatchback with a rocket launcher hanging out the back window is fun but perhaps doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. On the other hand, I'll be the first to admit that Hawley probably knows more about making a TV show than I do, and as someone who doesn't skip cutscenes—even in a Far Cry game—I might be an outlier here.

Hawley's approach hasn't been universally welcomed: Plenty of folks in the Far Cry subreddit don't care for it, and Far Cry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson seemed to take issue with it as well, saying in response to a post about the report on LinkedIn, "This is kinda pissing me off. And I like Noah Hawley’s work."

Myself, though, I think I see where Hawley is coming from. Far Cry at this point is a formula: A guy, some pals, and a situation that can only be resolved through the persistent application of extreme violence. The details don't really matter, because none of them provide an especially compelling narrative to begin with: Lots of fans cite Vaas from Far Cry 3 as a peak villain, but for my money the batshit ending of Far Cry 5 is the real gold.

The point is that when you view Far Cry that way—that it's a parable about stripping away the veneer of civilization, told over and over again—then you can tell pretty much whatever tale you'd like, and it'll work.

And if that doesn't float your boat, well, there's always Uwe Boll.

As reported by IGN, Assassin's Creed Hexe game director Benoit Richer has left the project. Richer is the second director-level developer to leave the team this year, with creative director Clint Hocking having departed in February.

Richer announced his career move on LinkedIn. According to the website for Servo Games, Richer is a cofounder of the new studio alongside three other former Ubisoft devs: Luc Tremblay, Danny Marcoux, and Alex Droun.

On February 25, we reported on the departure of Hexe's creative director, Clint Hocking, who was immediately replaced with Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag director Jean Guesden. Ubisoft has not yet publicly shared Richer's replacement as game director on Hexe.

Any number of things could be going on behind the scenes of Hexe's development, but back-to-back departures in a team's senior leadership is rarely a sign things are going well. Hexe remains a complete mystery otherwise: It's got distinctly witchy vibes, both with its name, as well as the creepy twig version of the Assassin log featured in its 2022 reveal trailer.

Ubisoft has described it as being a different sort of game from the open world, action-RPG era of Assassin's Creed that began with 2017's Origins, but that could mean any number of things. In the more near future of the series, we finally got to see Black Flag Resynced last week, the worst-kept secret in gaming. The long-rumored Assassin's Creed 4 remake will release on July 9, and it will apparently still have blood, if you were worried.

Assassin's Creed's former overall franchise boss, Marc-Alexis Côté, left the series and Ubisoft last year, and that particular break-up hasn't been pretty: Côté has sued Ubisoft alleging "constructive dismissal" (basically getting pressured into resigning through hostile working conditions). Côté is claiming $1.3 million Canadian in damages.

If you're a vampire, you know the two most beautiful words in the English language: free blood. And if you caught the recent Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced reveal and were left uneasy by the lack of cherry syrup, you'll be extra pleased to know that blood is coming, and it will be free.

Producer at Ubisoft Singapore Justin Ng took to X to get in front of fan concerns that the game's violence had been toned down. In a post Thursday, he said "A few things to quickly address I guess (without getting into trouble hopefully). There WILL be blood in the final game, and it will not be a paid DLC. We hear the feedback on the VFX and audio cues on fights. It's being toned down."

If you're wondering where this is coming from, players have voiced concerns on social media this past week, worrying that the new game's combat might have a squeaky-clean sheen. Reddit user decimus_87 said of the reveal, "I hope they get rid of or at least change the cartoony sparks during fighting." In a reply on the same thread, Minute_Tomorrow_7935 commented "I hope they add blood. Shadows has quite satisfying blood animations so it seems odd if they've fully removed that from this game."

While it's impossible to appraise the full game from some brief footage, it seems natural that people are scrutinizing the fights. An overhaul to combat is one of the remake's big selling points, so without a multiplayer revival to round things out (yes, I'm bitter about it, can't you tell?), it's hard to say how appealing Resynced will be without some top shelf sword-swinging.

Ng assured fans further down in the aforementioned X thread that non-combat systems should feel familiar, too. When asked if social stealth would be back, Ng simply said "It's still there. #Faithful." It should be welcome news to any fans of AC's swashbucklingest entry.

And while it might sound ridiculous to even suggest that blood might come in the form of a paid DLC, there is certainly precedent.

The Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake is just over yon horizon, scheduled to dock this summer, nevermind the leaky hull that Ubisoft always springs when trying to keep a secret. The fourth mainline Assassin's Creed game was an unequivocal pirate game favorite in the years before we had Sea of Thieves. It's still got a place in a lot of hearts thanks to roguish pirate protagonist Edward Kenway and his antics rallying a bunch of pirate legends to a haven in Nassau.

When is the Black Flag Resynced release date?

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced launches on July 9, 2026 on PC (via Steam or Epic), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S for $60 / £50.

What's new in Black Flag Resynced?

Remake or remaster?

Ubisoft says that Black Flag has been "rebuilt from the ground up" in the latest version of its Ubisoft Anvil Engine, the version it used for Mirage and Shadows. So let's call it a remake, then. Ubisoft says that the upgrade is bringing modern tech like ray-traced lighting, water rendering, and weather simulation.

Who's making it?

Ubisoft Singapore is leading development on Resynced. Yup, that's the studio that did Skull and Bones, for better or worse, "with many of the original game’s developers returning to bring the game to the latest generation of hardware," Ubisoft adds.

Combat and stealth got a rework

Ubisoft was big on highlighting the way that combat has been updated: mostly the ability to do parries and takedowns. It's been "rebuilt from the ground up", and that combat in Resynced is more demanding than before as enemies will adapt to your behaviour, especially if you fall into predictable patterns.

On the stealth side, it highlights how Kenway can now freely crouch whenever as a stealth approach. That plays into all those many tailing missions, which it says have been updated so that being spotted doesn't just instantly fail the mission and instead just means you'll transition to head-on combat to resolve the situation. So stealth is encouraged, but perhaps not required.

What else is new?

• New story scenes, including one with Edward's wife Caroline
• 3 new recruitable crew officers (Lucy Baldwin, "The Padre", and Tobias "Deadman" Smith) with their own story questlines
• The modern day segments connecting to the animus feature "new moments that focus on Edward's internal struggles"
• 10 new sea shanties featuring French artist Woodkid
• Six hours of new quests, and "similar activities"
• Kenway’s Fleet mini-game no longer trapped on an app, you can now play it in-game
• New weapon upgrades for your ship
• Ziplines scattered across the cities
• You can manually jump whenever you like
• The Observe feature in AC Shadows has been added to Eagle Vision
• Cat or monkey pet to live on your ship (Jackd—awwwww, right?)

What's staying the same?

What's NOT in Black Flag Resynced?

After a year of leaks and horsing around that Ubisoft probably didn't find nearly as funny as I did, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced was finally given the official curtain-lifting today. The reveal of "gaming's worst-kept secret" was pretty much what we expected—it's a remake of Black Flag—but hidden in Ubisoft's big announcement roundup is a fun little bit of trivia: Development is being led by Ubisoft Singapore.

Ubisoft Singapore is one of the many studios Ubisoft has around the world, but it's notable in this particular context because Singapore is also the developer of Skull and Bones, Ubi's other big pirate fantasy adventure—the game whose well-documented difficulties enabled me to do this:

Skull and Bones was the victim of its own Ubisoft curse, you see. Where Black Flag Resync was destined to leak, Skull and Bones was doomed to delays, at least one of which happened less than two months ahead of its planned release in 2022. That date was itself the result of multiple prior delays: Skull and Bones was announced in 2017 and was originally supposed to be out in the fall of 2018. Missed it by that much.

I'm not suggesting here that Ubisoft is going to mash the brakes on Black Flag Resynced until 2032: As much as I enjoy utterly baseless, wild speculation, I'm pretty confident it will make its July 9 release target.

But recall that work on Skull and Bones began in 2013, right on the heels of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag's release, and it was originally envisioned as a multiplayer expansion for Black Flag. After more than 10 years of tossin' on turbulent seas, Singapore finally shoves Skull and Bones out the door, and what do they get told? Yer doin' Black Flag again!

It's a living, as the saying goes, but holy cow. After 13 solid years of working on Edward Kenway and his various legally distinct spinoff adventures, I would imagine the Singapore squad is really looking forward to turning its attention to something different. Hey, maybe Ubisoft can put 'em to work on Beyond Good and Evil 2. Getting that out the door shouldn't eat up more than, oh, another 17 years.

For the record, Ubisoft Singapore isn't working on Black Flag Resynced alone. They're not included on the announcement page but mashed down in the fine print of the actual press release is a list of co-dev studios, and it's basically like someone put Gary Oldman in charge of production: The full roster includes: Ubisoft Barcelona, Ubisoft Belgrade, Ubisoft Blue Byte, Ubisoft Bordeaux, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Chengdu, Ubisoft Da Nang, Ubisoft India, Ubisoft Kyiv, Ubisoft Montpellier, Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft Philippines, Ubisoft Quebec, Ubisoft Shanghai, and Ubisoft Sofia.

After more than a year of leaks that got so out of hand they forced Ubisoft's legal department to crack a smile, the big moment is finally upon us: Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has been formally, fully, and finally revealed to the world. And it won't be too long before we get to actually play it, as Ubisoft also unveiled the launch date of July 9.

We've also got the Black Flag Resynced PC system requirements:

• Minimum System Requirements For 1920x1080, 30 FPS, Low Preset, Ray Tracing – Standard, Upscaler – Balanced
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K 3.7 GHz, AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (6GB), AMD Radeon RX5500XT (8GB) or Intel ARC A580 (8GB)
  • RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
  • Storage space: 65 GB (SSD required)
  • OS: Windows 11
• Recommended System Requirements For 1920x1080, 60 FPS, Medium Preset, Ray Tracing – Standard, Upscaler – Balanced
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-10600K 4.1 GHz, AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB), AMD Radeon RX6600XT (8GB), or Intel ARC B580 (12GB)
  • RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
  • Storage space: 65 GB (SSD required)
  • OS: Windows 11
• Recommended System Requirements For 2560x1440 (2K), 60 FPS, High Preset, Ray Tracing – Standard, Upscaler – Balanced
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-11600K 3.9 GHz, AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 3.7 GHz
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (10GB) or AMD Radeon RX6800XT (16GB)
  • RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
  • Storage space: 65 GB (SSD required)
  • OS: Windows 11
• Recommended System Requirements For 3840x2160 (4K), 60 FPS, Ultra Preset, Ray Tracing – Extended, Upscaler – Quality
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-12700K 3.6 GHz, AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D 3 GHz
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (24GB) or AMD Radeon RX7900XTX (24GB)
  • RAM: 16GB (Dual-channel setup)
  • Storage space: 65 GB (SSD required)
  • OS: Windows 11

A Core i7-8700K, GTX 1660, and 16GB RAM struck me as a little on the steep side for a minimum spec—although some of that feeling may arise from the fact that Black Flag originally came out in 2013. You shouldn't need that much horsepower to run a 2013 game, right?

It's not really a 2013 game, of course: Black Flag Resynced is "rebuilt from the ground up" in Ubisoft's Anvil engine, and as PC Gamer hardware writer Nick Evanson noted, the Resynced requirements are quite similar to those of Assassin's Creed Shadows, which he said "makes sense, because they're both on Anvil."

Black Flag Resynced promises "updated visuals and enriched gameplay, including parry driven combat, improved stealth and parkour, deeper naval mechanics, and new narrative content." Among that new content is a trio of new officers who can join you on your adventures—Lucy Baldwin, the Padre, and Dead Man Smith—each with their own unique quest that reveals more about their histories. They'll also bring new special abilities to your ship, like double shots from broadside weapons.

"Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced matters deeply to us and to you," game director Richard Knight said during today's showcase. "That's why we took the time to rebuild it with the care it deserves. This remains a solo adventure and character-driven experience. It is not an RPG. The focus stays on how you play and how you explore the world."

That might seem like kind of an odd thing to focus on, but there's a point: Creative director Paul Fu said that because Ubisoft wants Resynced to be a "pure story-driven adventure" that's "fully focused on Edward's adventures," it will not offer the multiplayer elements that were in the original game.

Here's a deeper dive into the updated gameplay:

And some new screens:

It's been quite a ride, with spoilers coming from merch makers, voice actors, age rating boards, and various "anonymous sources," who probably aren't used to having to stand in line when they want to spill some beans.

Ubisoft didn't take that leakiness especially well at first but eventually had a change of heart about the whole thing and decided to embrace the absurdity of it all. Which was understandable, really: Have to laugh to keep yourself from crying, and all that.

The standard edition of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced goes for $60, and is up for pre-purchase now on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Ubisoft Store. Ubisoft also confirmed during today's showcase that the original Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag will remain available for purchase.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced will be out on July 9—I already said that, I know, but a reminder never hurts. In the meantime, why not try our new pirate quiz? I can promise* you that "What's a pirate's favorite letter?" is absolutely not one of the questions.

(*not actually a promise, I have no idea)

Sometimes you just gotta roll with the punches and, credit where it's due, Ubisoft eventually leaned into the fact that its Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake became, in the publisher's own words, "the worst-kept secret in gaming."

The remake's existence was revealed ahead of time by countless leaks: everything from age rating boards to anonymous sources to its own lead actor, Matt Ryan—who then said he wouldn't be saying any more because "the company threatened to sue me." It got leaked by the existence of a statue. Twice.

Finally wiser heads prevailed and Ubisoft began meme-ing about the game, and yesterday officially confirmed that the game will be revealed later this week. But wait! There's still time for the leakiest game ever to offer up one more leak for old times' sake, with a clip from what is presumably the reveal trailer finding its way onto X.

The clip gives our first look at in-game footage, with protagonist Edward Kenway alongside Blackbeard during some naval warfare, with lots of explosions and rousing battle cries. It's only a short snippet but there's time enough to see Kenway wielding cutlasses, Blackbeard jollying around with a telescope, cannons being loaded, and Kenway taking the ship's wheel.

It also features Matt Ryan delivering the line "so let the Black Flag signal nothing but your allegiance to man's natural freedoms", so it's nice to know that Ubisoft definitely did call off the lawyers.

Some fans have already stitched together comparison shots, which show the remake does have much more detailed character models and improved lighting. Though if we're being honest this was always a great-looking game: it's a glow-up, sure, but I don't know how many folks who own the original will be rushing to throw their money at Ubisoft.

The official reveal of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced will be during a showcase on Thursday, April 23 which takes place at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT. Hopefully the hull of Kenway's boat proves less leaky than the project itself.

Publishers don't like leaks. But sometimes things leak so much, so badly, that all they can do is roll with it, and I give full credit to Ubisoft for being good sports about the upcoming Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake, which the publisher said today will be properly revealed to the world on April 23—along with an admission that it is indeed "gaming's worst-kept secret."

"We know you know, but how about we tell you some more now?" Ubisoft wrote in a Bluesky announcement of the upcoming "Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced's worldwide reveal showcase," set for 9 am PT/12 PM ET/5 pm UK on April 23. And in case that's too subtle, the little video clip attached to the announcement puts it in simple words:

We know you know, but how about we tell you some more now? Tune in for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced's Worldwide Reveal Showcase on April 23rd at 4PM UTC - 6PM CEST - 9AM PDT. youtu.be/7hkFaTypP1Q

— @ubisoft.com (@ubisoft.com.bsky.social) 2026-04-20T19:32:17.577Z

It's quite a turnabout for Ubisoft, which in August 2025 threatened to sue voice actor Matt Ryan for blabbing—because yeah, Ubisoft wasn't always quite so cool about the whole thing. It may have been prompted to fly the white flag over Black Flag by the persistence of subsequent leaks, which left the whole thing looking like HMS Surprise after its first encounter with the Acheron.

Whatever the reason, by January of this year Ubisoft was posting memes in reaction to new leaks, even though it didn't officially confirm that Black Flag was real until March, when it dropped the "4" and added "Resynced."

It's kind of too bad that those good times are over, but I'm sure Ubisoft will be glad to finally have this thing out in the open. The Assassin's Creed Black Flag reveal showcase will be streamed on YouTube and Twitch.

Morbid Metal released into early access last week, and I finally got the chance to sit down and play it—and while developer Screen Juice's new roguelike needs some proper work on its secondary elements, the good news is that the bones are good. Really good, in fact.

Given their repetitive nature, the most important thing about a roguelike is how it feels to play. No-one's gonna try and achieve mastery when basic combat feels like pulling teeth: Luckily, Morbid Metal's already slick as oil, and I'm certainly not surprised it hooked fellow PCG writer Elie Gould when they played it at Gamescom last year.

Its potent character action fundamentals are underpinned by its "shapeshift" system. Basically, you've got three characters that you can shapeshift between at the press of a button—and given each character has two abilities (and an ultimate) which have their own respective cooldowns, you'll be hotswapping a lot just to make use of your attacks.

In terms of your defensive options, you can dodge, and that's about it—but a perfect dodge nets you a sick as hell counter, one that's distinct between characters. For example, heavy-hitter Ekku's dodge counter tosses enemies up into the air, letting you flow into a juggle.

Morbid Metal already feels very, very good. Chaining together your skills, shapeshifting between the trio of characters, and obliterating your enemies with ultimates all feels great and responsive. And while the shapeshifting itself is a mindbender to get around, it's an appealing skill ceiling. Ain't nothing wrong with a complex system that encourages mastery, especially in a genre built on repetition.

The runs themselves see you dashing in a distinctly Warframe-esque fashion through floating islands rife with technological overgrowth. If you've played a roguelike, you know what's in store here—you enter a room. There are enemies there. You get an upgrade, you rinse and repeat.

And this is the only glitch in Morbid Metal's present program—as far as this central loop goes, it's a little dry. Routines, which are the major modifiers to your abilities, just aren't all that game-changing in practice because they lack the variety to back each other up with the kind of synergies that make a game like Hades pop.

Other layers to this system don't help in their relative milquetoastness—Corporas mostly just apply flat stat boosts, for instance. Devil's Bargains seem slightly more interesting, insofar as they ask you to make a trade-off (as the name suggests), but they take a while to unlock.

There's also a bit of friction between the skills, too, which you can find upgraded versions of. Basically, if you've got a bunch of Routines that work off a specific skill, you can often find yourself in a situation where you've run into a powerful skill that you don't take because, well, it doesn't gel with your Routines.

Which is a problem, because even in roguelikes where you miss an opportunity for a synergy, you're usually given a lesser upgrade to be getting on with. It doesn't feel great to leave what's meant to be a reward on the ground entirely because it doesn't mesh with the choices I nabbed in previous rooms.

The good news is that this is all stuff that can be worked on—Morbid Metal is, after all, in early access, and it's entirely within the developer's power to add more impactful and wider-reaching abilities as the patches proceed apace. It's harder for a studio to make sure that the moment-to-moment feels good if it launches all janky, and fortunately, Morbid Metal is already there.

Helping my opinion is the price—Morbid Metal's very humbly costed at the moment, at £18/£16 on Steam (not including the current 25% discount, which'll be available until April 21). That's pretty reasonable for a game with bones this sturdy, and if Screen Juice is given the time it needs to expand on what's already there, I can see this game making its way comfortably into my roguelike rotation.

Ubisoft has revealed that city-building sequel Anno 117: Pax Romana will get its first DLC later this month. Prophecies of Ash will add the largest island featured in the series yet, one that happens to be loomed over by a massive volcano. Because why bother building a Roman city without the risk of a natural disaster that will echo across millennia?

Cinis is the name of the volcanic island, acting as an expansion to the Latium province rather than a whole new map. The trailer for the Prophecies of Ash suggests that Cinis will be a bountiful place to build, with plentiful river slots and mining nodes for your citizens to exploit. The DLC also introduces a new resource to the game—Obsidian—which brings new items to fashion like carved idols and boardgames, alongside the production chains required to make them.

Naturally, building a city in the shadow of a volcano comes with its own hazards. The trailer doesn't explain exactly what these will be, though it shows footage of giant rocks blasting out from the volcano and landing on buildings in the city. A press release from Ubisoft mentions that volcano-based mechanics will include eruptions, volcanic winters and a "bloom phase". I'm guessing the latter two affect the productivity of your agricultural buildings, with the former hindering food production while the latter sends it into overdrive.

Finally, Prophecies of Ash lets players construct a temple to Vulcan. This boosts mine productivity and your city's fire safety, which seems like it's going to be particularly important given the environment in which you're building.

Prophecies of Ash launches on April 23. It'll be interesting to see how it affects Anno 117's somewhat muddled reputation. The game has a 'Mixed' rating on Steam, partly due to Ubisoft Mainz' controversial inclusion of AI art in the game (which has since been removed), but also because there's a sense the game was released in an incomplete state, with the third act of the campaign's story having been cut.

None of this stopped Anno 117 having the most successful launch for the series ever. We liked it well enough too, with Phil Iwaniuk awarding it a score of 80 in our Anno 117: Pax Romana Review: "Anno 117 finds a reason for being with its setting and characterisation, giving you new resources and supply chains using a ready-made and polished interface," he wrote back in November. "I’ve been surprised to find that’s exactly the pace to keep me compelled towards this chocolate-box depiction of Rome."

As part of its 14,000 layoffs in October 2025, Amazon made major cuts to its gaming division, claiming that it was shifting its strategy away from ill-advised attempts at competing with Steam through mismanaged AAA projects and focusing instead on its Luna cloud gaming service.

Despite that supposed refocusing, Luna just got smaller. As of today, Luna will no longer allow users to purchase games from third-party game stores like EA, Ubisoft, and GOG. The service is also discontinuing its sale of Ubisoft+ and Jackbox Games subscriptions. Previously purchased third-party games will be streamable for Luna users until June 10, 2026, at which point they will be removed from the service.

In its customer service page explaining the changes, Amazon said the removal of third-party games from Luna was informed by "clear" feedback from players who "want easy access to great games, more social experiences, and a steady flow of new content from developers you know and love." So it's cutting streaming access for users who've already purchased those developers' games. Makes sense!

Users who've previously purchased games from third-party stores through Luna will still be able to access those games on their respective stores. But the Bring Your Own Library feature, which lets Luna users stream their existing EA, GOG, and Ubisoft store games, is ending on June 3, 2026.

Luna users will be able to download their save data for affected titles for 90 days after they're removed from the service on June 10, but Amazon says it "cannot guarantee that save data downloaded from Luna will work on other gaming services."

While those third-party games will no longer be available for direct purchase, they aren't disappearing from the platform entirely. Many will instead be available to stream for subscribers of Luna Premium, which offers users access to a library of streamable third-party titles like EA FC 26, Madden, Fallout, Death Stranding, and more for an additional monthly fee.

As previously demonstrated by the ever-shifting pricing tiers of Xbox Game Pass, it's apparently impossible to design a game library subscription service that doesn't feel like being hit in the head with a brick when you try and parse what it does and doesn't include.

This feels like a less-than-subtle attempt at squeezing players who've already made a habit of Luna streaming—presumably those players exist—into signing up for Luna Premium's additional monthly fee. But hey, maybe those users will be content with the games included in Luna standard. They might be losing streaming access to whatever EA and Ubisoft favorites they've paid for, but they'll still have AI-generated courtroom Snoop Dogg.

Larry Kuperman made his mark on the industry as part of the team at Nightdive, the games preservation and remaster specialists, but before that, he was on the front line of the digital distribution wars from the early 2000s to 2013. He helped build up the online storefront, Impulse, which was later acquired (and ultimately shuttered) by GameStop.

Valve's unlikely victory against titans like EA and Microsoft has always fascinated me, and I asked Kuperman for his take on Steam's ultimate victory when we spoke at this year's Game Developers Conference.

"The idea was coming up to all of us," said Kuperman. "Let's also remember that Steam really began as a visual way of finding your Counter-Strike server." Steam had a number of early rivals in digital distribution⁠—Kuperman shouted out Paradox's GamersGate (don't say it)—but he thinks Steam was quicker on the draw to sell other companies' games on its own platform.

"The idea of selling games, and then selling third party games, didn't seem intuitive at the time," Kuperman said. "You're a game company, why are you selling other people's games? That was a hard thing to understand. But Gabe really had a great vision, coming out of Microsoft."

Another advantage, according to Kuperman, was Steam's "stickiness" and embrace of social elements. He noted that Steam and Impulse both let you redownload your games without restrictions, something that wasn't always guranteed⁠—I still have a GamesPlanet receipt from 2008 that would only let me redownload Fallout 1 and 2 through the service six times a piece.

But Steam also had friends lists, messaging, playtime stats, and those little popup notifications about what your buddies were playing. "What Steam did better than anybody else was to create a community," Kuperman argued. "They established a stickiness to it, that people came back because it was Steam."

There's one more decision by Valve that Kuperman cited as key to Steam's victory: Its relatively low barrier to entry. There were so many great games in the 2000s, it's easy to forget all the small to mid-sized studios that shuttered during that era, particularly PC specialists who couldn't make the jump to consoles. Shareware is dead, digital distribution is yet to be born, now is the time of monsters.

"If you did not get a retail buyer to pick up your game," recalled Kuperman, "If your game wasn't at Walmart, GameStop, three or four retailers⁠, you were done. You didn't make a game. Games that were kind of unusual and quirky, that broke them.

"Steam's philosophy of, anybody can put their game on it—for a price, but it's not a significant price—that really changed the gaming world. … I think that probably the biggest thing that you can say about Steam is that, for a number of indies, it kept their company alive when they would have otherwise gone under."

But Kuperman attributes the survival of his own indie studio to a different storefront that emerged in the same ferment. "If it wasn't for GOG, there would have been no Nightdive," said Kuperman. "GOG was the one that put System Shock 2 up and really started our company, and that goes to our friend Oleg [Klapovskiy].

"These are relationships that we've had for years, but I don't think people realize just how important they were. I think Good Old Games is something that when you look at the history of games during this time, that they deserve their moment in the sun and the spotlight on them."

French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir, with support from the Stop Killing Games initiative, has filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft over the 2024 shutdown of the racing game The Crew. An announcement on the UFC-Que Choisir (Google translated) says Ubisoft's decision to close the game and revoke licenses "violated fundamental consumer rights," and that "players were never fairly informed about the potentially temporary nature of access to the game they were buying."

The Crew launched in 2014, but became unplayable in April 2024 after Ubisoft closed the servers it depended upon; adding insult to injury, it began stripping people's licenses to the game a few weeks later, presumably to prevent them from playing it on then-hypothetical fan servers. It proved to be a PR botch of truly epic proportions, to the point that Ubisoft promised to never, ever do it again—even as it doggedly defended the initial decision by reminding gamers that they don't actually own their games.

The Stop Killing Games initiative, launched by YouTuber Ross Scott, is maybe the biggest thing to come out of the whole mess. What initially looked to me like a long-shot campaign to squeeze some promissory pleasantries out of game publishers has exploded into something much larger: An EU Citizens Initiative started by STG drew 1.3 million verified signatures and is due to be debated by EU politicians in April, and in February the group announced that it's launching NGOs in Europe and the US.

The UFC-Que Choisir lawsuit is also meaningful. Founded in 1951, the group describes itself as "France's leading consumer association," providing everything from product comparison tools and buying guides to investigative reports, legal advice, lobbying, and direct legal action like this.

The goal of the lawsuit isn't to force Ubisoft to bring back The Crew, but rather to keep this sort of thing from happening again "by obtaining a pioneering decision essential to clarifying the obligations incumbent upon videogame publishers." UFC-Que Choisir said in the lawsuit announcement that it is seeking an end to "harmful practices," a removal of clauses in terms of service agreements that enable publishers to shut down games without warning or recourse, and an acknowledgement of the harm done by these practices.

In the meantime, if you just really wanna play The Crew, you can: Modders brought it back to life in 2025. Just think of all the hassles that could've been avoided if Ubisoft had done that itself in the first place.

It's been nearly thirteen years since we last saw a Splinter Cell game, and there's little chance of another one appearing any time soon. A remake of the original Splinter Cell is supposedly in the works, but it's been in development long enough for its original director to leave the project, spend three years doing something else, and then come back.

But as ever, indie gaming aims to deliver where the mainstream fails to provide. Such is the case with Lizard State, a newly announced sneak 'em up that could only be more Splinter Cell if the protagonist had three glowing lights on his head.

Created by solo developer Benjamin Rose, Lizard State sees you playing as a Sam Fisher archetype on a mission to rescue a hostage from an island. The story apparently takes place over a single night, in a "short and focused campaign that focuses on deep gameplay systems".

Lizard State wears its influences on its sleeve, from the visuals inspired by "classic PS2-era games" featuring angular characters and moody stencil shadows, to its distinctive style of stealth where you can shoot out lightbulbs, choke guards into unconsciousness, or take them out from a distance with your pistol or assault rifle.

Yet within this familiar framework are a couple of more novel ideas. One of these is what Rose refers to as "mimic cameras", which resemble regular surveillance cameras until you disable them by shooting them off their mounts, at which point they sprout metal spider legs and scuttle around trying to spot you. There's also a second spiderlike gadget shown in the reveal trailer that can be controlled by the player, which disables guards with a blast of electricity.

I always enjoy seeing indie devs working on stealth and immersive sim projects, but they are also the most difficult style of game for smaller studios to get right, especially when it comes to imbuing the experience with some fundamental tactility. I had some initial reservations about this aspect of Lizard State while watching the trailer. Then, right at the end, your spy blasts a canister on the wall to engulf a guard with smoke, charges forward, and performs a sick-as-hell combined judo throw/rifle execution.

Given all the footage of Lizard State is from an early alpha build, this gives me hope that it will feel sufficiently satisfying under the fingers while dishing out its stealth conundrums. There's no word on when Lizard State will release, but you can request access to an (as-yet-unspecified) playtest over on its Steam page.

Ubisoft has ended game development at the famed Red Storm studio as part of its global cost-cutting efforts, a move that will see 105 employees put out of work. Red Storm itself will remain open: A VGC report says it will operate going forward as an IT and Snowdrop engine support studio.

Red Storm was founded in 1996 by Tom Clancy (yes, that Tom Clancy), Doug Littlejohns, and software company Virtus Corporation, following the release of the sub sim Tom Clancy's SSN in 1996. The studio stuck with the Tom Clancy angle through most of its history, creating the Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon franchises and developing a number of lesser-known (but thematically similar) titles.

Recent years have been less kind to the studio, however. Red Storm's last Tom Clancy game was the solid-but-unremarkable Future Soldier in 2012; it followed that up with Werewolves Within, Star Trek: Bridge Crew, and Assassin's Creed Nexus, all VR games and none of which added up to much. A Splinter Cell VR game in development at Red Storm was cancelled in 2022, while The Division: Heartland, a free-to-play multiplayer shooter, met a similar fate in 2024.

Red Storm itself is presumably a victim of Ubisoft's bigger problems, though. The publisher has struggled badly in recent years, and in January announced a major internal restructuring that included multiple game cancellations, along with layoffs and studio closures. That new structure will see Ubisoft divide its properties between five "creative houses," with Tom Clancy games divvied up between them: Rainbow Six, along with Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, going to Vantage Studios, while Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, and The Division are now under the control of the as-yet-unamed Creative House 2.

Ubisoft was pretty brutal with its treatment of previous Assassin's Creed leadership in this restructuring, despite the success of Shadows, so I can't say I'm too surprised that it's now showing any deep sentiment for a 30-year-old Tom Clancy studio here, either. Despite the effective end of Red Storm, a source within Ubisoft said the company remains committed to the Tom Clancy games, including The Division, Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and Splinter Cell.

Among the many debates surrounding Nvidia's DLSS 5 announcement is one about artist autonomy and creative freedom. Effectively, the question is 'do these tools hinder or contribute to artistic direction?', and developers are pretty mixed on that one, to put it lightly. Where the likes of Bethesda boss Todd Howard and Capcom executive Jun Takeuchi seem to be in support of it, many developers are anxious, disgusted, or even blindsided by it.

According to Insider Gaming, a Ubisoft developer said, “We found out at the same time as the public”.

It's not clear who this developer is, which department they work in, or how widespread that secrecy is at Ubisoft, but Assassin's Creed Shadows was one of the games used to showcase DLSS 5 during its reveal earlier this week.

As well as Ubisoft, developers at Capcom reportedly told Insider Gaming they were shocked by the announcement, as Capcom had historically been "anti-AI". Resident Evil Requiem's shot of Grace Ashcroft is among the most highly criticised from the DLSS 5 reveal, with our own Tyler Wilde arguing it 'clearly overwrites game characters with AI beauty standards.'

Jensen Huang has said devs have 'artistic control' and Bethesda argued the same, though with mega corporations getting access to these tools, it begs the question 'who really gets to decide if developers use DLSS 5?'

A company as large as Ubisoft couldn't possibly tell all its artists, designers, and producers of the DLSS 5 announcement without a lot of paperwork and likely NDAs to go with it. So, would it check whether individual developers are comfortable with generative AI tools like DLSS 5 before implementation for the public?

Still, it's worth noting that DLSS 5 won't launch until later this year, and the demo shown this week likely won't be the final product. DLSS 5 seems to offer the ability to toggle and customise the strength of its AI generation to some degree, and that's before noting that generative AI imagery has vastly improved over the last few years in terms of technical quality.

Generative AI has been criticised not only for its quality but for its ethics, and that's a debate sitting near the core of this announcement. There are concerns about both the work models used to train and how their output is used. If executives believe there's more money to be made in generative AI assets than handmade ones, what's to stop them from employing fewer real artists?

DLSS 5 is not intended to add new textures, but the underlying philosophy of making existing textures more photorealistic is a concern for many developers. At the very least, the devs might have taken the news better if they knew ahead of time.

Six years prior to releasing Dishonored, Arkane studio made a game about booting orcs from cliffs. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic had other things going for it, obviously, but it was mainly about the booting. What originally started as an effort by modder Dave Wiltos and a team of others to add co-op to the game eventually resulted in a "blank check" in terms of permission from Ubisoft to develop an SDK. "To quote Ubisoft, they 'don't want to impose any sort of restrictions so that the community can really appreciate the full value of the work that's being put in here,'" wrote Wiltos on ModDB in 2023 (via RPS). Since then, they've been working on projects to add RTX and a dungeon generator, alongside co-op.

Now, Wiltos and the team have announced that, following a trip to Ubisoft Montreal in which he got "[console port] Dark Messiah Elements to work on PC", they're working on a Community Edition of Dark Messiah "with approval from Ubisoft and support from Valve" (via RPS). Elements, released on the Xbox 360, expanded and tweaked features from the original PC release, including a new prologue.

"We're not really remaking the game, just porting it over thanks to our deep knowledge from the Advanced SDK and Ubisoft's dev trip, but that's still a job in and of itself," says Wiltos. "Over the next few months I'll be contacting mod makers and players alike so that we can integrate works and desires." Wiltos also says he can't share all the features and directions "just yet", but "we'll have a lot more stability on this new SDK and most importantly direct code access for expanding and fixing issues.

"Best of all it's in the hands of the community, meaning we'll all be working together on making this amazing game even greater," he continues.

The post goes on to detail the team's progress on the co-op, RTX, and dungeon generation mods, plus a project to port Elements' maps over multiplayer. It also introduces a new system they're working on named 'runes', which takes the relics from Elements that gave players extra skill points and repurposes it to offer "mutators that can make your game more challenging, wacky, or easier".

It's always heartening to see this much passion for both a game and series that's lain dormant since 2016's DLC for Might & Magic Heroes VII. That's set to change this year (following a couple of delays) with the release of Olden Era, a demo of which is still available on Steam.

The long-rumored, many times-leaked Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag remake is official. Ubisoft dropped the confirmation in an email to press laying out the future of the Assassin's Creed series, sandwiched between sparse details about a future co-op AC game and the upcoming Netflix show.

"Speculation around Assassin’s Creed is not new, but it’s worth repeating: 'Nothing is true. Everything is permitted,'" the announcement reads. "Well, except in this case, some whispers have a little more wind in their sails. Keep your spyglass on the horizon."

Attached is a piece of art from the remake, officially dubbed Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced (a triple name-er), of pirate assassin Edward Kenway standing on the mast of his Jackdaw.

Sure man, let's do it. It's still a little funny that the first Assassin's Creed game getting the remake treatment is the sixth one in the series, but if you're throwing your weight behind a full-fledged do-over, you might as well start with everyone's favorite.

Black Flag was a triumphant little comeback for AC after two disappointing years in a row—Revelations in 2011 and AC3 in 2012—that layered unexpectedly fantastic open-world sailing on top of the best version of its sneaky-stabbing at the time. I never loved how it traded signature urban jungles for smaller settlements and actual jungles, but sailing the high seas with my mates while making swiss cheese of the British armada was so fun that I didn't really mind.

Ubi also just clearly has a soft spot for its pirate game—it's no coincidence that the director of the original Black Flag, Jean Guesden, was recently tapped to replace Clint Hocking as director of the next mainline AC on the books, Project Hexe.

Also, is it worth talking about how Ubisoft has erased the "4" from Black Flag's title? That's kinda weird. Do we think that's just some marketing-fu to avoid naming confusion, or is Ubi setting the stage for Black Flag to become a sub-series that gets its own sequels, a-la Modern Warfare?

Ahead of a stream on March 20, Ubisoft has confirmed Assassin's Creed Shadows is moving "into its final phase of support". The publisher's focus will move to three previously announced Assassin's Creed projects, including the "darker, narrative driven" Codename Hexe.

"We’re winding things down with smaller, less frequent updates… but still a few surprises!" Ubisoft confirmed today in an update. That surprise—or those surprises—will be shown during the March 20 stream commemorating Shadows' 2025 launch date.

The series update is otherwise just a re-iteration of what we already know: the PvP multiplayer take on Assassin's Creed, Codename Invictus, is still in development. Rumors that it's a chaotic online party game in the style of Fall Guys, which didn't seem very substantial to begin with, have been quietly shut down: "It’s a new approach to multiplayer in the franchise, but it isn't quite what the rumors have suggested," is the official line. The multiplayer project is progressing on a "test and learn" basis.

The most substantial part of the update is on co-op. "We’re also looking into bringing coop back to Assassin’s Creed—a detail we know didn’t go unnoticed," the publisher said. "And while we recently chose to pivot away from an early project, the lessons from that work are already helping shape our approach going forward."

An aborted co-op feature in Shadows is what's being alluded to here. AC League was reportedly in development at Ubisoft Annecy, initially as a substantial expansion to Shadows, but then possibly as a more ambitious standalone title. AC League was then outright cancelled following Ubisoft's January round of layoffs. French outlet Origami reports that some Annecy devs have been tasked with working towards multiplayer tech that can be easily adapted for future Assassin's Creed games.

Codename Hexe, which remains the most enticing Assassin's Creed project in development, lost veteran director Clint Hocking last week. Black Flag director Jean Guesden now leads the project.

If you've been thinking, like I have, that we're still some way off seeing AI being used in games for more than just upscaling or frame generation, then it's time to think again. That's because it turns out that Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage is one of only a tiny number of games to use neural texture compression.

As someone who is very much a hobbyist in the world of 3D graphics, spending my spare time messing around in Unreal Engine and ShaderToy, I like to think that I have my ear to the ground about what games are using the very latest rendering technologies. So when I read a blog by Ubisoft (via Access The Animus on X), describing the implementation of neural texture compression in AC Mirage, I was genuinely caught out.

Up to now, I wasn't aware of any game using it, and I'm a bit puzzled as to why Ubisoft has only now decided to talk about this. The company has done so in the past, at the 2024 GDC, but that was just about the tech in general and used Mirage as a demo for it. The presentation even has "Internal Tech Demo | Not Shipped | Not Future Update" plastered all over it. Yes, I am a bit slow to catch on.

Anyway, so what's all this about? In short, it's about replacing the use of multiple, high-resolution textures with a single, lower-resolution map and a small neural network. The replacement map looks a little bit like the original(s) but when it comes to using it, the engine runs the neural network to reconstruct material properties, such as how well it reflects, how rough the surface is, and so on.

The smaller map and the network take up far less VRAM and storage space than the original big 'uns, and in the case of AC Mirage, where Ubisoft chose to apply it, the memory savings were as high as 30%.

You don't get something for nothing in the world of graphics, though, and when it comes to neural texture compression, all that fancy AI stuff requires a fair bit of compute. So much so that Ubisoft only "applied [it] selectively to a subset of assets, focusing on objects with high instance counts and significant memory pressure."

Although the blog doesn't explicitly mention them, the images suggest that Ubisoft is talking about objects such as trees, furniture, and buildings. The game will have relatively few variations of them, but a typical scene will still apply lots of them around (which is what 'instances' refers to here). They'll all be using pretty much the same textures, so there will be a constant VRAM usage just for these objects.

Enter stage left, neural texture compression to cut down on that memory demand. Given the state of the DRAM and SSD market right now, you can bet your last dollar that a whole heap of game developers will be looking closely at what Ubisoft has done to see if it can help out in their games, too.

The leadership overhaul at Ubisoft appears to have claimed another Assassin's Creed stalwart, as Ubisoft has confirmed a VGC report that longtime veteran Clint Hocking, who was heading up the Assassin's Creed Hexe project, has left the company.

"Clint Hocking, creative director on Assassin’s Creed Codename Hexe, will be departing Ubisoft," a spokesperson said in a statement provided to PC Gamer. "We sincerely thank him for his vision, creative contributions, and dedication over the years, and we wish him the very best in his next chapter.

"Development on Assassin’s Creed Codename Hexe continues with a seasoned team. The game will deliver something distinctive within the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Jean Guesdon, head of content for the Assassin's Creed brand, is now acting as the creative director on the project."

Hocking's career began at Ubisoft on the original Splinter Cell, after which he served as creative director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and the celebrated Far Cry 2. He left Ubisoft in 2010, bouncing between LucasArts, Valve, and Amazon, before returning to Ubisoft in 2015. He was the creative director on Watch Dogs: Legion, and prior to his departure was working in the same role on Assassin's Creed Hexe.

Little is known about Hexe at this point: It will reportedly be a more supernatural-focused game than other entries in the series, and in 2024 Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said it "is going to be a very different game from Assassin's Creed Shadows," which was still in development at that point. "We're going to surprise people, I think."

But Ubisoft's restructuring has had a deep impact at the top of the Assassin's Creed food chain. The Assassin's Creed franchise is now being handled by Ubisoft's Vantage Studios division, headed up by Ubisoft veteran Christophe Derennes and Yves Guillemot offspring Charlie. In October 2025, former Assassin's Creed boss Marc-Alexis Côté left Ubisoft under a cloud, which a few months later resulted in a lawsuit against his former employers. Earlier this week, Ubisoft announced a trio of new Assassin's Creed bosses at Vantage, including Guesden, who it said will "steer the brand's ambitious new chapter."

It's been a rough few years for Ubisoft. Skull and Bones became a $200 million folly, one of several failed attempts to capitalise on live-service popularity; staff are revolting due to layoffs, studio closures and a mandatory return-to-office command; and after years of trying to curtail the influence of Tencent, the Chinese publisher now controls more than 26% of newly-formed Assassin's Creed subsidiary Vantage Studios.

Alex Hutchinson, who served as Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed 3's creative director, before leaving Ubisoft to found Typhoon Studios in 2017, believes the company's fall is down to several factors, which have been hammering the publisher for a while now—it's why he left.

"It's a shame," he tells us. "I think a bunch of things happened. The style of development we pioneered was being able to manage big teams by letting them be individual groups with ownership of their own thing, to allow us to make bigger games faster. But then I think with the recent boom, there's been a weird five year boom in private equity and investment from people which we hadn't seen before ever. So a lot of senior people left Ubisoft and started studios or splintered off. So there was this talent drain that went out."

Hutchinson was among them. He co-founded Typhoon in 2017, which released its first game, Journey to the Savage Planet, in 2020. Unfortunately, Typhoon was acquired by Stadia in 2019, and when Google decided its experiment in cloud gaming had failed, Typhoon was one of its casualties.

With so much talent leaving, Hutchinson reckons, the massive scale of the company "suddenly became a noose". The pandemic only made things worse.

"If you have a team of 800 people," he says, "it's really hard to manage, even if they're in the same building. If they're not coming to work, how do you police them? How do you make sure what's going on is going on? And then juniors don't learn because they like working from home, and they don't like asking questions. So I think they lost that momentum as well."

Back when Ubisoft was fighting fit, it released Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed 2, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Assassin's Creed 3 and Assassin's Creed: Black Flag in a mere six years. But in the last six years, we've just had Valhalla and Shadows. Mirage, too, I guess, but that was originally meant to be Valhalla DLC.

Fewer sequels isn't a bad thing, especially if it's accompanied by more fresh ideas and new games. But that hasn't happened at Ubisoft, says Hutchinson.

"They always had a history of sequelizing the franchises, but also having a couple of new things coming along. They became very allergic to the new things, and so they killed a bunch of our ideas, like when I was working on Pioneer. They had nothing new to come through."

Pioneer was going to be a sci-fi romp that deviated from Ubisoft's traditionally more violent open-world outings by focusing on peaceful exploration. It was teased in Watch Dogs 2, but never saw the light of day.

Hutchinson and the other leads were pushed out in 2016 and Ubisoft put the project under new leadership. Shortly after, Hutchinson left Ubisoft, along with other former Pioneer leads. In 2019, after years of Ubisoft staying silent regarding the project, Hutchinson confirmed it had been cancelled.

At the same time, Kotaku reported that it was actually still alive, but that Ubisoft had made another change: now this peaceful exploration game would be a co-op shooter. That's so different from the original vision that it might as well have been canned. And seven years later, it's still just a rumour.

Ubisoft's treatment of Pioneer is the reason Hutchinson left, which allowed him to create his own sci-fi exploration game—albeit with some combat. And even when Typhoon was shuttered when Stadia was killed off, the team reformed under Raccoon Logic, giving us the excellent sequel Revenge of the Savage Planet.

The way Hutchinson frames Ubisoft's troubles makes it sound like death from a thousand cuts. "There's a million tiny things, as well," he says. "They're essentially a packaged goods business, and they had trouble figuring out digital as a whole platform." Just take a look at Ubisoft Connect, formerly Uplay, and its impotent struggle against Steam, where you will once again find all of Ubisoft's games.

And Ubisoft's troubles seem far from over. Only last week it laid off 40 people from its Toronto studio, as part of an ongoing restructuring effort that has included numerous cancellations, studio closures and layoffs.

The human cost of this restructuring effort is grotesque, but one of its goals, the establishing of various creative houses, does sound a bit like an attempt to return to individual studios having ownership of their projects. It's not doing anything for Ubisoft's dire public image, though, and even if we're being optimistic, it's going to be years before gamers actually see the results.

Of all Ubisoft's follies, Skull and Bones feels like one of the most significant—a game that took the best parts of Assassin's Creed 3 and Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, and just stuck them in a dodgy live service treadmill.

It took a decade to make, seemed to be perpetually delayed, and just kept changing. It started out as a Black Flag expansion, then a Black Flag MMO spin-off, then something entirely unrelated to Assassin's Creed. It was a huge mess, had no vision, and Ubisoft still charged $70 for it.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot defended the steep price by calling it a "quadruple-A game". Nobody believed him.

The whole saga seemed ridiculous. At no point were we shown anything to justify Guillemot's confidence, and sure enough, the game failed to make a splash. Now imagine how weird it would have been to watch this all unfold if you'd designed the bones it was built on.

Before leaving Ubisoft to co-found the studios behind Journey to the Savage Planet (Typhoon) and Revenge of the Savage Planet (Raccoon Logic), Alex Hutchinson was the creative director on Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed 3, the first Assassin's Creed to give us the naval battles, which would eventually lead to the brilliant Black Flag.

It was "bizarre", he tells us, "to see essentially the same stuff re-shipping 14 years after we made it". Assassin's Creed 3's sailing was an experiment that Ubisoft didn't have a lot of faith in, but it proved to be the game's greatest feature, resulting in it being given top billing in both Black Flag and Rogue. But it was old news by the time Skull and Bones finally launched.

"Ideas have a window, and that's another reason we're trying to do things faster this time," he says. "They age out and become stale. I think the team was junior. They were trying to essentially make Black Flag crossed with World of Tanks or World of Warships. But I don't think they had experience in that. And then they didn't really have experience in making even an Assassin's Creed game down there, because they really did co-development. And then I think it just got away from them."

Ubisoft Singapore was established in 2008 and, by the time it was working on Skull and Bones, had ballooned to more than 300 employees. Prior to that, it mostly served as a support studio, and assisted in the development of every Assassin's Creed from AC2 onward.

While Ubisoft would sometimes send devs from the Canadian and French studios to help Ubisoft Singapore, Hutchinson describes these excursions as holidays.

"For a lot of the French or Canadian developers, they would go down to Singapore for a year's holiday," he says. "They weren't going down there to make that studio huge. They were like, 'Oh, that'd be fun to work for a year in Singapore.' I don't think they were serious. And you couldn't get as many people, the talent pool just wasn't deep enough."

When Skull and Bones finally launched, it found itself jockeying for position with countless other live service games, many of which were free to play. What may have seemed novel and full of potential in 2013 had become rote. The only surprise is that Ubisoft is still maintaining it, but I suspect it will end up in Davy Jones's locker before too long.

Ubisoft's big restructuring has left the Assassin's Creed series under the control of Vantage Studios, one of five "creative houses" (and still the only one with a name) charged with carrying its brands into the future. What that means in practical terms is unclear: The only concrete impact up to today was the loss of former Assassin's Creed franchise boss Marc-Alexis Côté, who said he was forced out just seven months after the success of Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Today Ubisoft announced who will be taking the reins on the Assassin's Creed series, and it's not one guy but three guys, a "trio of experts of the series, who will bring their expertise, knowledge, and passion to guide Assassin’s Creed into its next chapter." They are:

Martin Schelling, Head of Brand: "He will lead the franchise team, as well as the overall strategy, long term vision, and development of Assassin's Creed. Martin previously worked as a Producer and Senior Producer on many defining titles in the series, including Revelations, Black Flag, Origins, and Valhalla."

Jean Guesdon, Head of Content: "He will lead the creative direction of the franchise, support ongoing projects, and help shape the franchise’s future while ensuring it remains true to its DNA. You probably remember Jean for his work as Creative Director on Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag and Assassin’s Creed Origins. But his history with the series goes all the way back to Assassin’s Creed II. His contribution to the brand is immense, and we are delighted to see him return to help shape this next exciting chapter."

François De Billy, Head of Production Excellence: "He will support our teams by strengthening production practices and execution across the franchise. François recently worked as Senior Director, Global Production, and contributed to several major Assassin’s Creed titles, including Revelations and Black Flag, and more recently as Production Director on AC Origins and AC Valhalla."

I won't pretend to fully grasp the distinctions between leading a creative franchise and leading a franchise creatively (which is why I quoted all of the above from the announcement post on Reddit), and it's fun to imagine that the entirety of De Billy's job involves wandering around the office telling people to "Be excellent!" like some kind of game dev Bill and Ted. (That's probably not it, though.)

Regardless of the specifics, all three have long histories at Ubisoft, although as the announcement suggests, Guesdon is the only one with specific Assassin's Creed roots, while Schelling and De Billy have been more Ubisoft generalists over the past several years. Guesden actually left Ubisoft in 2023 after 17 years at Ubi, but said in today's announcement on Reddit that "it is wonderful to be back after all these years."

"Assassin’s Creed has been a defining part of my professional life and being back feels like coming home. This universe, these characters, these worlds, and of course the community have always meant so much to me. I’m especially grateful to be sharing this journey with all of you again, and look forward to sharing more about the next steps ahead for the franchise."

Assassin's Creed is one of Ubisoft's premiere properties, and as it goes, so goes Ubisoft. But this shakeup still feels a bit odd to me. Côté, the previous vice president and executive producer of Assassin's Creed, is a long-time veteran of the series himself, and had overseen a string of successes beginning with Assassin's Creed Odyssey in 2018. He was also a vocal defender of developers amidst the ugly backlash over the presence of Yasuke in Assassin's Creed Shadows, which despite the fevered hopes of some portions of gamerdom proved to be a major success. All of which makes me wonder—why mess with it?

Joining Schelling, Guesdon, and De Billy at the top of the Assassin's Creed pile are Andrée-Anne Boisvert, Producer for Assassin’s Creed’s cross-brand initiatives and Head of Technological Excellence, and Lionel Hiller, VP Brand and Go-to-Market Strategy. Ubisoft said they'll formally join the leadership team over the next few weeks, "where they are set to steer the brand’s ambitious new chapter."

In hindsight, Assassin's Creed 3 is both fascinating and fundamental to the later development of the series. At the time, the expansive wilderness and smaller settlements felt restrictive compared to the series' massive cities, but it gave Ubisoft a model it would carry on successfully many years later in Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla and Shadows. And then there were the ships.

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag remains one of the high points for the Assassin's Creed, with its nautical open world and piratical antics, but it was Assassin's Creed 3 that really kicked things off by letting players explore the Eastern Seaboard and parts of the Caribbean in naval side missions. Some of its changes proved to be divisive, but pretty much everyone seemed to agree that captaining a ship felt incredible. So why wasn't there more of it?

"There was a whole fear that the tech [for the ships] wouldn't work," Alex Hutchinson, creative director on AC3 and Far Cry 4, tells us. Even in an Assassin's Creed that was already proving to be experimental, the feature was too much of an unknown quantity for the team to put all its faith in.

"So it couldn't be a huge part of the main story, because we weren't certain it was going to work," he continues. "And then when it was cool, then you're like, 'This is great.'" It was indeed cool. So cool, in fact, that Ubisoft went and built a whole Assassin's Creed out of it, with Black Flag, and then did it again in the Templar-focused Rogue spin-off. Odyssey, and to a lesser degree Valhalla, made ships an important part of their respective adventures too.

Hutchinson says this is "the old AAA model", where the alpha build would come in two months before launch, followed by the beta and final build in quick succession. "I think [Ubisoft is] really struggling with [this] now," he adds. Naturally, he notes, this means the devs don't get a look at the game "in its totality" until it's almost out the door.

When he co-founded Typhoon, the studio behind the excellent Journey to the Savage Planet, it was decided that alpha would happen in the middle of development. "And then that means you have to be hard about what you keep and what you cut, but you can see the shape of the game basically. Then we could have been like, 'Alright, this naval thing is going to be fine, put it everywhere.'"

Typhoon was acquired by Stadia, and then killed off when Stadia closed its doors in 2021. But much of the team were reunited, co-founding Raccoon Logic, which released Revenge of the Savage Planet last year. It's still doing alphas a lot earlier than Ubisoft.

"Just because your DNA is a one in a billion match doesn't mean you can be a princess," says Dr Monroe. "Get moving, tiara."

I've won the lottery, in the strangest possible way. After growing up in a Californian megacity overrun by poverty, I've been handed an invitation to the Avatar Program. Five years of cryosleep later, I'm thrust into Hell's Gate, a colonial military base on the distant planet of Pandora. "You start growing a conscience," warns one jarhead, "and you'll end up on the dead end of a na'vi spear."

My name is 'Able' Ryder, and I'm the protagonist of the Avatar game. Yes, the Ubisoft one. No, not the one you're thinking of. 14 years before Frontiers of Pandora, the French publisher put out a third-person shooter, day-and-date with Jim Cameron's big, blue, billion-selling blockbuster.

Avatar: The Game arrived right on the cusp of Ubisoft's imperial phase. Fresh from Far Cry 2 and Assassin's Creed II, the publisher would soon codify the lessons of those games and spread them throughout its international teams—dominating the open-world genre for the next decade.

Yet this project is something of a hangover from an earlier point in Ubisoft's life. A period of game development in which licensed movie tie-ins were created on a limited budget, to a deadline dictated by Hollywood. Ubi had managed to beat the odds once previously, when Rayman creator Michel Ancel directed a well-received King Kong game for Peter Jackson. But Avatar: The Game visibly suffers from its circumstances. Ryder's animations are less lavish than those of Ezio Auditore, and Pandora's lighting less spectacular than the sun that splashes across Far Cry 2's Africa.

Still, there's ambition here of a kind. Avatar: The Game's most intriguing choice is the one it asks you to make a short way through its campaign. Are you going to follow in the oversized footsteps of Jake Sully and embrace life among the na'vi? Or stick with the RDA, the corp that funded your journey here in the first place?

Since there's likely never going to be another Avatar game in which you play the baddies, I plumped for the latter. To be honest, the alternative wasn't particularly tempting. In Frontiers of Pandora, na'vi players get to navigate the world as natives, springing between car-sized mushrooms and sliding down branches like parkour stars. Ryder's avatar, by contrast, is simply a very large and brightly-coloured soldier. Don't get me wrong, it's fun to mount a direhorse in the wild and canter through the trees. But when your weapons and abilities are indistinguishable from those you wield as a human, you wonder why the RDA bothered with the Program at all.

More fun, then, to be an ignorant schmuck with a machine gun. Played on the human side, Avatar: The Game becomes a technicolour Vietnam movie. Your mission isn't to fight in the war, per se, but to locate and secure a series of tuning crystals. With their help, and that of Dr Monroe, you'll triangulate an abandoned Well of Souls, which the RDA hopes will give them a backdoor to Eywa—and ultimately a way of cutting off the na'vi from their goddess.

It's easy to feel like Martin Sheen venturing into the heart of darkness—despite the array of glowing flora and fauna. Troops glower as you roll through on your special mission, resentful of the soldiers they've lost holding the territory that contains your magical singing rocks. You'll search for shards in areas that have been pre-approved for airstrikes, wincing as the bombs land around your head.

Avatar: The Game might be built on Far Cry's Dunia engine, but its levels aren't open. Instead, its jungles are constructed like warrens, with multiple meandering paths carrying you from one objective to the next. The very ecosystem is hostile to outsiders: plants barfing poison gas at your feet, thwacking with vines, or simply exploding like mines. The flamethrower becomes your best friend as you brute-force your way through a natural world that hates you, just as much as it loves the na'vi.

Your quest takes you constantly back and forth across the frontline, where RDA troops engage the blue folk in bitter firefights. You're free to engage whenever you like, but it doesn't feel like your battle, exactly: merely the rocky sea you need to cross to reach your objectives.

To that end, Ubisoft stuffs its jungle full of vehicles you can hop in and out of at will. Maybe you'll pilot one of those exosuits Cameron has been obsessed with since Aliens. Then, once the na'vi stick a spear through the fuel tank, switch to a buggy instead—running down viperwolves at inadvisably high speeds. If you can steer a four-wheeled vehicle across a snaking tree trunk without tumbling through the canopy below, you have truly mastered the peculiar skillset Pandora demands.

Let's be clear: all of the above is clumsily implemented, with limited physics modelling that fails to convince you're turning a tight corner on rough terrain—let alone piloting a Scorpion gunship between floating islands. But Ubi's freeform approach to vehicle-swapping is endearing nonetheless, lending Avatar: The Game the feel of a solo Battlefield, played with idiotic bots and second-rate assault rifles.

As the short campaign wears on, you repeat the same objectives—the definition of insanity, as a fella in Far Cry once said—and watch your superiors at Hell's Gate descend into paranoia and infighting. The scientists, in their attempts to emulate a voice that can talk to Eywa, run 'doomsday' diagnostics in case their attempt to trick a goddess backfires. But the RDA pushes on. "Don't start growing a brain, Ryder," says one commander. "If you don't have the lumps to do this, I'll find someone else."

Eventually, of course, you reach the Well of Souls. There's a bit of a light show, and a lot of ominous rumbling. But in the end, it's not clear whether the RDA have succeeded, failed, or made any impact at all. "Eywa needed to see what we were capable of," says Sigourney Weaver, reassuringly. "And now she knows. Next time she'll be ready." Right. Cheers. Is that lorespeak for, 'This was a throwaway prequel, don't overthink it'?

It's certainly true that Avatar: The Game isn't recognised as canon. Contemporary reviewers were unmoved, and Ubisoft has never made any effort to commemorate the game since. Perhaps its greatest contribution was as a stepping stone to the really quite excellent Frontiers of Pandora, and as a reminder of the publisher's more humble origins. Mind you: Ubi did just retroactively add a third-person mode to Frontiers of Pandora alongside its new expansion. So maybe Avatar: The Game got one thing right the first time.

If you're wondering what became of 'Able' Ryder, consider that my commander threatened latrine duty for a month if anything happened to his gunship. Given that I crashed the thing into a mountain or two afterwards, it's fair to assume that Ryder spent the events of the subsequent Avatar movies not clutching a machine gun, but a bottle of Toilet Duck.

I'm not sure this really needs to be said out loud, but Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said it out loud in a new interview with Variety and so we're spreading the word: Yes, new Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games are in development.

"We have a solid pipeline underway across Vantage Studios," Guilemot said. "Under the Assassin's Creed brand, several titles are in development, spanning both single-player and multiplayer experiences, with the ambition to further grow a community that exceeded 30 million players last year.

"On Far Cry, anticipation is high, and we currently have two very promising projects in development."

That a major game company is making new additions to two of its most successful and longest-running franchises is not exactly Earth-shattering news. Call me cynical if you like, but videogames are like superheroes: They're never really dead.

I feel a particular lack of surprise-face in the case of Far Cry. Rumors about the two Far Cry projects—the inevitable Far Cry 7, and a live service multiplayer venture—have been floating around for a few years now.

Still, it's nice to have it all officially confirmed and formalized in writing, I suppose, and Assassin's Creed fans will no doubt be pleased to hear that an abundance of new games are on the way—although even there, spinoffs are hardly a new thing for the AC series.

And obvious or not, it's understandable that Guillemot wants to make noise about all that Ubisoft has cooking. To put it bluntly, Ubisoft is in serious trouble, to the extent that it kicked off a major internal restructuring in January that will see the company's studios resorted into five "creative houses."

That announcement, along with the layoffs, cancellations, and studio closures that followed, caused Ubisoft's share price to crater to its lowest point in 15 years. An infusion of Tencent funding has helped keep the lights on, but the company needs a more concrete path forward if it wants to keep shareholders from doing anything rash.

The creative houses restructuring is a major step in that direction, but that hasn't been without controversy either. The first creative house, Vantage Studios—the only one with a name at this point—will be responsible for handling Ubisoft's biggest boys: Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six, and coincidentally or not, it's being co-headed by Guillemot's son, Charlie Guillemot. That particular development led to the departure of former Assassin's Creed franchise boss Marc-Alexis Côté, who said in October 2025 that he was forced out after refusing to take a reduced role at Vantage. Côté, who played a highly visible leadership role on the successful Assassin's Creed Shadows, subsequently sued Ubisoft for just under $1 million.

Yves Guillemot denied that nepotism played a role in Charlie's ascendance, however. "Ubisoft was created as a family company, and our strong heritage helps us take a long-term view, prioritizing sustainable growth, creative ambition, and continuity over short-term cycles," Guillemot said. "This perspective guides our decisions and helps us build franchises, teams, and strategies that endure for decades.

"I strongly believe that Christophe Derennes and Charlie are the right leaders as Co-CEOs of Vantage Studios. They bring complementary strengths and experience that make them well-suited for the role. Their appointment was based on their skills, track record, and fit for the role."

Derennes does indeed bring an impressive CV to the co-CEO role: He's been with Ubisoft for more than 35 years, launched and headed up its Ubisoft Montreal studio, and has credits on dozens of games. Charlie's qualifications are somewhat less clear: Before being handed the reins on Ubisoft's prime properties he served as studio manager and creative director on one Ubisoft mobile game—the ill-fated Tom Clancy's Elite Squad, for which Ubisoft was eventually forced to apologize—and co-founded a Web3 gaming, AI, and NFT company called Unagi.

The cuts at Ubisoft continued today with the layoffs of 40 people from the company's Toronto studio. First reported by MobileSyrup, the layoffs are part of the ongoing restructuring of Ubisoft into "creative houses," announced in January, a process that's also included multiple game cancellations, studio closures, and other layoffs.

"Following the recent announcement of the final phase of Ubisoft’s global cost-savings plan and the discontinuation of projects, Ubisoft Toronto will be reducing its workforce by 40 roles," a Ubisoft spokesperson confirmed with PC Gamer.  

"This decision was not taken lightly and does not in any way reflect the talent, dedication, or contributions of the individuals affected. Our priority now is to support them through this transition with comprehensive severance packages and robust career placement assistance."

Originally launched in 2010, Ubisoft Toronto is one of the company's largest studios, with more than 500 employees. It's previously developed games in the Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Watch Dogs, For Honor and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series; in 2024 it joined the effort to get the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake out the door. That game was one of the projects cancelled in the immediate wake of Ubisoft's restructuring, although whether that cancellation had anything to do with this round of layoffs isn't clear.

Ironically, given that the cancelled Sands of Time remake was reportedly "close to the finish line" when Ubisoft pulled the plug, the repo also confirmed that the faintly-recalled Splinter Cell remake—the latest step in Ubisoft's years-long trolling of fans—is still in development. The remake was announced more than four years ago and despite the passage of enough time for the game director to quit, go to work for EA on Battlefield 6, change his mind, and come back to his old gig at Ubisoft (which was apparently still open, for some reason), we've heard virtually nothing about it since.

It all bears a striking similarity to Ubisoft's post-restructuring insistence that Beyond Good and Evil 2 also survived the bloodbath and remains in development, although that case is much more egregious: BG&E2 was first revealed in 2008.

Ubisoft also said the Toronto studio will continue to operate as a "co-development partner" on Rainbow Six and other projects.

It's not exactly Mirror's Edge, but the robust free-running parkour system has always been a huge draw for Assassin's Creed enjoyers. It changes a lot from game to game, and everyone has their favorite implementation, but it might be time to reassess: Shadows's parkour just got a big upgrade with manual jumping.

"It’s finally here," exclaim the latest patch notes, which you can find on Ubisoft's website. "We've heard your request and are bringing back a fan favorite feature for parkour: the manual jump."

So long as you have Advanced Parkour enabled, you can jump at will to dismount a structure gracefully or hop toward a nearby obstacle. Currently, both comments on Ubisoft's short video demonstration are just the word "peak," so you know people are excited.

It might seem like a silly thing to get worked up about. I can jump in all sorts of games, and if Shadows was perfectly playable without it, what does it matter if they add the button now? Well, AC movement is as beloved for its expressiveness as it is for its functionality—something you can glean by watching any number of parkour montages where players clamber around buildings just to show off—so this is less quality of life and more an extra dose of delicious freedom.

Players on social media are pleased as punch. Reddit user Adipay commented, "Shadows now has one of the best parkour systems in the franchise." A concurrent comment from ZillaJrKaijuKing reads, "I picked a good time to reinstall."

There's other stuff in the new update, as well: critical hits have more detailed visual feedback now, the animus menu can now be accessed via a glitchy portal in your hideout, and a slew of bug fixes have been thrown in for good measure.

It's a good day if you're still on the Assassin's Creed Shadows train, which PC Gamer staff writer Morgan Park scored an 80 in his review; "Shadows is some of the most fun I've had with a stealth game in a decade," he said.