If there's one thing you should know about my gaming habits it's that I unironically bloody love me some Assassin's Creed. That means the older sneaky-stabby AC and the more modern shouty-pillage fests like Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Assassin's Creed Origins is the awkward middle step between the two, acting as the series' first go at a proper RPG.
]]>Are you looking forward to the Assassin's Creed Valhalla soundtrack just as much as the actual game? If so, then you should check out our latest music quiz, which focuses on all things Assassin's Creed.
Because the masses have been eating up online quizzes during lockdown, RPS' video wing has been testing the waters to see if you, the video game playing public, also enjoy them. And it turns out you do. And that's lovely.
]]>Put yer sand shoes on, folks. We're going to Egypt. Assassin's Creed Origins is free to play this weekend. Start downloading now if you happened to miss this particular chapter of stealth, stabbing, and wall climbing.
]]>You've tapped out those skill trees, but have you levelled up your brain? Until next Thursday, both Greek and Egyptian flavours of Ubisoft's historical learn 'em up Discovery Tour by Assassin's Creed are free to pick up and keep forever. Go on, get yourself a slice of ancient education without all that stabby Assassin guff to deal with.
]]>If it's not baroque, don't fix it. Little architecture joke for you there, just to kick off a dry topic with a giggle. You see, appreciating architecture is for people in beige cardigans. Folks who subscribe to magazines printed on paper so thick you can still calculate the tree’s age. You know the type I mean. Spectacled couples with non-Ikea coffee tables. Thirty-year-olds. People like you! Here are 11 examples of very satisfying architecture in PC games.
]]>HDR on PC hasn't improved much in 2019. Despite there being more HDR gaming monitors than ever before, the very best gaming monitors for HDR continue to be quite expensive compared to non-HDR monitors, and the situation around Windows 10 support for it is still a bit of a mess. However, provided you're willing to fight through all that, then the next step on your path to high dynamic range glory is to get an HDR compatible graphics card.
Below, you'll find a complete list of all the Nvidia and AMD graphics cards that have built-in support for HDR, as well as everything you need to know about getting one that also supports Nvidia and AMD's own HDR standards, G-Sync Ultimate and FreeSync 2. I've also put together a list of all the PC games that support HDR as well, so you know exactly which PC games you can start playing in high dynamic range.
]]>If there's one advantage to Assassin's Creed's just-a-simulation framing device, it's that you can bend the rules (and timeline) occasionally. While it makes no sense temporally, those who have been hunting in-game achievements in Assassin's Creed Odyssey can cash in their earned Club Units to make Origins hero Bayek of Siwa an officer aboard your flagship, the Adrestia. While he doesn't have much to say, it's nice to see him still finding work four hundred years before he was born.
]]>“Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”
It’s a common enough idiom, a plea for empathy and understanding. Taken literally, it’s also a phrase that rings true for gamers. We walk countless miles in the shoes of our favourite characters, learning to love and feel for them along the way. But despite all the miles we travel, we rarely give our well-worn virtual footwear its due. Virtual shoes are just another one of the many small, mundane details that make the worlds in which we play believable, and most players ignore them. Luckily, one photographer has made it his mission to document the art of virtual shoes.
]]>While we’re all busy digging into ancient Greece, Ubisoft haven’t forgotten last year’s Ptolomaic playground, Assassin’s Creed Origins. During development, they partnered with Egyptologists, and in doing so they apparently discovered that translating hieroglyphs is very difficult and time consuming. In response, they started looking into ways to streamline the process using machine learning, and this week, they presented their initial progress.
Take a look at their introductory video explaining what they’re trying to achieve:
]]>There are a lot of dads in video games, and their number only grows. A rising tide of stubbled, emotionally-reserved dadflesh, heralding a new age of "serious storytelling" in games. Assassin’s Creed Origins stands out from this paternal wave by showcasing a different kind of videogame dad. Egyptian proto-sheriff Bayek, who displays as much tenderness as he does the ability to stab things really, really well.
]]>With Assassin’s Creed Odyssey just around the corner, I find myself thinking back to last year’s entry in the series, Origins. It was packed full of side quests and collectables and set pieces – in short, everything we’ve come to expect from a Ubisoft open world adventure. But one moment in my playthrough still stands out to me. It was almost entirely unscripted, driven by my own exploration, and – because this is an Assassin’s Creed game we’re talking about – involves a dead body.
Spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Origins and Revelations below the cut.
]]>Last week, after much hype and excitement, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card was finally unleashed on the world. Today, it's the turn of its beefed-up big brother, the RTX 2080Ti, whose release was delayed by a week for reasons lost to the bowels of Nvidia's marketing department. As you can see from my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080Ti review, this is hands down the best graphics card for 4K I've ever seen, and that's all down to the monstrous power of Nvidia's new Turing GPU. But how much of a leap does it represent over its immediate predecessor, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080Ti? To the graphs!
]]>In my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 review last week, we discovered that Nvidia's super duper new graphics card was about as fast as their GTX 1080Ti when paired with Intel's Core i5-8600K CPU, representing only the teensiest bit of improvement to your overall frames per second output if you were to bung one in your PC today. That may well change once we start seeing more games take advantage of the Nvidia's clever speed-boosting AI-driven Turing tech, but until developers get their act together and start patching in support for all of the best RTX features, the only thing we've got to go on right now is raw performance data.
With this in mind, I thought I'd take a closer look at how the RTX 2080 compares to its direct predecessor, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080. The former might not represent much of a leap past the GTX 1080's souped up Ti cousin, but regular 1080 owners should see much better results compared to what they can do now, particularly when it comes to gaming at 4K. Let's take a look.
]]>Ubisoft are giving their studios a moment to catch their breath after the launch of Assassin's Creed Odyssey in October. After debuting a new Odyssey trailer (below) at Gamescom, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot stated that there's no sequels, spinoffs or side-games due in 2019, as reported by Gamespot. Their focus for next year will be live support for Odyssey. Probably for the best, as according to Odyssey director Scott Phillips (in a video interview with Game Informer), the new game will be "much longer" than the already massive Assassin's Creed Origins.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>After a great many leaks, Ubisoft today finally announced Assassin's Creed Odyssey, taking the open-world murder simulator to Ancient Greece. Playing as a lad or a lass who's the grandkid of Leonidas, the Scot who was crowned king of Sparta after kicking a postman down a hole, we'll sneak, sail, and stab across the land. It largely resembles last year's Assassin's Creed Origins, obviously, but the return of naval combat to the series is quite welcome. It also leans on the drama a bit more, with dialogue options and even optional romances. Here, come watch all this.
]]>Update: And it's official. Ubisoft have tweeted a short teaser with a fella doing that kick from the meme.
As E3 approaches, rumours and teasers are flying off all over. Here's a new rumour for you: Ubisoft are following up on the Egyptian Assassin's Creed Origins with a visit to ancient Greece in a game named Assassin's Creed Odyssey. That's the buzz from French site JeuxVideo-Live, who have a photo they say is a keyring promoting the game from a source they trust. The supposed promo tat is in the shape of a Spartan helmet, like that movie with the radge from Paisley in the leather pants, so: rumour is, the stabmen are off to Greece. Ubisoft, of course, have announced no such game.
]]>Please sit down. Make sure you have a friend with you, or available on the telephone. Plunkbat isn't at number one. Somehow, it's something even more boring. But the rest of the charts are a splendid sight! No GTA, no CS:GO, no Witcher 3, no Skyrim!
]]>If you want to make Assassin's Creed Origins easier, tougher, or weirder, from today you can tinker with its gameguts in the official new Animus Control Panel. Arriving today for free, it opens up a wide range of game settings and options to fiddle with, affecting things including the number of animal friends you can have, hitbox sizes, health points, unlocking all skills, NPC level scaling, and so on. They're the sort of things some games might let us change through arcane console commands or buried config files, but bundled up in a menu system so it's easy for everyone.
]]>Jumping off buildings and stabbing Romans is all well and good, but wouldn't it be nice to command a phalanx of turbo-charged hippos? While its official season pass may have ended recently with a nice chunky expansion, Assassin's Creed Origins is still growing. Its next update is putting the power of the Animus control panel in your hands, allowing you to tweak and mutate the experience to your own whims, no matter how silly they may be.
]]>John is missing. He flew out to GDC last week stowed inside Brendan's suitcase to save money, I'm sure you'll remember, but on the return journey Brendan's bag has gone missing. Vanished. Didn't flop onto the luggage carousel. The airport have no idea. John took a few cans of pop and bags of gross American chocolate in with him so I'm sure he'll be fine, but where is he? Amsterdam? Boise? Hong Kong? Honolulu? I'm sure he'll turn up. For now, here I am, I am taking over the Steam Charts for another week.
If there's one lesson to learn from last week's 10 top-selling games on Steam, it's that fancy open-world games are quite popular.
]]>A few of the things I have had to do in order to get a workable version of HDR (also known as high dynamic range), the new-ish display technology that significantly ramps up brightness, darkness and vibrancy, on my PC (not including the acquisition of a fancy monitor):
- Try four different display cables - Adjust as many as seven different brightness/contrast/colour etc shaders per game. (I have spent long, unhappy hours doing this to date) - Manually turn on HDR on the monitor, manually turn HDR on in Windows then manually turn on HDR in the game settings. Or sometimes HDR off in Windows but on in the game then alt-tab back to Windows and turn HDR on, and off, and on, and off. Or sometimes alt-tab and alt-tab and alt-tab and alt-tab and alt-tab until HDR suddenly, randomly kicks in. When I exit the game, I have to manually turn it all back off again or Windows is unusable. - Install an unfinished preview build of Windows 10 whose HDR isn't totally broken on Nvidia cards. - Almost completely lose my sense of whether anything is actually different after all of this.
The egg yolks in Final Fantasy XV were a bit shinier, though.
]]>Assuming you've played an hour or two of Assassin's Creed Origins every day since its original launch last October, you might now find yourself running out of things to do and see in Ubisoft's absurdly large ultra-budget adventure through ancient Egypt. Thank god for mandatory DLC, eh?
Today, the second (and final) major component of the Origins season pass rolls out. Dropping sci-fi weirdness in favour of classical Egyptian mythology, Curse Of The Pharaohs has Bayek and friends square up against a cadre of returned undead kings across new locations in the physical world and the afterlife, the latter of which is probably not covered by the historical tour mode.
]]>From a publisher as huge as Ubisoft, and in a series as chart-dominating as Assassin’s Creed's Discovery Tour represents an unusual and welcome ambition. The mode, available as free DLC for Assassin’s Creed Origins or as a standalone game, strips out all the combat, levelling-up and collectibles in favour of a promised educational experience. It takes the strongest facet of Origins – its detailed and enormous depiction of Ancient Egypt – and adapts it into something almost entirely new.
Ubisoft isn’t alone in remixing its games in this way, however. The Discovery mode for Origins follows in the squelchy footsteps of Frictional’s Soma, which added a ‘Safe Mode’ last December that removes any mechanical threat from its monsters. Traditionally, the concept of ‘games’ has been closely tied with that of ‘challenge’, but these modes sidestep that. And in doing so, they remove a barrier to entry for less experienced players who want to explore their worlds. Even if the execution doesn't necessarily match the idea, this is a good thing.
]]>The blizzards of Siberia have gone on holiday to the United Kingdom this week. But the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, doesn’t do snow days. The pod squad have trekked hard through the whiteout (from their bedrooms to their computers) to gather on their respective microphones. To what end? Well, to talk about the weather. Blizzards, thunderclouds, sandstorms and, er, night-time? In videogames, it all counts.
]]>The announcement of the Discovery Tour was a source of much rejoicing. Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed games have for many years built these extraordinarily detailed cities, that are swiftly disposed of as the series' annual development cycle demands fresh urban grist for the mill. The recreation of Ptolemaic Egypt was by far Ubisoft's most remarkable, and the idea of using it as an educational tool, a living museum of sorts, was well received.
In practice, Discovery Tour by Assassin’s Creed: Ancient Egypt (to give it its given name) is a peculiar thing, made with much ambition, but seemingly little understanding of how education actually works.
]]>We've only just started exploring the newly released Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins, but there's something we thought you should know. Gone entirely are all the marble boobies and winkies. For what we can only assume are "educational purposes", the game's many statues have been rather daftly covered up by a plague of seashells.
]]>Lace up your walking boots and fill your canteen, as today Assassin's Creed Origins wanders into a world of tourism. Today the game receives its new Discovery Mode in a free update, letting players freely and peacefully explore Ancient Egypt and enjoy guided tours written with historians. Ubisoft also sell this mode as a separate standalone game, cheaper and without any of that murdering. I've not played AssCreed Oranges yet because I have so many open-world murder simulators already half-finished, but I am tempted by wandering.
]]>On top of being a broadly pleasant surprise and a very strong return to form for Ubisoft's open-world murder-sandbox series, one of the key selling points of Assassin's Creed Oranges for me was a promised feature that wasn't quite ready in time for launch.
Ubisoft are finally making good on their plans next week. On February 20th, the Discovery Tour mode will be arriving as a free upgrade for existing players (or as a $20 standalone product), converting the violent saga into a serious educational product featuring 75 narrated and guided tours through ancient Egypt.
]]>I have been, since November, utterly enamoured with digital Ptolemaic Egypt. Assassin's Creed Origins’ snowglobe version of the kingdom makes it excellent fodder for long, meandering walks and screenshots of tantalising vistas, but it's the small vignettes of daily life and scenes of mundanity that make Egypt feel less like just another theme park.
Since the first Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft Montreal has used scale as its default weapon. Huge towers, massive crowds, more map icons than the eye can handle. But while, yes, Origins is still a gargantuan game, it’s one that spends a lot of time zoomed in on the streets instead of hovering around the rooftops. It’s inspired me to do the same, accompanied by the game's impressive photo mode. It pauses the action and unlocks the camera at the press of a button, letting you tweak the image with filters and by changing things like contrast and depth of field.
]]>Ubisoft's historical open-world murder simulator Assassin's Creed Origins is getting a safe and friendly 'Discovery Mode' for tourism soon, and it seems they're also brewing a new mode with even more murder. A New Game+ mode will come to Oranges some time in the future, Ubisoft have confirmed, which should mean people who have finished the game will get to start the story again with all their end-game weapons, tools, and murderpowers carrying over. I'd imagine enemies will be levelled to match you but going through will full murderpowers is likely to be a lark.
]]>Now that everyone's had a few months to wander and stab around Ancient Egypt in Assassin's Creed Origins, Ubisoft are ready to share new sights and new murders. Today they announced the first paid expansion, named The Hidden Ones and set four years after events of the main story, will launch next Tuesday, January 23rd. While you're drawing daggers in your calendar (bonus points: use a red pen for cool blood drops), you can also note that the educational sightseeing Discovery Tour mode will arrive on February 20th, then the second big story DLC on March 6th. Before all that, a new quest that's a prelude to The Hidden Ones hits the game for free in a patch today.
]]>Post-processing tools for games aren't new - hello Reshade and SweetFX - but the world of dramatically altering a PC game's appearance with what could loosely be described as real-time Instragram filters has always been a scrappy wild west. Nvidia have this week built themselves a governor's mansion on this new frontier, introducing a feature called 'Freestyle' to the GeForce Experience suite of game optimisation, streaming and screenshotting tools. It might lack the open source and community-driven scope of ReShade, but it's easier and slicker to use on the games that support it - and the results can be dramatic. Gimmicky, sure, but making a game you're otherwise tiring of into a neon fever-dream can be a real shot in the arm.
Presenting for your wide-eyed delectation and howling disapproval - Plunkbat: The Animated Series, Assassin's Creed Oranges: Vice City and American Truck Simulator: Grindhouse Edition.
]]>As the feedback loop of Steam successes reaches an ear-shattering scream, this week we see last year's best sellers dominating the New Year's first week. So I refuse to live in the past. Let's look forward. Let's imagine what we might want from these behemothic developers.
]]>We've already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin' and a-shakin' in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol' Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well - as do a host of other games from 2017's great and good.
Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you're so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I'd have gone for in each category.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>Sometimes it’s good to go back to where you came from in open world games. When the content is the world, travelling through it can often feel like you’re gobbling it up, every virtual kilometre a chunk of media you’ve greedily consumed rather than occupied.
But they rarely give you much reason for retracing your steps. Levelled rewards are rarely worth the journey; storylines and quests are often all used up. Towns, jungles, villages are left frozen in time, a snapshot of less sophisticated times. Now their challenges are less keen, their demands on your expanded skillset simplistic. Their NPCs repeat the same declamations as they ever did, ignorant of your world-spanning achievements.
While these worlds are physically non-linear, they often feel the opposite, locations standing as staging posts on a winding trail rather than interconnected places. Then I played Assassin’s Creed Origins, which goes out of its way to seed the places you’ve barrelled through with reasons to return.
]]>Yesterday, the very fabric of society was threatened when some people disputed, with terminally dangerous inaccuracy, my 100% objectively and factually correct assertion that the currently-free Assassin's Creed 4 is the bestest best Assassin's Creed game of all time. Some of these anarchistic perverts argued that this year's Egypt-set Origins was the better man-stabber, despite its complete absence of ghost pirate ships and Welsh accents, and rest assured they will suffer for this blasphemy.
But I am a merciful dictator of gaming opinion, so before they are all rounded up and fired into the sun, I shall first allow them to enjoy the bountiful contents of Asscreed Origins Update 6. Also known as patch 1.1.0, this 1.2GB bundle o'fixes includes significant graphical improvements and the aforementioned new difficulty mode. Enjoy it while you still draw breath, heretics.
]]>I like the boat-centric Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag so much that I just went and added it to Uplay even though I already own it Steam. That's right: an Asscreed I dig enough to voluntarily load up Uplay. Last week, Ubisoft were giving away the tragically de-Steamed RTS World in Conflict, and, as we promised then, here's your nudge about this week's Festivus freebie.
]]>Have you been finding Assassin’s Creed Origins, a game where you can control the trajectory of your arrows, a bit on the easy side? Don’t fret -- the December update will add a new "nightmare" difficulty mode, level scaling and two new quests, one of which introduces horde mode.
]]>The tail-end of Steam's Autumnal sale sees a few old favourites lingering with the usual suspects in the charts this week. The discounts that got them here are all gone now, but it's only a couple of weeks now before everything goes completely bonkers for the Winter Sale, and you can expect to see all the same names deeply discounted once more.
]]>Assassin’s Creed clothes are some of the best clothes in all games. Those layers, all those flowing, flapping, swinging layers: cloth and leather and swords and knives and pouches and harnesses. I often idly wonder, as I watch an Assassin’s Creed loading screen, how many people - how many studios! - produce Assassin’s Creed’s clothes? They’re a wonder of code and art coming together, of layers of beautiful fabric flapping just right. And Ubisoft knocked Assassin’s Creed Origins’ clothes out of the goddamn park.
]]>Hey ho, chart fans, let's go. Statman John is indisposed today, and was last seen meandering along the seafront muttering "Plunkbat! They give me Plunkbat! I've a grand idea for a grand theft five five fi-diddly-fi fi whoopsadaisy down we go," so I'm taking over for this week's Steam charts. Seeing as he's always griping about the charts being identical, I'm sure John will be infuriated to miss seeing how much Steam's autumn sale changed things. Won't you join for me a stroll down the hit parade?
]]>Imagine what would happen if Plunkbat weren't to be at number 1? Could anyone even cope any more? Has all of gaming started operating on this as a foundation, forgetting that it could, one day, not sell more copies than everything else? What if I'm writing this as a bluff because it's not at number 1 this week? What if I just wrote that to imply the bluff even though there isn't a bluff?! OH MY GOODNESS EVERYONE QUICKLY READ THIS NOW!
]]>If my second favourite thing to do in Assassin’s Creed Origins is tomb raiding, my first favourite thing is travelling by eagle. Your character, Bayek, has a pet eagle called Senu which constantly follows in the sky above him, and you can possess it at pretty any time, sweeping your view up into its own. As Senu you can fly freely, ascending to extraordinary heights and roaming as far as the map allows, while Bayek waits far below.
Here’s the thing. If Bayek is standing, he’ll remain motionless, but if he’s riding a mount and you’ve set it to automatically follow the roads to a waypoint, he’ll keep riding as you fly. And thus you get to experience Egypt from the best seat in the house. There are limits: you can’t stray too far from Bayek, else he’ll just stop. But it’s remarkably free.
]]>Weirdly, none of my favourite Assassin’s Creed Origins moments so far relate to assassinating. Then again, they never really did in the previous games. Instead they’re about buildings, specifically climbing them and going into them. So it’s appropriate that my absolute second favourite thing to do in Assassin’s Creed: Origins is tombs.
]]>The continued clotting amalgamation of the Steam Charts, with CODWARs and AssCreed Oranges mysteriously occupying multiple spaces, is having frankly dangerous effects on the column. No The Witcher 3! No GTA V! And H1Z1 seems to have been entirely forgotten by the ages! What is a running joke to do?
]]>My three year old rates games based on whether the character goes into water, and if they do, do they swim underneath. My personal rating systems are a little more nuanced, but it turns out that Assassin's Creed Origins' swimming is so astoundingly atmospheric I'm willing to forgive it a dozen other foibles. In all of gaming, water has never felt wetter.
]]>WAR. The men and women of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, are doing their part, but are you doing yours? We have shown bravery among the bullets and beaches of Call of Duty WWII, with John popping helmets in the "quite good" single player campaign, and Matt hiding in the bloodied crater of multiplayer. I've done sweet foxtrot alpha on the frontlines, so to make up for it I've invented another minigame for my fellow hosts. On top of that we've been horsing around (or unicorning around) in the Egypt of Assassin's Creed Origins, appreciating our friend the eagle and taking nice photos of the ancient civilisation. Come listen.
]]>Do you find solace through memetics? Which enormously popular game you like is also liked by lots of other people? What else might form the triangle of your desire? Cast aside your romantic delusions, and delve into the acquisitive mire that is the Steam Charts.
]]>Good news: a new Assassin's Creed Origins patch yesterday expanded and improved the open-world murder simulator's Photo Mode, which is one of John's favourite parts of the game. It also fixes a number of bugs and crashes, and supposedly improves performance a bit too - things I suppose you might be interested in. Me, I'm poring over the update with concern, trying to figure out if Ubi have fixed those wonderful glitched-out humanoid animals. Please no.
]]>I'm having an odd time with Assassin's Creed Origins. It is, perhaps, the most "fine" game I've ever played. It's fine. It's fine. It's not bad. There are bugs, but they're not that bad. There's... plenty to do? It is, I've found, one of the most bland games I've ever experienced. But goodness me, it lets you take a good screenshot.
I've found, as I've played the first ten or so hours, that I've had much more fun using the game's photo mode than I have completing any of the quests. So I figured I'd share some of my snapshots with you.
]]>A soft reboot four years in the making, Ubisoft Montreal's Assassin's Creed: Origins is one giant step back in time plus a smaller step forward in terms of world design, a stumble in terms of its levelling system, a sideways hop as regards combat and an exercise in jogging on the spot in terms of missions. This is exactly the kind of complex footwork that leads to messy accidents during parkour sequences, but somehow, the game keeps its balance throughout, though it's not quite the revival I was hoping for.
]]>Several Ancient Egyptian gods had the heads of animals but a bug in Assassin's Creed Origins turns beasts humanoid in a wonderful and terrifying other way. While we've already reported players bumping into bugs and crashes in Origins, none were nearly as exciting as the creatures photographed and tweeted by Tom Phillips of our corporate sibling Eurogamer. A bug can make animals appear standing on their hind legs, twisted in the human 'T pose' (a sort of 'blank slate' animation) with their necks mangled. Reminiscent of Red Dead Redemption's human/animal glitches like the donkey lady and flapping bird woman, they replace Unity's missing faces as my favourite Ass Creed bug. Sure, bugs can be nuisances, but we can also enjoy their absurdity; I myself was delighted by a light show in XCOM 2's final mission.
]]>In a week in which Assassin's Creed Origins has managed to break the charts to such a degree that it somehow not only appears three times, but also stopped Feedly from being able to display the rest of the games in the correct order, we also see a few other new entries. But absolutely no new names.
]]>Alice is on holiday and she's taken all the games with her. Luckily some developers released new games after she'd left, so the rest of us still have something to play. Our choices are below, but we want to know from you: what are you playing in this weekend of plenty?
]]>Assassin’s Creed Origins is out today, and for some of you that will mean you’ve got a weekend full of murder and climbing pyramids ahead of you, but others have been less fortunate. We’re not talking Unity-levels of performance issues, but players have been reporting issues ranging from bugs to crashes.
]]>Our full review of Assassin's Creed: Origins is yet to come, but Edwin has been exploring its world on our behalf and sends back this report.
I've only had time for a quick poke through the world of Assassin's Creed: Origins, thanks to a combination of Ancient Egypt-grade download speeds, short notice and a tortuous wrangle with graphics card drivers, but I'm already enjoying myself. This is something of a surprise, as I've become profoundly weary of the Ubiworld in recent years and Origins is very much an Ubiworld - a Pharoah's haul of bite-sized distractions and trinkets that may or may not add up into something genuinely compelling.
]]>Free bits coming to Assassin's Creed Origins [official site] in the weeks and months after launch will include battles against gods, a wave survival arena mode, and the promised tourism of Discovery Mode. Ubi today detailed their post-launch plans, which include some nice bits and pieces, then went on to announce all the paid DLC because apparently this is something people find exciting. I'm still baffled by DLC announcements coming when I haven't even bought the game yet and certainly don't fancy paying extra up front, but here we go.
]]>Seeing as Assassin's Creed took a year out between Syndicate and Assassin's Creed Origins [official site], will your PC need to hurdle an extra year's tech to play this new one? Nope! Ubisoft have confirmed the system requirements, and they're the same as Syndicate demanded. Ubi also gab about PC technobits including making a proper go of keyboard and mouse controls, a built-in benchmarking tool, and options for dynamic resolution scaling to keep framerates stable (or not, if you don't want it).
]]>Ubisoft made a fascinating announcement this week. They revealed that the latest Assassin's Creed [official site] is to add a "Discovery Tour" mode, removing all the combat and challenges from the game, to let players just freely experience their in-depth recreation of Ancient Egypt. It's fascinating, to me, because it's a big deal. And goodness me, it shouldn't be a big deal. Because games should be delighted to include modes that remove all their difficulty and challenge, and players should cheer when they hear about it.
]]>Assassin's Creed Origins [official site] has lavishly recreated (and reimagined) large chunks of Ancient Egypt so we can stab men to bits amidst beautiful scenery. But wait, if you simply wish to admire the world without getting into scraps or being nagged about objectives, that will be an option. Ubisoft today announced that they'll add a free-roaming 'Discovery Tour' mode to Origins after launch, letting players explore the whole world "free of combat, storyline or time constraints". It'll also include guided tours from historical experts. For this occasional video game tourist, it sounds splendid.
]]>A new cinematic trailer for Assassin's Creed Origins [official site] is basically a Leonard Cohen music video, which is a fine thing to be. The big German games show Gamescom starts this week, which means the streets are running orange with trailers. If we're to be shown all these things which don't represent video games at all, hey, at least they're letting us listen to Leonard Cohen. I just listened to Leonard Cohen for work purposes! I don't remember much else. Pyramids and Cleopatra and Romans and some bloke with a cool hat and murders? And Leonard Cohen.
]]>During the Assassin's Creed: Origins [official site] demo I played at E3, I pressed the wrong button and thought I'd broken the game. I was trying to switch to my bow while sneaking and I accidentally meditated, causing time to fast forward. The sun wheeled around the sky, sank below the horizon, and night fell. The developer guiding me through the experience – an environmental artist – was slightly taken aback, but we rolled with my mistake and I got an accidental peek at the nightlife of Ptolemaic Egypt. Colour me intrigued.
]]>Each year E3 rolls around like a giant evil worm, crushing all that's good and pure. BUT that worm also announces lots of exciting gaming news as it wreaks its carnage upon the Earth. Here we have gathered every announcement, reveal, and exciting new trailer that emerged from the barrage of screamed press conferences over the last few days. And lots of it looks rather spiffy.
A rather enormous 47 PC games were either announced, revealed, or updated upon, with new trailers, information, and released dates that will all be missed by at least three months. We've collected the lot, with trailers, in alphabetical order, into one neat place, just for you.
]]>Oh, would you Adam and Eve it! Ubisoft are bringing murder simulator Assassin's Creed back from sabbatical with a trip to Ancient Egypt for a prequel named Assassin's Creed: Origins [official site]. Ubi announced Ass Origins during Microsoft's E3 announce-o-rama, seventeen months after word of a prequel leaked and one month since we heard its name. But you must act surprised, as this is E3 and we have to be polite. Here, check out the announcement trailer and some gameplay from the demo:
]]>Far Cry 5 and The Crew 2, Ubisoft announced today, as if you hadn't already guessed. That's it. They have nothing of substance to say about either game. Oh, and would you believe that more Assassin's Creed is coming too? Astonishing. Ladies and germs, we truly are in the runup to E3. Ooh I swear it starts earlier and shoutier every year! Back in my day, E3 was held in secret in dark stone chambers and the only way you could tell what happened was to watch for logos forming in your tea leaves.
]]>We were on a break! (Entirely topical references for you there). Yes, it appears that Assassin's Creed is back after a year-odd hiatus from its traditionally annual release cycle. Various leaks have it that the game is named Assassin's Creed: Origins, is set in ancient Egypt and looks, well, just like the image above.
]]>A rumour is going round, based on anonymous 4chan posts supposedly by an Ubisoft employee, that we'll not see a new main Assassin's Creed game in 2016, but it'll return in 2017 with a complete overhaul set in Ancient Egypt. Not the most reliable of sources, that, and probably not a rumour to put money on. However, now we're all back at work and loitering around water coolers with idle hands and malevolent intent, let's gasbag and tell other people how to do their jobs. We ask: how would you revitalise the open-world parkouring murder simulator series?
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