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During Ubisoft's E3 keynote, it was revealed that South Park: The Stick of Truth's launch has been narrowed down to Holiday 2013. The turn-based RPG, which Ubisoft recently acquired from defunct publisher THQ, is currently in development at Obsidian Entertainment.

Let's see, we've gone through Microsoft and EA, who's next? Ah yes, Ubisoft, bringing the Watch Dogs and Assassin's Creed, plus whatever else they might have laying about. Splinter Cell? Rabbids? Will this be the first presser of the year that features a Wii U game? Tune in to Spike TV's stream and find out!

A new Just Dance game, called Just Dance 2014, has leaked ahead of an expected announcement by Ubisoft at their E3 press conference. A listing for the game has appeared on Xbox.com, containing screenshots and some brief information on the title, which has given up sequel numbering in favour of a sports game-like annual schedule. The latest opus of the Just Dance franchise will make you dance even more and will be once again the ultimate casual rendezvous of the year. This new opus will be even more social as you will be able to connect and dance with players from all over the world and share a unique dancing experience with them. It becomes the party expert and features today iconic pop culture references. New modes will be available, letting you and your friends experience parties the way only Just Dance knows how! Yes, they used the word "opus" twice. It's listed for just the Xbox 360, and is due in October. Just Dance 2014 [Xbox, via NeoGAF]

No doubt Ubisoft would have preferred you watch this within the context of the company's big E3 press conference. Ah well. You may as well watch it here instead, right now. Not sure where this leaked from - there are multiple copies floating around, some like this with English subtitles, other in Cyrillic - but the actual language track is in English, so enjoy. It is exactly what you'd expect of a big, expensive E3 trailer. Lots and lots of fancy pre-rendered cinematics showing the systems and "mood" of the game. The clip opens giving us a taste of not just the inter-connected future of the Watch Dogs world, but of the kind of people star Aiden Pearce will be up against. You know, architects and graphic designers who shop for women on the internet. Then the guns come out - it's an E3 trailer after all - the cops show up and we get a look at what must surely be one of the game's more useful special attacks. WD-E3-CGI-Trailer-UPlay-EXP 480 [Vimeo]

Limbic Entertainment, who are building the handsome new Might & Magic game for Ubisoft, have just announced the start of “Open Dev” for the game. But what does this cryptic phrase mean? Which part of the current community-infused, early-access, crowdy gaming zeitgeist are they actually riffing off here? Well, it’s… different. They are allowing us to vote on various aspects of how they develop the game overall. For example, right now you can vote on how a dungeon gets made. The explain: “This week we’ll start with the general concept. The vote will be open until next Tuesday. After you have decided for one general concept, we will go into detail. So stay tuned for the dungeon fine tuning!”

Weird. Is it a gimmick? Time will tell, I suppose. They’ve detailed all this a bit more in a video, which you can see below.(more…)

Since launching almost two years ago, Ubisoft's game of guitar studies Rocksmith has garnered 1.4 million sales. In the press release past the break, Ubisoft boasts it has sold 3 million DLC tracks to date and promises "exciting Rocksmith news" at E3 next week.

Rocksmith was met with a mixed reception. Our own review criticized Rocksmith for its lack of music theory education, awkward audio latency issues and dearth of all nuance in the automatic difficulty tuner. An expansion focusing on the bass was introduced back in August of last year.

It's a funny thing, working as a reporter who covers the video game industry. Often, video game publishers try to treat you like you're part of their marketing arm. Sometimes they ask for some very strange things. This morning, Ubisoft sent us a handful of screenshots from their upcoming role-playing game, South Park: The Stick of Truth. The images looked great, so we shared them with you. But apparently someone at Ubisoft flipped the wrong switch, because shortly after our story went live, a PR representative frantically emailed to ask us to take down the screenshot of Cartman farting fire. Later in the afternoon, they also asked gaming press to take down a second screenshot, which involved an unidentified character getting an anal probe. "Due to a technical error," a Ubisoft repsentative said, "we mistakenly sent you two screenshots that are not approved for distribution by the ESRB for 'crude and/or offensive language,' and for 'offensive depictions or ridicule of basic bodily functions.' Can you please remove them from your gallery, and ensure they aren’t posted in the future?" The ESRB is the Entertainment Software Rating Board—the folks responsible for all those Ts and Ms on game labels. They handle the guidelines and rules surrounding how games and game-related content are rated and distributed. It was a strange request, the type of thing I can't imagine would make it past the desks of the notoriously controversial creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Sure enough, you may have noticed a number of game websites pull the images from their previews of the upcoming RPG. We censored one of the images, because we thought the initial request was silly and wanted to have some fun with it. But after the second request, we told Ubisoft that we had no intention of pulling the images. Published images are published. Pulling those screenshots would have been doing a disservice to our readers—and insulting your intelligence in the process. So we decided to dig around a little bit to figure out just what happened. We reached out to Ubisoft, but they never got back to us. Then we heard back from the ESRB. Turns out, the ESRB never asked anyone to pull any images. According to an ESRB representative, the ratings board is perfectly okay with gaming websites hosting those screenshots. There are different guidelines for materials meant for marketing and those meant for editorial, the ESRB told us. Ubisoft was going by the guidelines meant for marketing. The ESRB has no problem with any gaming websites using those images. In other words, those images didn't need to be pulled.

Yes, it's changed publishers and been delayed a few times, but South Park: The Stick of Truth still exists, and it still looks amazing. Here are some new screenshots from the Obsidian-developed RPG, which is written by the show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Originally slated for last year (and then earlier this year) as a THQ game, South Park: The Stick of Truth was purchased by Ubisoft when THQ went bankrupt back in January. No release date just yet, but it'll be at E3 next week.

South Park: The Stick of Truth is a fantastical universe built on a foundation of realism: "In terms of a fourth-grade boy, magic really is farting," producer Nathan Davis proclaims. In the Obsidian-developed, now Ubisoft published role-playing game, that foundation is the essence of your character's power.

Choosing to align with either Cartman and his human faction or with Stan, Kyle and the elves they command, your customizable character will offer his mysterious command of flatulence to defeat his enemies and recover the fabled 'Stick of Truth.' Known throughout the land as "the new kid" (and, yes, even as the "Dragonborn"), your character wields special abilities based on the bodily function - such as "cup-a-spell," cupping foul smelling attacks and throwing them toward enemies and the environment for massive explosive damage.

It's the most South Park game you'll ever play and, with it's absolute perfect mimicry of the show's art style, it's the most loyal adaptation the series has seen in video games.

We may be coming to the twilight of the current console generation but these old dogs can still learn some new tricks, as this making-of video for Watch_Dogs shows. That's right, hero Aiden Pearce will be able to walk with his hands in his pockets. This is actual gameplay, folks, NOT PRE-RENDER. Skip ahead to 1:12 to see what all the fuss is about. Going through the library of titles I have on my shelf, nobody walks around, in gameplay, with their hands in their pockets. Anything come to your mind? To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

Okay, any Assassins' Creed cosplay is going to start with a white hood, but soon after that you're going to need a weapon. Comic book legend Todd McFarlane provides, with a replica of Edward Kenway's Hidden Blade Gauntlet so pretty you can barely tell it's plastic. McFarlane Toys is doing lovely things with the Assassin's Creed license, using up all the white paint to create some really sexy assassin figures, as seen at Toy Fair earlier this year. McFarlane has been a champion of franchises traditional toy companies wouldn't touch, catering to the adult collector with stunning original and licensed works. His company's work is so distinctive that I knew where this replica Hidden Blade Guantlet came from the moment I saw it. "You think it's leather until you actually touch it," McFarlane told me during an interview earlier this week, obviously proud of what his company has created. "We're simulating the look of leather on it, down to where it tightens around your wrist... there are wrinkles. We were looking at real leather when we sculpted it. Looking at these images I curse my giant size and massive forearms — one size fits most does not apply to me. Then again, were I to dress all in white I'd look less like an assassin, more like a slow-moving cloud bank. At least I would be a well-armed cloud bank. This thing look downright dangerous. "It does," agrees McFarlane. "I think from a distance people will go 'Whoa, what is that?' When you press the spring it actually shoots out, like a blade should. There's a snap to it. Then you get to the end and realize you can curl the tip on it, so it's not going to do any real damage." Awww. McFarlane Toys' Hidden Wrist Blade is an incredibly detailed piece of role-play gear that's sure to have countless Edward Kenway cosplayers checking weaponry off of their list and moving on to making vests and hoods. A GameStop exclusive shipping in the fall, it'll be available for preorder soon at the retailer's website for $39.99.

Ubisoft teases the updates and announcements you can expect to see from E3 2013.

It's pretty rare for a game series to get as many chances as Call of Juarez has. After a middling debut, the series drummed up lots of critical goodwill with Bound in Blood, and then absolutely threw it all away with the awful The Cartel. Now, Techland has ventured back to the Wild West with Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, and the developer's got something to prove.

Perhaps seeking to distance itself from The Cartel, Gunslinger is a different beast in almost every way, and it works. The most immediately obvious difference is the art style. Instead of the mostly realistic style of past Juarez games, Gunslinger opts for a more stylized and bombastic look. It's as if the developers threw anime, Mad Max, and The Good the Bad and the Ugly and Borderlands into a blender. That might sound weird, but it's a refreshing and enjoyable change.

Gunslinger also has very little in common with its predecessors when it comes to story. The only real connection is a collectible with a short biography of Ray McCall, one of the protagonists from the first two games. This time around, Gunslinger puts players into the dusty spurs of bounty hunter Silas Greaves.

I can see where this going. The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot is going to bludgeon us into submission with a series of amusing trailery missives, until we feel obliged to try it out. It’s is F2P, after all. But actually this latest trailer – the archer – shows a lot more of the game in-play than I’d expected. And it actually looks okay. At least as okay as Craig’s hands-on suggested it might be.

Hmm!(more…)

Ubisoft Montreal teases a new character class in its latest trailer for the free-to-play PC loot-'em-up The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot. Mighty Quest features asynchronous multiplayer gameplay built around unique dungeon-building mechanics. It also includes hamster-powered spike traps, if that's the sort of thing you look for in your dungeon crawlers. Would-be looters can check out a free alpha version at the Mighty Quest website.

Cheesy-awesome retro news today, as Ubisoft has announced the release of a Blood Dragon asset pack for the Far Cry 3 map editor. The "Mark IV Style" pack for the editor allows players to create levels with the same neon-drenched visuals as Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (pictured).

The pack is available now for free on Xbox 360 and PS3. We haven't spotted it on either Steam or Uplay, but we're checking with Ubisoft regarding a PC release.

Time is a meaningless construct. A philosophically confusing frame that demeans our very existence when we acknowledge it. Destroy your clocks and watches, they are prisons, trapping you in a mental cells! Stop being tools of the elite chronologistia, and allow yourself to be free. Let’s not consider the seconds ticking off, falling like dandruff on the shoulder of life; the minutes that build up and up and up until the dam breaks and we all get covered in sticky time juice; the hours that segment our day but lazily repeat, not even having the common decency to go up to 24; the days that.. ooh, today’s Wednesday! That means Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger is out! Hooray for time and dates. And hooray for acknowledging Call Of Juarez: Juarez’s launch with a new trailer on that very day! There’s 4 minutes of footage, which covers everything that has been said about the game and finally demonstrates the unreliable narrator with guns schtick. It is below.(more…)

Sometimes, the art behind a video game is done by the people making the game. Other times, some of the creative process is handled by an external party, like Massive Black, or Atomhawk. Two Dots are another such company, a team of artists who help behind the scenes on everything from a game's world design to its box art and promotional posters. No doubt you've seen a lot of the art featured below, whether online, on your shelf or in a magazine. Now you know where it came from. Some of the games they've worked on include Assassin's Creed III, Assassin's Creed IV, Splinter Cell Blacklist, Sleeping Dogs, Watch Dogs and Driver: San Francisco. There's even, if you look, some art down here for the mythical Rainbow Six: Patriots. You can check out more of Two Dots' work at their company site. To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they’re big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), click on the “expand” button in the bottom-right corner. Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of both their professional and personal portfolios. If you're in the business and have some concept, environment, promotional or character art you'd like to share, drop us a line!

Case in point: a four-minute (!) launch trailer, consisting of Mr. Greaves shooting people in the face with a wide variety of weapons. While Techland's latest entry into the Call of Juarez brand of shooters is looking better by the minute, I can't help but be wary after The Cartel. We'll see. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is hitting PS3, Xbox 360 and PC tomorrow. Let's hope it's as fun as it looks. Questions? Comments? Contact the author of this post at andras-AT-kotaku-DOT-com.

While it’s the fourth game in the Call Of Juarez series, Gunslinger is not directly connected to its preceding brethren. A Western that tells the unreliable memories of cowboy bounty hunter Silas Greaves, through first-person shooting, for a remarkably low £12 pricetag. Should it climb atop a horse for dairy consumption, or might it be the sheriff of this here town? Here’s wot I think:

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A portion of a Playstation interview with Ubisoft's Jonathan Morin...

P: What was the first seed of the idea that later grew into Watch_Dogs?

Jonathan Morin: It started as a conversation. Four years ago we were talking about humans exchanging their lives and their details through their phones, and about how that could change our everyday lives.

When you make a new game where the mandate is broad and you have the right to create something new, you want to make sure that the people around you are all working on a subject they’re passionate about – something they really want to explore. So listening to those conversations helped come up with ideas. Like, “we all want to dig into these issues, so let’s try it out.” As the conversation grew, we started to add crazy ideas, like the profiler, and when you start prototyping those things, that’s when it explodes.

As with any jump from one console generation to the next, PlayStation 4 owners will expect to see hardware that sits at the very cutting edge of innovation, offering unparalleled processing power and an arsenal of exciting new features.

However, the onus on game developers to bring bold new gameplay innovation to the table is every bit as integral to that generational leap, and it’s a responsibility that the whipsmart team behind Ubisoft’s future-tech open world action title Watch_Dogs are really tearing into.

As detailed in our coverage last week, the game’s core conceit – that its central hero, hacker Aiden Pearce’s primary weapon is not a gun, but an entire city – is one of the boldest, most ambitious ideas to come along in some time. To find out more about the game’s attempts to re-write the action rulebook, PlayStation.Blog sat down with the game’s creative director Jonathan Morin.

PlayStation.Blog: What was the first seed of an idea that later grew into Watch_Dogs?

Jonathan Morin: It started as a conversation. Four years ago we were talking about humans exchanging their lives and their details through their phones, and about how that could change our everyday lives.

When you make a new game where the mandate is broad and you have the right to create something new, you want to make sure that the people around you are all working on a subject they’re passionate about – something they really want to explore. So listening to those conversations helped come up with ideas. Like, “we all want to dig into these issues, so let’s try it out.” As the conversation grew, we started to add crazy ideas, like the profiler, and when you start prototyping those things, that’s when it explodes.

PSB: You started development four years ago. To many people, that might seem like a very long time to devote to one game…

JM: Well, there’s always a conception phase where there’s not a lot of people involved. We were only 10 for a long time, then we were 20 or 30. You need a certain kind of people – people who like to dig into subjects and research, try elements out and be comfortable with failure. Those were the kind of people we had.

It was a long process to define what was going to be special about the game. It was pretty early on when we ended up talking about controlling an entire city. The traffic light hack was one of the first prototypes we did. That really generated an emotion. “Woah, what? Can I do it on the other one too?”

That’s the kind of thing where you say to yourself “the promise of doing this is insane.” But you need to make it real and build a system around it that works. So those four years became a big challenge for some very smart people.

PSB: The core idea of having a whole city as your weapon is hugely ambitious – were you ever forced to make compromises to make the concept work in practice?

JM: Not really. There’s no real compromise there. It’s a very broad subject and had a tendency to create an infinite number of ideas when you brainstorm it. There’s a moment when you have to say “let’s stop here, let’s not go there”.

I don’t see that as a compromise, I see that as a necessity. If you want to make a game that has quality and in which everything reacts with each other in an elegant way, the only way to pull it off is to understand the barriers.

Constraint can be seen as a negative from the outside, but when you’re on the inside, having clear constraints helps people produce ideas faster. The constraints are re-assuring. This is where we stop. Then the rest is like, if there’s a subject that is bigger than just one game and there are a lot of ideas, and it’s successful, well… that’s not a problem, it’s a good thing.

PSB: And what about Aidan Pierce? How did his character take shape?

JM: One of the big things about Aidan Pierce is that he’s very street smart. We had a lot of conversations about that. It sounds straightforward, but very early on we looked at a game like Assassin’s Creed and how characters are and how they move. One of the things we felt was missing in every game was contextualisation. All those guys feel like robots. They move in the same way regardless of the situation.

Can we change that? Someone who is smart and is supposed not to attract attention to himself is going to walk in a certain way, and is going to be aware of his surroundings. So we put a lot of effort into that contextualisation. And that influenced everything, especially his look.

Like his mask. If there’s press and media in the game universe, he needs to react to it. Contextually he’s going to put his mask on when he starts doing bad things so that he’s not noticed.

The hat? He doesn’t want to be seen, so he can pull the brim down – like all those actors in Hollywood trying to avoid the paparazzi. They always have caps on. It’s cool, it’s different. The hoodie has been done to death.

The coat – same thing. It hides a lot of his body and he can hide things underneath. It’s also a cool way to interact with the wind physics and create nice continuity of movement. It creates a second wave of movement. It feels a lot more realistic for the player.

It sounds very easy and smart but it took years to have these ideas. Iteration upon iteration.

PSB: Can you talk a little about the ‘PS4 difference’? How does next-gen enhance your game?

JM: The experience is the same. We’re not removing anything from the core experience on either platform. We’re not eager to create a game for a machine. We’re making a game because we think it’s cool. When you create an idea you shouldn’t base that idea only on what’s possible or impossible to do on a machine. If you do I don’t think you’re doing the right thing.

When PS4 showed up, there was definitely a portion of the game we could push forward – the wind simulation, the water, the realisation of certain AI behaviours. So those elements are magnified versions of the core experience in the next gen.

PSB: What aspect of PS4 has surprised or excited you most?

JM: One thing I like about the PS4 is its philosophy, which from a creative perspective is an important thing. I think the next generation of games will be more than ever at the service of the player. Players are now the ones who drive what next gen should be. They’re connected all the time. The way they live their lives are different. So we need to pay attention to how society changes to give them a form of entertainment that is a natural extrapolation of that. I think that Sony understands that.

PSB: I know you’re leaving your big multiplayer reveal for another day, but can you talk in general terms about how you’re approaching that part of the experience?

JM: You can play single player or multiplayer in the game. You’re always in your own session. If you’re playing alone, you’re playing alone. So it means there are millions of people alone in their own sessions. We’ve simply added the ability to merge those sessions together at the pacing of our choice.

You can be free-roaming and naturally getting into some kind of activity that makes you intertwine with another player. You interact with them, then you’re done and it goes away. It’s not like you have someone in your game the whole time who can mess with your game, but it’s definitely the beginning of a solution to tackle those taboos.

Players often worry that another player is going to come into their game and break their experience. That’s an old school statement. We need to fix that, and it’s a design problem, not a technical problem – how do you bring two players together and let them interact in a way that’s pleasing?

One thing I can say is that when we watch people play together in Watch_Dogs, most of the time they don’t even realise that it was another player. There are no signs. There is a great thing there that someone can be in the experience and naturally enter a situation. They become part of the story. “That was another player? No way! That’s awesome!” They didn’t notice. That’s spectacular!

As a developer, I can immediately tell when it’s another player in a game – jeez, that guy doesn’t walk like an AI, that’s a player. But in Watch_Dogs, players won’t notice that immediately. It’s a new form of emotion and it fits perfectly in the Watch_Dogs universe where everybody watches everyone else.

In what's come across as far too amicable to be called a dispute, Notion Games has accepted Ubisoft's request and changed the name of its upcoming platformer to Super Ubie Land. The PC and Mac platformer, successfully funded through Kickstarter to launch later this year, was originally christened Super Ubi Land. Ubisoft then stepped in and asked for the name to be changed, which Notion's now done with little fuss.

By the way, that's our interpretation above of how Super Ubie Land's new logo will look. As if the sheer quality didn't make that obvious.

Don’t get your hopes up for seeing the next game from influential designer Patrice Desilets—a mysterious project called 1666—anytime soon. The latest update on 1666’s fate came today during a Ubisoft investor call when company president Yves Guillemot said the following: "So, for Patrice, after more than two months of discussions with him, we couldn't align our vision both on project development and team management," said Guillemot, "so consequently our collaboration has ended, and we have suspended 1666 for an undisclosed period of time." When Ubisoft acquired some of the work in development from THQ’s Montreal studio, it seemed like Desilets would be returning to the place where he helped create beloved titles Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Assassin’s Creed II. But the reunion ended in an acrimonious split from Ubisoft, with Desilets saying he was removed from the premises. With Desilets no longer at Ubisoft, it was to be expected that 1666 might get cancelled. But, according to Kotaku columnist Superannuation, suspending the game prevents Desilets from getting it back: Ubisoft "indefinitely suspending production" on 1666 is way for them to cancel the game w/o giving back Desilets his IP as per his contract. — superannuation (@supererogatory) May 15, 2013 Desilets contract specifies that IP rights revert to him in event of the game's cancellation, similar to the arrangement Del Toro had w/ THQ — superannuation (@supererogatory) May 15, 2013 Hence the talk of why Patrice is pursuing legal options in order to assume control of the IP Ubisoft optioned. — superannuation (@supererogatory) May 15, 2013 So, unless some kind of resolution happens in the future, we may not get any real details about what the game was going to be. Given the quality of games that Desilets has been in charge of, that’s a major bummer.

I am a monologue trailer. I'm going to say things in a deeper than natural voice. I'm also going to wait ... (wait, no wait some more) before I finish a full sentence. I'm going to tell you how cool I am between quick flashy edits of me stabbing dudes. Yes, I am a protagonist and I'll finish off by saying something supposedly profound.

Ubisoft has shipped and digitally sold 6 million units of Far Cry 3 since its release late last year. That's 1.5 million more than the figure reported in Ubi's Q3 report back in February.

Assassin's Creed 3 sits at 12.5 million shipped and digitally sold (it was at over 12 million back in February), while Just Dance 4 is up to 8.5 million shipped.

Ubisoft's Anno Online has opened the city gates for an open beta, granting all access to the free-to-play city building strategy game. Interested lords and ladies should set course to anno-online.com for access. New players logging in during the first week of the open beta will receive a "premium ship." Players who participated in the closed beta will receive several rewards. The greatest gift? Their data won't be wiped per the standard beta transition, so they can continue on.

Based on Anno 1404 (previously known as Dawn of Discovery in the States), Anno Online has players build and develop a medieval city, support the population and develop trade routes. Anno Online will also add a guild system sometime this month for players to cooperate with friends.