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Ubisoft’s vaguely cyberpunk open-world thriller Watch Dogs has the worst minimap in history. It’s so amorphous and blobby, like someone sneezed on the screen, and it miraculously oozed into a fully functioning UI element. I’m sorry. I know that’s not really the main issue at hand here, but it had to be said. But yes, Watch Dogs! It looked rather promising – though somewhat upsettingly action-focused – during E3, and new footage only adds fuel to the electrical fire. Which is rather the opposite of how you’re supposed to deal with those things, but this is a rare case where that’s a good thing. Well, if you like Assassin’s-Creed-style chases and magical cell phone techno-magic, anyway.

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Watch_Dogs is back. In reality it never really went away, but it has been a while since E3 2012. A lot of development has been done on our side. We know you have many questions. Believe this: we’ll do our best in the upcoming months to answer all of them… well, most of them.

For now, though, the whole development team is very proud to show you this new gameplay demo where you’ll get to see yet another facet of Watch_Dogs in action. In it, you can see that Watch_Dogs will be a game of opportunities and choices; of connections and consequences.

As we continue our march towards launch you’ll get to know Aiden Pearce, our mysterious protagonist. Learn what drives him and what makes him tick. You’ll get to experience and understand the concept of a hyper-connected, smart city. You’ll realize what it is like to have complete control over a major city right at your fingertips and the chaos it can create.

Watch_Dogs will be available on PlayStation 4 at launch, as well as the PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system. Keep checking back with us by visiting the official website, Facebook page and Twitter account.

All the news from PlayStation Meeting 2013

PlayStation Meeting 2013: The Future of Gaming is Here with PlayStation 4

DUALSHOCK 4 Revealed: Pushing the Boundaries of Play

PlayStation 4 Developers: The Shape of Things to Come

Killzone: Shadow Fall Announced for PlayStation 4

inFAMOUS: Second Son Announced for PlayStation 4

Racing evolves on PlayStation 4 with Driveclub

Watch_Dogs Coming to PlayStation 4 at Launch

Destiny Coming to PlayStation 4

Knack – A Brand New Platformer for the PlayStation 4

The Witness: An Open-World Puzzle Game on PlayStation 4

#assassinscreed Eddie Bennun is a senior concept artist at Ubisoft, whose most recent finished project was Vita title Assassin's Creed III: Liberation. He's currently working on an unannounced game at the publisher. More »

Ubisoft has announced some of the upcoming changes it will make to Far Cry 3. The headline changes include the option to reset all the outposts on Rook Island. This can only be done after you've conquered all of the posts and completed the game. This will also hide incomplete side missions and quests in the area.

Assassin's Creed 3's first downloadable content pack for the "Tyranny of King Washington" is available today on Xbox 360 and PC, along with the PS3 following the standard weekly update.

The three-part story begins with "The Infamy," as an alternate history unfolds with George Washington's head getting bloated and heavy as he wears the crown of the Americas. Infamy can be purchased on its own for $10 (800 MSP) or in the Assassin's Creed 3 Season Pass bundle for $30. The content will also be available on Wii U at some point in our current timeline.

Ubisoft is taking a cue from Far Cry 3 fans, issuing a series of changes to both the single-player campaign and multiplayer mode. The most notable changes involve the ability to reset all outposts - allowing you to assault and capture each one again -and a new higher difficulty mode called Master.

On the multiplayer side, the additions focus on user-generated maps. Ubisoft promises a "more intuitive feedback interface" with the ability to add "feedback tags" to better parse custom maps. There will also be beta map testing available to editors, so they no longer need to create a map and simply publish it. Others who wish to help during beta testing of these maps can hop into a special playlist and test it out, and authors can go into a spectator mode to watch those playing.

Ubisoft promises a series of patches to add all of this stuff to Far Cry 3, so don't expect it all at once. The full list of changes is available through the source link below.

[Thanks, Thomas.]

#assassinscreed I admit that I've had my doubts about Assassin's Creed III in the three months since I had last played it. More »

“That’s an excellent question and one that I cannot answer [laughs]. There is always something more to tell about our characters and more side-stories to explore for Altair, Ezio and Connor. We’re building games about the lives of these people, but there is so much stuff to explore in history. And that’s what is magical about Assassin’s Creed. We have an endless quantity of material and I like to be able to show different periods to players.” - creative director Marc-Alexis Cote

Ubisoft is going to push this yearly series as far as they can take it. How far is going to be too far?

"By the end of the last episode you will see how this relates to Connor and the real George Washington. This experience is canon." - game director Marc-Alexis Côté

Well...that's certainly interesting to find out. I guess it's just a DLC pack just for fun. It's going to mean something to the overall story. I don't even play AC games and I'm intrigued!

#watchdogs Watch Dogs, the impressive-looking game that stole the show at last year's E3, will be out this holiday for "all home consoles," according to leaked marketing materials received by Kotaku today. More »

#assassinscreed Earlier today, Ubisoft announced that the Assassin's Creed series would be getting a new game in "fiscal 2014" that would feature a new protagonist and a new setting. More »

#breaking Ubisoft announced that a new Assassin's Creed game featuring a new hero and time period will be coming in fiscal year 2014, which could be anywhere from this October to next September April 1, 2013 to March 31, 2014. More »

Speaking in an earnings call today, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said "fans certainly won't have to wait four more years for the next Far Cry." With Far Cry 3 performing "way better than expected," helping it to ship 4.5 million, Ubisoft is keen to take advantage of what it feels is the right brand of gameplay for the series, despite partially attributing the third entry's profitability to the four-year-wait between it and Far Cry 2.

#screengrab At the DICE convention in Las Vegas, Ubisoft's Xavier Poix illustrates his talk about Ubisoft's creation of launch games for new platforms using the Rayman Origins UbiArt game engine to essentially make an interactive slide-show. It's a side-scroller as Powerpoint, steered with an Xbox 360 controller. More »

"The depth of what you can do with that console is really hard to get across unless you play with it. It's different from the Wii, where seeing was believing. With the Wii U, people really need to experience it. The whole idea of the asymmetrical gameplay and using two screens to do two very different things is not simple to explain to people. ZombiU was designed to be a game for core players launching with a new Nintendo console. We should have communicated better in this respect to let people know what kind of experience to expect. It wasn't obvious enough that there would be a new controller and new gameplay and a new skill set to develop.

We are at a new start in the industry, a moment where gaming is no longer just for geeks. We have consoles like the Wii to thank for that, and the rise in mobile gaming. It's all leading towards interconnectivity. What will you do on your phone in the future will impact what you do on your console back home, and so on. There will be different applications for different devices. You've got a new toy to play with, and for the first time you need to think differently. It's hard to achieve but it's the best moment." - Xavier Poix, managing director of Ubisoft

Let's hope Ubisoft keeps feeling that way this generation. They've had good support out of the gate, but I'd hate to think they'd slack off as the years continue.

In Splinter Cell: Blacklist, a decidedly less gravelly-voiced Sam Fisher heads up new government outfit Fourth Echelon, an anti-terrorism task force out to prevent the titular blacklist - an escalating list of threats suddenly levied at the United States by a terrorist group calling themselves The Engineers.

Sam and his team (including series regular Anna 'Grim' Grímsdóttir) operate high above the clouds within a massive transport plane, a literal and narrative vehicle that can whisk Sam & Co. away to foreign locales at a moment's notice. Despite being the boss, Sam foregoes the corner office in favor of continuing his hands-on approach to combatting threats to national security in his latest covert op, the first from developer Ubisoft Toronto.

#coverstory Last week, while I was checking out Splinter Cell: Blacklist, I had a long, interesting talk with the game's creative director Maxime Béland. More »

#procreation Plenty of my friends have had babies, so I knew what to expect. The woman goes into labour. There is the physical pain. You rub the back and say ‘there there'. You watch the little lump of flesh flop out like a wriggling trout. You shed the tears, you kiss the baby on the forehead. You take the photographs, you take the baby home. The baby sleeps for sixteen hours a day. More »

#ubisoft Not unless you want them to actually fire back. More »

#interview One of the more inflammatory aspects of 2010's Splinter Cell: Conviction was the fact that it included a number of gruesome interactive torture sequences. The game, in which you play as rogue spec-ops badass Sam Fisher, featured a number of ticking time-bomb scenarios in which Sam would torture various bad guys to get information. More »

See some of Sam Fisher's new gear in action as we get our first hands-on with Blacklist.

The E3 2012 demo for Splinter Cell: Blacklist introduced a savage, player-controlled torture scene, asking players to press and hold a button to twist a knife into an enemy's throat, hoping he spills some information. That torture scene will not be in the final version of Blacklist, following negative response from early players.

"Definitely we are not going to see when the game's coming out that there are torture scenes in it," Blacklist producer Andrew Wilson said. "That scene is not there any more. I've not really heard anyone say they loved it."

Wilson said the scene may have been missing context, making it seem like "tough material."

"We've scaled a lot of that back, and as we've gone through the process of development there are always things that you feel are not working as well," he said. "Every game does this, and cuts certain things." Just not throats, apparently.

#rumor Bizarrely, within the same 24-hour period that Ubisoft says the Prince of Persia series is "paused", footage has emerged of a project that sure seems like a Prince of Persia reboot. More »

“Brand management is a tricky thing. It needs people's attention a lot. I think it is fair to say that, right now, Prince of Persia is being paused. But we said the same thing for some other brands that suddenly popped up because a team is willing to do it.

I'm not scared at all for Prince of Persia fans, We'll find something to entertain them with in the future. Prince of Persia is part of Ubisoft's portfolio. As a matter of fact, we sometimes iterate on franchises and sometimes we give them time to breathe and time to grow, or time to rest. Prince of Persia is as important as any other franchise for Ubisoft. As soon as we have something to show, we will.” - Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat

I think the Prince of Persia franchise needs to find its voice again. Somewhere along the line, it seems like Ubisoft forgot what the series was about. It got cluttered up with extra nonsense that diluted the fun. Let's hope the series finds itself in the future.

Amazon's digital games deal of the week covers two exemplary bundles, the Microsoft 5-Game Arcade Pack and the Settlers Bundle from Ubisoft.

The Microsoft 5-Game Arcade Pack includes Steam versions of Deadlight, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Iron Brigade, Mark of the Ninja and Toy Soldiers, all for $10. The standard price for this bundle is $70, for a savings of $60. These games are also on sale individually on Amazon, Toy Soldiers for $2.50 and the rest for $3.75.

The Settlers Bundle offers Windows versions of Dawn of Discovery Gold, Heritage of Kings: The Settlers, The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom Deluxe Gold Edition and its "The Two Kings" DLC pack, and The Settlers: Rise of an Empire Gold Edition. This bundle is currently $16, compared with the normal price of $85.

Also for PC, Fable: The Lost Chapters is $2.50, rather than $10. For Steam, the Age of Empires 3 Complete Collection is $10 via Amazon.

Even members of clandestine orders with a strict dress code can appreciate a good deal. GameStop is offering the PC version of Assassin's Creed 3 for $30, while Amazon is discounting the romp through alt-history to $35. Neither retailer has stated when the offers will expire.

Ubisoft has announced the first episode in the three-part Tyranny of King Washington DLC pack - dubbed "The Infamy" - is launching on February 19. The add-on will be available simultaneously on PC, Xbox 360 and PC for $10 as a standalone download or included within the $30 Assassin's Creed 3 Season Pass.

#appreview Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is one of my favorite puzzle role-playing games. I loved it on the DS. I loved it on Xbox Live Arcade. I've got it for my PC. This week the game finally arrived on iOS, and I grabbed it immediately. More »

Ghost Recon Online's latest patch drops a new map, new game mode and a clan match feature into the free-to-play title, along with general house cleaning and fixes. Patch 0.10.0 hit yesterday, at the same time as the Triton avatar pack, which boasts naval-themed avatars.

The new mode, Holdout, sees teams race to a single capture point and attempt to defend it until the end of the match. Balaklava Sub-Pen, the update's new map, was designed specifically for Holdout rounds. It's a symmetrical, compact area inspired by a secret underground submarine facility in Ukraine that was operational until 1933. Clan Matches build upon the implementation of October's Clan feature, allowing players to set up matches against other clans.

The Triton pack offers new helmets and armor vests, upgraded weapons and seaborne avatars. The Triton pack will be available for a limited time, during January only. Take a closer look at the Ghost Recon Online update below.

#assassinscreed Priced at $10 for the first episode, the long-teased "Tyranny of George Washington" DLC comes to Assassin's Creed III next month. The alternate reality add-on comes out a day after the U.S.' President's Day holiday and shows a Ratonhnhaké:ton who never joined the Assassin's Order. Titled "The Infamy," the first episode will be followed by two more installments on the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii U. PC players can get the DLC as part of the downloadable ACIII Deluxe Edition. More »

Just a day before it was due out, Ubisoft is pushing back ShootMania Storm until April. The game's new release date is April 10, with an open beta scheduled from February 12 until launch.

Developer Nadeo noted the additional time allows the studio to release the shooter/builder at an acceptable standard of quality.

"Nadeo's model of development has always been to be very close to the community, and following the release of the Beta 2 in December, we received a tremendous amount of information from the very active ShootMania community," said Nadeo Live managing director Anne Boudel-Jouin. "For a living, online multiplayer title like this the work is never done, but these extra few weeks will allow us to polish the game further and release it to the level of quality we think our players deserve."