Ubisoft Message Board older than one year ago

Hey, everyone! What’s free and now available to everyone with an internet connection? Hang on, my phone’s ringing… What? She’s crying! You’re right, I should stop and think before posting open-ended questions to a popular website. No, I guess I didn’t think it through. Look, Dad, there’s no smoke withou – okay! Jeez. Tell her I’m sorry. Hey, everyone! What game’s now free and now available to everyone with an internet connection? Everyone answering Anno Online, I appreciate your ability to see past a “your mother” joke. You’ve made a retirement age lady very happy.(more…)

Take a look at a beautiful underwater Rayman Legends level in the new 20,000 Lums Under The Sea world.

The design team at Basic have been working with Ubisoft lately on things like packaging, advertising and trailers. Feeling that the company's website could also "be improved upon", they put together a pitch for a complete redesign of Ubisoft.com. While it never went anywhere - and sounds boring as hell - it's actually a really interesting way of looking at how much design can (or can not) go into a video game company's presence on the internet, and at the opportunities there are to present more than just links to a store and some customer support. The pitch can be viewed at the link below. Ubisoft [BASIC]

IGN, as it happens. And you can see footage of some GTA-type wandering about in Watch Dogs below. The handsome corporate gaming site was the first to get to grips with Ubisoft’s action-hacking game about the timeless love affair between phones, surveillance, guns and explosions in urban areas, and it looks quite good. Like the tennis.(more…)

Steam's deals for this weekend are action-packed, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is 33 percent off ($40.19), while the Deluxe Edition also on sale for $53.59 until May 13. Early birds can play the game for free until 1pm Pacific on Sunday.

Trials Evolution is also part of the weekend sale, as the game's Gold Edition is 25 percent off ($14.99) until May 13. The special edition of the game also includes the single-player tracks and skill games from Trials HD.

I'm tired of Aliens and Star Wars references in video games. But references to HBO's great drama The Wire? I'll take more. Above, a scene from the interesting upcoming game Watch Dogs, which enables you to hack into—and see through—security cameras in a modern Chicago. Below, the presumed inspiration: When I asked the game's senior producer if that's where it came from, he smiled.

Here we go again. I'm at a preview of a big game coming from Ubisoft, hoping that it's going to be as terrific as it seems. I can be skeptical, but I'll be damned if I can cease being optimistic. Watch Dogs is looking and sounding good. We're in a conference room. Same one where a different team at Ubisoft Montreal talked up Assassin's Creed III rather impressively a year ago. A few of this new game's creators are there. One is going to play the game on a PS4 controller. Two are going to talk about it. Me, Brian Crecente from Polygon, and a bunch of Canadian reporters are there sitting around a long table. The gameplay will wait. First comes the spiel, and pretty soon comes the cascade of good ideas that make Watch Dogs, already a head-turner when it debuted at E3 last year, a fall 2013 game near the the top of the list of the ones I can't wait to play. They go through the basics, setting up their character—vigilante Aiden Pearce—and their game world—a modern Chicago wracked with crime and heavily networked by a program called CtOS that is responsible for dotting the city the security cameras. The game is open-world. As Pearce, we'll be running around, stealing cars, shooting bad guys, all the stuff you might think of in a Grand Theft Auto, though they don't mention rival series. You'll also be doing a lot of hacking. Hacking the traffic lights, hacking ATMs, hacking cell phones, hacking any piece of electronics in the game to learn things, change things, and use the city as a weapon. If you'd been aware of Watch Dogs, you knew all that. Then they're bragging about their game engine. Specifically, senior producer Dominic Guey is boasting about how much "dynamism" their game engine can allow. At first what he's talking about sounds like the kind of dynamism we've seen in open world games. But then he starts writing checks that those other games tend not to cash. Here's that bit: "[At] E3 2012, in our demo, the player went to a street corner, hacked a traffic light, caused an accident. That trapped his target. He started a firefight there and then. "Now, theoretically, you could do the exact same thing in any game engine. You could walk up to a street corner, a specific street corner, then you’d hit the button—or not—and a scripted event, something with always the same outcome would happen and there would be an accident. And then if there was a fight… the [artificially-intelligent enemies] would be predesigned or predetermined to go to certain areas and start shooting at the player. Things would be very predictable in the sense that they would always happen in the same way. "But not in Watch Dogs. "The player can go to any of the hundreds of street corners in our city, Chicago, and if there’s a traffic light, he can hack it at any time for any purpose he has. He can do so at any time of day, in any traffic condition with any amount of pedestrians around. And when he does this, will he even cause an accident? I don’t know. It depends on the traffic condition. And if there’s an accident, the other cars will try steering away, avoiding the accident. At E3 that caused a fire—an explosion—in a nearby gas station. But it could have caused hundreds of other things. Now, some of those drivers will be knocked out, pedestrians will try to help those injured people, some pedestrians might call the cops, the cops on this street corner might try to intervene. If a fight starts there, any of those cars can be used as cover by the player or the AIs. And if the player wants to navigate across this busy intersection, you need to be able to do so in a very fluid manner even though that intersection was basically created out of his own will—his own source of action." This sounds pretty great, because, hey, I do want you game developers to be trying to make your gameplay awesome. I'd rather you brag about that than your graphics. And then he's talking about the wind. He's actually showing visualizations of this on the TV behind him. We see city blocks with lots of arrows flowing through them. The arrows are of different colors. Guey is talking about how Chicago is the windy city and how in lots of cities you'll get gusts of wind down the corridors between skyscrapers. They're trying to get that in the game. They want there to be wind gusts when a car rushes by or when the elevated train goes by. Later, when we chat one on one he'll confirm that this is all cosmetic for now. They'd like to make it a gameplay thing—would love to incorporate that wind into the game's driving physics. But it sounds like a maybe, trending toward an unlikely. Still, he reminds me that the game takes place in the fall and I suggest that the higher-end versions of Watch Dogs could do a lot with blowing leaves or even newspapers. He doesn't commit, but, hey, dynamic wind? I want to see it (to the extent you can see wind. You get the idea!). This sounds pretty great, because, hey, I do want you game developers to be trying to make your gameplay awesome. Guey starts promising an exploration of moral gray areas in this game, suggesting that as a vigilante we'll be making decisions about who to help or hurt in this city without being given the spectrum extremes of simply being the nicest or most evil guy around. More on this in another story, I promise. We're on to multiplayer, which they still don't really want to talk about, except to point out that they've shown some versions of it already in their E3 demo and in their February demo shown during the unveiling of the PlayStation 4. In that PS4 demo, they'd had Aiden Pearce running around the city, fighting, hacking and so on. But they also showed/hinted/teased that another player was controlling a security camera in the game. Guey explains at this event I'm at that the other player was in that game on a mission from a faction in Watch Dogs. The mission was to follow Pearce using security cameras. Multiplayer tracking of someone else's gaming hero? OK! That could be cool. I'm in your game, watching you. Nothin' creepy about that at all... nope! Good idea. It's when Guey gets to teasing how awesome the game's "companion apps" will be that it's clearly time to get to some gameplay. Look, it does sound neat that you'll be able to play the game on PC or console while I'm interacting with your game from my phone while riding the bus, but today is not the day to be excited about companion apps. Today is the day to be excited about games that make Wire references: They play the game for about half an hour, and one of the first things that catches my eye is how real the city and its people look. Not in some "good lord, look at all the polygons rendering their faces" kind of real, but in a, hey, "people actually dress like this" and "there's grass growing between the cracks of the sidewalk" kind of real. The clips I have to show you are from about five minutes of footage of a playthrough of what the developers play live with the PS4 controller. That five minutes shows some of the good parts, but not all. For example, what I can't show you is that civilians will notice if you're acting shady and might call the cops, and this will allow you to hack their phone to cancel the call or, as they do in the demo they show me, just knock the phone out of the person's hand. It's such a tiny thing, but knocking a phone out of someone's hand is something I've never seen in a video game. No snark: this is progress! I can show you how Pearce can hack stuff and use it to his advantage when sneaking and fighting guys. Check this out: And here he is hacking while driving: Oh, and this is the bit where he hacks some a Wi-Fi hotspot, uses it to get into the laptop webcam in some guy's apartment, is able to then hack the guy's phone, get his license plate number, track down his car and then apparently have that car added to the player's collection of accessible cars. Here's part of that: Some of the best stuff, sadly, isn't in the clips I've got. Pearce has a cell phone and the player can pull up its interface and add apps to it. Some apps are for legit purposes, some are for criminal activities. One is like the song-identifying Shazam. The developers show this one off by having Pearce walk by a shop where some music is playing. He holds his phone up and IDs the song. Then, using in-game money, he can buy the song and add it to a playlist. I'm not sure if this same app is in play later when, walking by a shop that is playing music he doesn't like, the Ubisoft guy hacks the shop's sound system and changes what song is playing. The thing I keep flip-flopping about with Watch Dogs is how excited I can be for this game, how much it actually is different as opposed to just being dressed up differently. Pearce's phone also has some games in it. Specifically, he's got augmented reality games. Yes, this video game has virtual augmented reality games. They're kind of just a justification for the kind of rooftop-race/score-attack type of challenges we've seen in other open-world games, I guess, but the justification is just so wonderful and executed so well, that I'm immediately a fan. The game we're shown is called NVZN ("Invasion") and has Pearce holding his phone up and, through it, seeing a Chicago that now has purple aliens floating around and attaching themselves to pedestrians, waiting to be shot for high scores. As Pearce is playing the game, a computer-controlled civilian walks by, muttering "This is not a playground." The thing I keep flip-flopping about with Watch Dogs is how excited I can be for this game, how much it actually is different as opposed to just being dressed up differently. There are a lot of neat effects that pop up, including all these displays that hover over all of the people in the game's city, each offering some backstory and maybe affecting how you feel about them. I'm not sure how much that stuff matters. Maybe it will change how I feel about the cops and crooks and civilians I encounter in an open world game. Maybe not. I'm not sure. And for all the cleverness of the hacking, at plenty of times in the demo, I'm reminded that, yeah, this is a game that's ultimately about shooting people: I ask Guey about this later. Did you consider making the game without guns? It's not a violence thing that I'm reacting to. It's a more-of-the-same thing. The guns stuff feels so conventional compared to the hacking. They had these discussions, he tells me, but decided to give people the opportunity to choose their own play style. He doesn't expect that you'll be able to go through the game without using a gun, but he's seen big chunks of the game played with just hacking, stealth and no guns. Watch Dogs does make a very good impression and it's an easy one to root for. Please, let it be different. Please, let it be as refreshing as it seems it can be. My hopes are high. The game will be out by the end of the year on PS4, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, PC and, presumably, whatever they're calling the next Xbox.

Watch_Dogs’s dark vision of technological totalitarianism is heading to PS3 and PS4, and we were lucky enough to see the first live gameplay demo in San Francisco earlier this week (played on a DualShock 4, no less!). We’ve carefully studied the footage, asked pressing questions, and present you with this breakdown. Read on, then submit your questions in the comments below!

Aiden Pierce isn’t your typical videogame protagonist. “Aiden is a man with a dark past who has made questionable choices,” Lead Story Designer Kevin Shortt explained in our first live gameplay demo. Growing up in Chicago, Aiden used his technical prowess to infiltrate bank accounts and access surveillance systems, becoming something of a vigilante. Naturally, these pursuits earned him some powerful enemies on both sides of the law. As you play Watch_Dogs, you won’t be choosing between stark extremes on some binary morality scale, but defining where Aiden resides on much murkier spectrum of acceptability. Chicago isn’t your typical videogame city. We’ve all played open-world action games where cities feel more like a collection of giant painted boxes than a living, breathing urban community. Watch_Dogs’s densely detailed Chicago feel less like a pretty façade and more like a densely populated city. Alleys are riddled with rotting cardboard boxes and detritus and parking garages are honeycombed with gloomy staircases — hack the right device and you may even find yourself peering into the living room of a Chicago citizen.

You can hack almost anything. Thanks to Chicago’s Central Operating System (ctOS), the city’s expansive (and invasive) technology is constantly at your fingertips. Take control of a nearby security camera to map out the positions of guards in a well-fortified area, raise a garage door or forklift to confuse and distract your would-be enemies, or — if you’re in particularly dire straits — tamper with the traffic grid and cause a multi-car pileup. These aren’t scripted scenarios, but dynamic and occasionally unpredictable events that can change the course of an escape in a nanosecond. Stealth and no-holds-barred combat are viable options. Aiden is no sedentary computer geek — he’s quite capable of dispatching his enemies using lethal and nonlethal force. The stealthier player will value misdirection and surveillance, using remote cameras to tag and monitor enemy positions while skirting past trouble. Brute-force players will have a wide range of armaments to choose from, but you’ll want to keep civilian casualties in check lest your reputation suffer.

Multiplayer and single-player will overlap. Watch_Dogs will feature a full-blown multiplayer mode set in the mean streets of Chicago, though final details are still under lock and key. More intriguing is that multiplayer and single-player will “seamlessly” overlap, an effort by Ubisoft to demolish the wall that has divided single-player gaming and multiplayer for decades. This interconnectivity will extend to a companion experience on mobile devices, though details remain scarce. Voyeurism is more fun than it sounds. Connecting to “FREE PUBLIC WI-FI” is risky business in the real world, so you can imagine what’s in store for anyone foolish enough to hop on an unsecured network in Aiden Pearce’s city. Aiden can activate Wi-Fi hotspots around the city, then hack into any device that connects to it granting him access to, among other things, a webcam on an unsuspecting citizens’ computer. This enables you to score valuable data, but also peer into the strange domestic lives of Chicago’s apartment dwellers. The side quests are novel and varied. Once you hack into a district of Chicago’s ctOS, you’ll find yourself swimming in an ocean of data including the city’s crime prediction algorithms. If you want to go full-on Batman, you can use the crime prediction data to track down potential “victims” from the passers-by on the street, then intervene before their lives are cut short by a hail of bullets or a baseball bat to the head. Other side missions are less grim; one of our favorite was NVZN, an augmented-reality arcade game that tasks you with blasting marauding aliens with ray guns.

Andrew Augustin successfully funded Super Ubi Land through Kickstarter last month, his upcoming 2D platformer for PC and Mac about a little alien called Ubi who crashes on Earth and must find his way home. Ubisoft is none too pleased with the game's title, apparently, and has asked for it to be changed, Augustin confirmed through his studio Notion Games' Twitter account.

"Been exchanging emails with Ubisoft. Unfortunately, we have to change the title of #SuperUbiLand. Stay tuned," the initial tweet read. Notion Games doesn't seem to be too upset over the disagreement, however, and isn't even fighting the claim, a follow-up tweet explained. "Ubisoft is not doing anything wrong. They're protecting their business just like any small business would." Finally, a third tweet hammers it home that Ubisoft is just "being fair" in trying to protect its brand in the eyes of Notion Games.

Super Ubi Land still has some time left in the oven and is slated to launch this year on PC and Mac. A demo is currently available for all Windows, Mac and Linux users, which you can download over on Notion Games' website right here.

Ubisoft has released a free demo version of RedLynx's racing-platformer, Trials Evolution: Gold Edition, via Steam in advance of an upcoming sale later this week.

The sale, which starts May 9 and continues through May 13, will drop the price of Trials Evolution: Gold Edition from $19.99 to $14.99, or from £15.99 to £11.99 for buyers in Europe.

Trials Evolution: Gold Edition includes all content from 2012's Xbox Live Arcade release Trials Evolution, along with all tracks from its predecessor Trials HD. The game also includes an in-game track editor and level-sharing functionality, giving players access to a treasure trove of virtual injuries and other motorcycle-related mishaps.

Patrice Desilets left Ubisoft. They snagged him back. And now he's gone again, Kotaku has learned. Ubisoft confirmed news of the departure in a statement to Kotaku today. The designer best known for designing the first two Assassin's Creed games left Ubisoft in 2010. He was working on a game at THQ's Montreal studio when that publisher dissolved earlier this year. Ubisoft purchased the studio, and with it came Desilets. But that didn't work out. “The acquisition of THQ Montréal in January allowed Ubisoft to welcome 170 experienced developers, including Patrice Désilets, to our existing and renowned workforce," a Ubisoft representative said in a statement to Kotaku this afternoon. "Unfortunately, since the acquisition, the good faith discussions between Patrice and Ubisoft aimed at aligning Patrice’s and the studio’s visions have been inconclusive. As a result, Patrice has left the studio. Our priorities remain with the teams already hard at work on projects in development. They are at the root of Ubisoft Montréal’s past and future successes.” At THQ Montreal, Desilets was working on a game called 1666. We've followed up with Ubisoft to see if that game has been cancelled.

As we know, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger wants to return Techland's first-person shooter series to its roots. This trailer shows just that. We get to see Silas Greaves, the bounty hunter serving as this chapter's protagonist, shoot his way through the Wild West. Cue guitar ballad. Gunslinger is coming out on May 21.

I am still surprised when games have their own songs. I view music like magic, but not in the Kieron way. I think you shouldn’t be able to sit down and just come up with up a song based on a subject. That seems like it shouldn’t work. It should be, hmm, involuntary? And if someone sits down and just thinks up a song, then it shouldn’t be catchy or good. And then this bloody Gunslinger trailer comes along, with a song about Silas Greaves and his shooty ways, and is kind of catchy and good. It is confusing, and will lodge in your head like a bullet.(more…)

Creative Director Dean Evans is interested in a follow-up to Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, at least according to Michael Biehn, the game's star voice talent. In an interview with Xbox's Major Nelson, Biehn said from his understanding Blood Dragon is exceeding Ubisoft's sales expectations by five times, and Evans is now considering a sequel to the retro spinoff.

"Dean was with me on the phone last night, he called me last night," Biehn said on Major Nelson Radio. "He was pretty jacked up. He was going into a meeting today, to.. I think he wants to turn it into some sort of franchise. He's got a sequel in mind."

We gushed about the "most excellent" Blood Dragon in our review, so seeing Sgt. Rex Colt return to a screen near us could be a great thing. Having said that, we do wonder if the comprehensively nostalgic game has anything left to pastiche.

In the meantime, we've reached out to Ubisoft for comment.

Oh gosh, delivering bad news is always so difficult. I never know how to soften the blow. Good news first? No, no, that never works. Oh, I know: everything that’s ever mattered to you will be gone one day and also Might and Magic Heroes VI has been nigh-unplayable for more than 24 hours. Phew, much better. The rather disturbingly lengthy period of downtime (especially given that the base game’s been out for ages) seems to have kicked off around the recent release of the turn-based strategy’s new Shades of Darkness expansion. Players have been reporting mountains of issues ever since.

(more…)

Over the last day or so, complaints have cropped up from players who’ve been trying to play the latest installment of the long-lived Might & Magic series. Users have turned to the game’s official Ubisoft message boards and Steam forums to vent, citing missing music, corrupt installation files and game freezes that prevent them from playing the game that they bought. The breakage appears to coincide with the game’s Shadows of Darkness add-on, which rolled out yesterday. When contacted, Ubisoft told Kotaku that they're working on the problem: “We’re aware of the issues players have been experiencing with Might & Magic Heroes VI: Shades of Darkness, and apologize for any inconvenience caused. We’ve now successfully restored content through a server upgrade, and are monitoring the situation closely. Meanwhile, we also encourage players to follow the steps detailed here.” It’s not clear if the problems with Might & Magic Heroes VI are stemming from the game’s need to connect to Ubisoft’s uPlay service or for some other reason. Kotaku has contacted UbiSoft for clarification and will update this story if they respond.

Today we’re pleased to debut a Watch_Dogs developer diary as part of PlayStation’s “Conversations With Creators,” an ongoing series that focuses on PS4 game development with some of the most accomplished game studios in the world.

In this video, you get to meet two of the driving forces in the Watch_Dogs dev team: Dominic, our senior producer and Jonathan, the creative director. Together, they discuss the vision of Watch_Dogs and ultimately, some of the development details for the PlayStation platforms.

By working in close collaboration with PlayStation, the team is working to harness the full power of the PS4. This gives them the opportunity to create a truly no-compromises experience with high-resolution environment textures and advanced special effects. The game experience, much like the city you’ll get to play in, will be rich, deep, and detailed.

As Jonathan and Dominic explain in the video, connectivity is at the heart of the Watch_Dogs experience. We already know Aiden is connected to his own environment, but we also want to give the players new and different ways to connect with each other, and working with PlayStation makes this possible.

In the end, we want to let you experience what it truly feels like to be in a hyper-connected world, whether it be in single player, multiplayer, at home, or even on the go.

Remember, you can always visit the Watch_Dogs Facebook page and Twitter account for great content and conversation. You can also pre-order your copy on the official website.

Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon does a lot of things right, but few are righter than the game's tutorial. Which is terrible. On purpose.

Introducing a new Rayman Legends musical level! Think you've heard 'Eye of the Tiger'? Try 'Mariachi Madness' on for size!

There is joy in stupidity. In an age where the search for deeper meaning in our interactive entertainment pursuits begins after the first trailer — where more thought goes into post-game critical analysis than development — a game that bears its shallow soul for all to see is a blessing. "The game is stupid," Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon creative director Dean Evans proudly proclaimed during a recent press event — not foolish pride, but pride in foolishness. "Dare to be stupid," sang parody artist Weird Al Yankovick in a song appearing in the 1986 animated Transformers movie, a contemporary to the late 80s, early 90s action films from which this day-glo Far Cry 3 spin-off takes much of its inspiration. As a young teen I enjoyed the tune in the same way I enjoyed movies like Terminator and Aliens (both featuring Michael Biehn, the voice of Blood Dragon's protagonist) — mindless fun. The game casts players as Sergeant Rex 'Power' Colt, a name we wouldn't have blinked an eye at back in 86. He's a special forces cyborg with a man to kill, but first he's going to have to kill all of the things standing between him and that man. The game's loosely about saving the world. Heck, if we were in the 80s it might have been heralded as a commentary on the Cold War. We were pretty ridiculous in the 80s. The story unfolds through a series of 2D cutscenes that wouldn't be out-of-place in an NES-era adventure (well, except for the foul language and... other things). And when those scenes end, it's into a day-glo nightmare from the early days of MTV. If a black light poster broke open a neon bar sign and inhaled its contents, this would be what the puddle of vomit around its corpse would look like when the police found him. It was nice and novel for the first couple of hours, but I soon found myself yearning for the cloudy blue skies of Far Cry 3 proper. Ubisoft has done great and terrible things with the game engine, transforming it into a nightmare world, where wild boars roam the purple plains, backs covered with neon graffiti. Where mutated gila monsters — the eponymous blood dragons — prowl the tiny island, seeking to make a meal of whatever flesh your cyborg body still possesses. As outlandish and garish as this tiny island is, there is always something there to remind me of Far Cry 3. There's the sweet-spot shooting (not too loose, not too tight) that helped push me to nominate an FPS — not my normal go-to genre — for game of the year last year. There are outposts to conquer, side-missions to complete for weapon upgrades, money to collect and animals to hunt. The crafting system is gone (and good riddance), and the leveling system has swapped tattoo-based branching trees for straightforward level-based power upgrades. Oh, and the developers couldn't resist the opportunity to scare the living shit out of me with an alligator. They get me every damn time. But alligator attacks are few and far between — Blood Dragon would much rather make you laugh than make you scream, and it's damn good at it. Michael Biehn sighs gruffly through the opening tutorials, eager to get with the killing and catchphrases. The dialogue sounds as if it were written by a thirteen year-old me, more concerned with how cool it sounds than how much sense it makes. "Tell them I died for my country," one of Rex's compatriots tells him during a moment of tension. "You'll tell them that yourself!" he responds. That's the power of overt, honest stupidity. I just described two things I despise in a game attempting to be taken seriously. Bad dialogue and repetitive voice clips would completely kill most games for me, but there is no pretension here at all. There is no other expectation. It's the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker of first-person shooters, delivering ridiculous with a straight face, Airplane! style. There are people who consider Far Cry 3 to be the wrong kind of stupid — a senseless story masquerading as something deep and meaningful. There are many games that do just that, and sometimes they succeed. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon isn't trying to fool anyone, and that's why I loved every minute.

I’d been hearing about Manborg—the no-budget homage to 1980s VHS action movies—for a while now. But I only realized that it was out on DVD today after I saw this tweet from Irrational Games writer Joe Fielder: https://twitter.com/RFSLjoe/status... Meanwhile, in video game land, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon comes out today, too. The creators behind the two works clearly share a lot of the same obsessions but it’s a huge coincidence that they’re out on the same Tuesday in April. Well, either a coincidence or the renaissance of corny, half-human, half-machine heroes is about to kick into high gear.

The year is 20xx, and the world is starved ... of imagination. An evil army of soulless game clones is hell-bent on taking over The Industry. No one is brave enough or mad enough to stop them from reshaping the gaming landscape into their drab, browny-grey vision.

No one ... except one spin-off game, a retro-fueled standalone commando powered by the twin suns of Parody and Crazy. That game is Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

And it is most excellent.

Watch Dogs has been given a release date. It is Nov. 19. It will be available on PS3, 360, Wii U and PC "as well as at the launch of the PlayStation 4," says Ubisoft. "The game is also planned for other next generation consoles," meaning the next Xbox.

Nik here, it’s nice to get another opportunity to chat with you guys. Today we’re digging a bit deeper into the human puzzle that is Aiden Pearce by launching our World Premiere Gameplay Trailer. Here you’ll get to know Aiden a bit better, and most importantly, you’ll discover what drives him to do the things he does. You’ll get a good picture of how he uses the city of Chicago against those who crossed him… and you’ll see how far he will go to make them pay.

We’re also happy to announce that Watch_Dogs now has an official launch date — the game will be available on PS3 starting November 19th. (We’ll be back to talk about the PS4 version and its release timing at a later date.) In addition, those of you who pre-order at GameStop will also get an exclusive Watch_Dogs poster, designed by the legendary comic book artist Alex Ross. The poster’s design is the inspiration behind the game’s box art and captures the essence of our hero, Aiden Pearce.

That’s the last of our announcements for now, but you can look forward to even more exciting info soon. Until then, you might want to watch the new trailer one more time… there are a lot of intricacies you may have missed.

For more details on Watch_Dogs, check the game’s Facebook page and Twitter account. You can also pre-order your copy on the official website.

Ubisoft’s impressive-looking hacker-with-superphone action game, Watch Dogs, will appear on November 22nd. There’s a big fancy new trailer below, which you should definitely watch.(more…)

Ubisoft has published a trailer of what seems to be an Assassin's Creed-themed, community-focused website featuring puzzle games with leaderboards. The catch? It's exclusive to those who pre-ordered Black Flag, much like how access to Industrial Revolution was tied to a pre-order of BioShock Infinite.

Nearly six months on and I'm still torn on Assassin's Creed III. I loved the setting, loved the combat, loved anything and everything to do with the Aquila. But I couldn't stand the mission design, and the game was so humourless and drab it would bum me out just booting it up. The game's surprisingly substantial singleplayer DLC, then, gave me a chance to revisit Ubisoft's version of 18th-century America. Not just to see if my feelings have changed in the months since its release, but whether the new content could address some of the main game's several substantial flaws. The Tyranny of King Washington is a three-part series set in an alternate alternate universe, where instead of joining up with the Assassins Connor remains at home, and grows to a man as Ratohnhake:ton. In this version of events, the British are still defeated, however George Washington gets his hands on one of the game's Apples of Eden, and goes quite bonkers with it, installing himself as a tyrannical regent. Which sounds absolutely crazy, right? Crazy in the way only a flash game or B-movie could be. Awesome crazy. So my first problem with this DLC is that it has absolutely no fun with it. George Washington as a mad King is a ludicrous scenario, one that should have been played for over-the-top laughs, but instead, the three episodes are as humourless as the main game was. Ben Franklin as a tyrant's lackey? Serious. Thomas Jefferson as an armed insurgent? Serious. George Washington sipping tea on a throne? What should have been a hilarious sight is instead played totally seriously. This gives the DLC a ridiculous tone, one that's not helped by the fact that in each episode you're granted a new special ability that at best can be described as game-breaking. Early on in the opening chapter, and going against the wishes of his mother, Ratohnhake:ton drinks some funky spirit juice that gives him the power of certain animals. The first is the wolf, which lets you sneak undetected through crowds of people and set a pack of three ghost dogs on unsuspecting targets. The second is the eagle, which takes a page out of Batman's book by letting you "hook" between targets, flying over rooftops one "soar" at a time. The third is the bear, giving you a HULK SMASH move that can clear a crowd of enemies and topple/crush certain objects in the game. While all three drain your health upon use, they're still fabulously overpowered, to the point where their use - which at times is made mandatory - strips the game of not just its challenge, but its entire foundation of stealth and acrobatics. The wolf's invisiblity cloak makes tracking targets and infiltrating areas a breeze. The eagle's flight does likewise, letting you fly over the walls of forts and barricades. And the bear, well, it's basically a "kill everything around you" superpower. Of the three, only one is genuinely useful outside of combat scenarios, and that's the eagle's flight power, which drastically cuts down on the time needed to traverse the game's dull and repetitive cities. There's the argument that these powers are a release, a way of flipping the game on its head, of experimenting, but they all fall flat. Assassin's Creed is a game built on the tenets of stealth, of parkour, of combat that's almost rhythmic in its flow. When you take those things away and substitute them with weird superpowers, what's left? Why are you playing an Assassin's Creed game at all? What I found saddest about the whole thing, though, was the fact that it seems no lessons were learned from the main game's poor mission design. With the exception of a few well-staged battles and a single open-ended section towards the end of the third chapter, Tyranny's missions fall into the same trap as Assassin's Creed III's, in that most are poorly designed for the areas of the map in which they take place, constantly leaving you with scripting problems, pathfinding hiccups, cramped combat and busted stealth/trailing missions. When I booted this DLC up for the first time, I was hoping for a happy ending. Something tighter, more focused than the main game, which would let me make peace with it and end my adventures as Connor on a happy note. Instead, all I'm left with now is the confirmation that his world is so boring, and so often broken, that it's not worth returning to, let alone saving.

Ubisoft has shared another chunk of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon gameplay, this time narrated by the game's creative director Dean Evans. This gives a sense of Blood Dragon's willful stupidity, and shows off a trick that wasn't present in Far Cry 3: The ability to call in a massive land-dragon to fight your enemies. Nifty.

If Far Cry 3's grim tale of survival was a poor fit for the game's exotic, often preposterous antics, there are no such fears for its seemingly disconnected spin-off. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is nothing short of ridiculous, and deliberately so. Ubisoft's standalone shooter celebrates the endearingly excessive sci-fi action of a bygone era in entertainment, when men wore cyber-armor over cyber-arms and when eyes glowed red.

A animated opening transports us to the post-apocalyptic near future... of 2007. Our new cyborg hero is sent to an island to take out a rogue terrorist group - full of evil cyborgs. In case there's any doubt what Blood Dragon is going for in an intro with music so pungent of Terminator 2 that I half expect it to tell me it'll be back, the first 10 or so minutes are filled with references to sci-fi and action movies from in and around the 1980s. Blood Dragon pays homage to an era full of sci-fi missteps and overblown heroes exuding machismo.

The concluding episode of the Tyranny of King Washington DLC for Assassin's Creed III, Redemption, is now available for PC and Xbox 360 (with the PS3 getting it tomorrow). Let's celebrate with a trailer of spirit wolves, collapsing towers, and lots of cannon fire.