Author: Game Infliction

Ubisoft’s highly-anticipated Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag remake will launch in just a few months’ time, a fresh report has claimed.

This morning, Ubisoft revealed its latest financial results and laid out a slate of upcoming games set to arrive before the end of its current financial year, on March 31, 2026.

One title due for launch remained “unannounced” in Ubisoft’s official presentation, but a new Insider Gaming report has now stated that this not-so-mysterious project is the new version of Black Flag, which is scheduled to arrive during the week of March 23, 2026.

Despite years of internal leaks, fan speculation and even hints from the game’s lead actor, Ubisoft is still to officially confirm its Black Flag remake exists. But players have been tracking its progress for a while now, and think they have a pretty good idea of how it will play.

Alongside visual and gameplay upgrades to bring the game closer to Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ level of fidelity and more RPG-like focus, a recent report detailed plans for the game to feature all-new content and missions for its pirate hero Edward Kenway. At the same time, however, Black Flag’s modern day gameplay sections have apparently been excised — something that many fans aren’t happy about.

It’s believed that work on this new Black Flag remake has been spearheaded by Ubisoft Singapore, which previously launched the long-delayed Skull and Bones — a game that began life as an offshoot of Black Flag’s maritime gameplay.

Ubisoft is going all-in on Assassin’s Creed, its biggest franchise, with this year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows followed by a recent Saudi Arabia-funded free update to 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Alongside its Black Flag remake, next year is expected to bring a second major Shadows expansion. Beyond that, Ubisoft has already announced that a multiplayer Assassin’s Creed game and its next big blockbuster, the witchcraft-themed Assassin’s Creed Hexe, are also in the works.

This morning, Ubisoft said its latest positive financial results had been driven in part by a “strong performance” for its Assassin’s Creed franchise. But while the company noted that Mirage had now passed 10 million sales, there was no new figure provided for how well this year’s Shadows has sold.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Ubisoft has celebrated a fresh set of financial results that it says has been driven by a “strong performance” for its Assassin’s Creed franchise. But while there’s an update on sales figures for 2023’s Mirage, there’s no new figure for how this year’s Shadows has sold.

The French publisher’s latest earnings report, published this morning, covers the company’s performance over the first half of the current year: April through September. Last week, Ubisoft delayed the publication of these results at the last minute, prompting speculation that something had gone wrong with the company’s big Tencent deal — though there’s no suggestion of that today.

Ubisoft has framed the results in a positive light, with net bookings for the past quarter “above expectations” and up 39% year-on-year. “The outperformance was driven by stronger-than-expected partnerships,” Ubisoft noted, “and was supported by a robust back-catalog, both highlighting the strength of the Group’s brands.”

One back catalogue game seemingly doing very well is Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the series’ return to a smaller, city-based adventure that launched a couple of years ago. Today, Ubisoft announced a new 10 million sales milestone for the title, and said its recent Saudi Arabia-funded free update had received “very positive” feedback from fans.

But on the sales performance of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the franchise’s blockbuster feudal Japan entry launched in March, Ubisoft was less clear. Without providing a new sales total, Ubisoft simply said the game had “benefited” from the launch of its New Game+ mode and recent Claws of Awaji expansion, which seems obvious. The company then pointed to the game’s upcoming Switch 2 launch as an oppurtunity for it to “reach a broader audience.” Back in July, Ubisoft said Shadows had surpassed 5 million players, and that its performance had been in line with expectations.

Outside of Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft noted that Rainbow Six Siege’s cheating issues were continuing to temporarily impact “activity and player spending versus expectations,” following the game’s previous move to an essentially free-to-play model.

Ubisoft still expects to finalize its $1.16 billion deal with Chinese conglomerate Tencent in the near future, company boss Yves Guillemot said, noting that “all conditions precedent have been satisfied.” The transaction will secure funding for Vantage Studios, Ubisoft’s new self-contained subsidiary in charge of its biggest brands, including Assassin’s Creed.

Guillemot revealed that more of these companies, termed Creative Houses, will be detailed in January — a point at which the Tencent deal should presumably be sorted. After this, the future shape of the company should become clear, following years of internal turmoil.

“These Creative Houses will be autonomous, efficient, focused and accountable business units, each with its own leadership, creative vision and strategic roadmap,” Guillemot concluded. “This Group-wide transformation reflects our ambition to renew how we create and operate in order to deliver great games for our players and lasting value for our partners and shareholders.”

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are reportedly in for some shell shock of their own, with Paramount planning a live-action movie reboot series inspired by the Sonic film franchise.

Sources told The Hollywood Reporter that Paramount has ditched the R-rated The Last Ronin, a live-action / animation hybrid (although it could return to it one day), and will now instead focus on a live-action movie. The sequel to Mutant Mayhem is still due out September 17, 2027.

First released back in 2020, The Last Ronin features a dystopian world in which all but one of the Turtles have perished, drawing inspiration from God of War among other works. It written by original creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, who said it was based on an outline from a story in 1987.

The Last Ronin was a big success for the Turtles, earning the story a sequel featuring a new generation of turtles. A Last Ronin video game is also in development, although we haven’t had an update on it for some time.

The last live-action or live-action / animation hybrid Turtles movie was 2016’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, which flopped at the box office. Successful animated Turtles movies, including 2023’s Mutant Mayhem, followed.

Paramount has reportedly drafted in Neal H. Moritz, the producer of The Fast and the Furious and Sonic movie franchises, to lead this new Turtles charge in a bid to “fully unlock its potential,” THR said.

Given the success of the Sonic films, you can see why Paramount would want to get the producer responsible to repeat the trick with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In January, Paramount hailed the success of the Sonic movie franchise after Sonic the Hedgehog 3 helped it pass $1 billion at the global box office. 2024’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which stars Keanu Reeves as Shadow, made nearly half a billion dollars during its theatrical run.

It feels like early days for this new era of Turtles films, and there’s no indication when the first movie will come out.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

When I played Escape From Tarkov for the first time in 2018, I remember being captivated by its obtuse, insanely challenging structure. Like PUBG was to the battle royale genre, this promising prototype of an extraction shooter had so many unique elements going for it that made me absolutely certain it would be the next big thing, even if it was sometimes completely broken in its Early Access state. All these years later, now finally hitting 1.0, it’s pretty shocking how much has changed while it also remains exactly as exasperating as I remember it. The hands-off approach to onboarding that forces newcomers to beat their heads against its unforgiving mechanics for dozens of hours before claiming even a single victory captures the same relentless challenge I’ve always adored, while other frustrations, like its continued bugs, poor technical performance, and inability to address an abundance of cheaters, remains disappointingly worse than ever. I’ve only spent 30 hours with the 1.0 version so far, which (as any veteran player will surely tell you) is no time at all, but right now it feels like this progenitor may have been left in the dust of the genre it spawned.

Escape From Tarkov isn’t just the original standalone extraction shooter, but also the one most fanatically adherent to the ruthless principles on which the genre was founded. Not only are you thrown into a deadly hellscape filled with lethal NPCs and merciless human opponents, but you’re given absolutely no guidance in your quest for survival and loot. Practically none of the progression systems are explained to you, there’s no map for you to look at while out in the field to indicate where the extraction points are, and you could easily spend tens of hours studying weapon attachments and ammo types just to understand how the heck to use the tools of death you’ll find in your journey.

In some ways, I really admire how unrepentant Tarkov is – its beautifully exacting game design, and the sense of discovery that takes place across hundreds of lessons learned the hard way can be incredibly rewarding. But then there are times where it’s all just so dang frustrating, like how atrociously the UI and menus are organized, as if they were designed specifically to offend you. Whether or not the payoff of finally feeling comfortable enough to bring your best equipment out and try for a proper extraction is worth it will ultimately depend on couple things: your tolerance for pain, and your drive to master something designed to really test your expertise of systems Tarkov refuses to teach you. At least in these early hours with 1.0, I find myself somewhere in the middle of enamoured by its harsh edges and utterly disgusted by outdated design choices.

Unfortunately, the intentionally punishing design is marred by completely unintentional issues that have made this full launch that much harder to enjoy. The servers so far have been incredibly unreliable, with regular disconnects and wait times greater than 15 minutes to get into a match, and cheaters are very prevalent since accounts and items can be sold for real money in the gray market. As a result, I decided to spend most of my time this first week just focusing on the PvE mode for the sake of my sanity.

There’s also the matter of just how bad this thing looks and performs by the standards of the day. I remember thinking Escape from Tarkov already didn’t look great when I last revisited it, and coming back to it again a few years later has not done it any favors. Objects in the environment are blurry and low res, and with the exception of the vendors you’ll chat with as you complete quests, human faces look like they were modeled using the monster-generator that is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s character creator. It’ll take me a while before I’ve played enough to call this review final, so hopefully developer Battlestate Games will smooth out the worst of these issues before they drive me insane, but it’s been an incredibly rocky start.

Anyway, I should get back to it – between the PvE mode, PvP mode, and Arena, I’ve got plenty more to see and do before I can make a recommendation either way. For now, diving back into this influential, daunting game has been equal parts fascinating and irksome, but I’m looking forward to going as deep down the rabbit hole as I can.