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Former Assassin’s Creed series lead Marc-Alexis Côté is suing Ubisoft for damages, alleging that his abrupt October departure from the company after 20 years wasn’t a matter of personal choice, but a case of “constructive dismissal”. That, in non-legalese, means that the developer believes he was left with no choice but to resign, having been offered new roles he viewed as demotions amid a round of corporate musical chairs.
Rockstar North, the Edinburgh office of GTA 6 developers Rockstar Games, has been cordoned off by emergency services following reports of an explosion in the building.
Valve have reportedly rewritten Steam’s AI disclosure form, essentially a declaration of a game’s generative AI usage that developers and publishers must complete to sell on the platform. The new form, shared by consultant Simon Carless, now specifies that while the presence of in-game GenAI content must still be divulged, including on the game’s store page, the usage of AI-based production tools for “efficiency gains” does not require disclosure.
“We are aware that many modern game development environments have AI powered tools built into them,” the update form reads. “Efficiency gains through the use of these tools is not focus of this section. Instead, it is concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players.”
Happy new week of PC game releases, all! First, the customary paragraph of Maw musings. What we refer to as the Maw goes by many other names in different regions, as different cultures react to its cosmic incursions. Across the channel in Normandy, generations of monks have addressed the creature as La Bête des Trous. The Finnish know the Maw as Tuleva Syöjä. In the United States, meanwhile they call it Friday Night at Applebee’s.
Many of today’s game designers have, like me, grown up with Japanese Y2K style – the style of the late 90s and early 2000s that gave us not only fear of the end of the world due to a calendar change, but also the WipEout series, futuristic PlayStation 2 ads, and fashion that incorporated everything from glitter to holographic fabrics and cute crop tops.
In a media landscape that seldom shies away from homages and sequels, I’ve waited a long time for the influence of childhood favourites such as Dance Dance Revolution and Space Channel 5 to pop back up. After all, plenty of Western developers have taken inspiration from Japanese role-playing games, giving us Sea of Stars, Undertale and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, to name a few. Recently, I found some really cool games by Western developers that are living the Y2K dream with me, so it was time to dive into their inspirations and compare some childhood anime with some nerds.
Julian Gerighty, a long-time key cog at Massive Entertainment, has announced that he’s departing the Ubisoft-owned studio after 12 years to go and work on Battlefield at EA. His departure swiftly follows Ubisoft revealing earlier this week that they’re planning to lay off staff at Massive, with a voluntary redundancy process late last year reportedly having not resulted in enough departures to stave off this bloodletting.
Meanwhile, the publishers have opted to take the opportunity of Gerighty’s departure to reassure folks that The Division series is just fine.
DLSS 4.5 is out now, and while previous new versions of Nvidia’s performance-massaging upscaler would have required waiting around for game implementation – beyond the inevitable Cyberpunk 2077 debut, anyway – it follows more recent additions in letting you impose it upon existing games from the off. That’s done via the Nvidia App and its DLSS Override tools, which following an update on January 14th, is tooled up with what version 4.5 promises to be tangible visual improvements.
I’ve been testing it, both on this public Nvidia App release and on a pre-release beta build, and DLSS 4.5 can indeed deliver on the right settings. But it’s also more of a specialised tool than DLSS 4, and although backwards compatibility is welcome, it’s presented with an opaque naming system that has as much in common with algebra as it does with upscaling.
I continue to have a soft spot for Soulframe, the new, sort-of-early access fantasy RPG from Warframe developers Digital Extremes, despite the fact that the lore writing is often wyrd to the point of giving me a concussion. Especially when it creeps into studio press announcements. For example, here is a snippet from the developer’s summary of Soulframey doings in the year 2025: “Together, we stepped into sap-dreams and freed Bromius from rotting roots. We Bestitched with a certain witch and crept into the crypts of The Circade.” …Right then! I expect you shall be tending to your ravens next.
Still, don’t let that turn you off. There’s a lot of gentle craft beneath the plus-plus-ultra world-building. Soulframe is a game that often comes alive in the quieter moments. Take, for example, the login screen, which I’ve just realised could be a hidden creature collection game.
Amazon’s colonial fantasy MMO New World (latterly rebranded New World: Aeternum) is no longer available for purchase as of yesterday, and will be taken offline for good from 31st January 2027, the publishers have announced. The news follows the release of the game’s final major update back in October, amid mass layoffs at Amazon.
I be a poor journo. Newly come from the official Ubisoft music YouTube channel. I spend my life in jeopardy.
Of a publisher suddenly turning around and saying that a sudden mass reupload of Black Flag‘s sea shanties was in fact just a case of behind-the-scenes issues, rather than another harbinger of a remake announcement.
Tp be fair, it did follow many reports about the badly kept secret that is the Black Flag remake and a PEGI rating that sure looks like it’s for such a game.
