The hero of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag (already truncated to AssFlag in office lingo) makes a bid to become the loudest assassin yet in the box art Ubisoft put out today. He is wearing FOUR guns. He's wearing his "hidden" blade on the outside of his sleeve. He has woven a flag with the Assassin order logo on it, and then, because it wasn't piratey enough, plopped a skull in there for good measure. Because that's what you do, isn't it, when you're a pirate? You whack a skull on it.

Assassin's Creed 4 is about pirates, and boats, and islands, and killing bad men. All will be revealed on Monday when details banks burst and information flows through the webways, as hot and saucy as the regurgitated rum of a green sailor's first hurl. Those of us in the office that played Assassin's Creed 3 really enjoyed the sea bits, which bodes well for this latest outing. We'll have preview here for you on Monday, and we've squared away four pages in the next issue of PC Gamer, too. Here be ye box art ye blaggards.

A crude metaphor for the PC gaming community

Ubisoft recently expanded their Uplay Store catalogue to include third-party publishers like EA and Warner Brothers. Their next step on the road to being a competitive force in digital distribution is more an act of contrition. The publisher realises it needs to improve its perception among the PC gaming community.

Speaking to MCV, Ubisoft's worldwide Uplay director, Stephanie Perotti, says, "Announcing all these partners for Uplay and a wider choice of PC games, it shows our commitment to PC, and we want to improve out relationship with the PC community."

"We are always seeking to improve. We took a lot of that feedback on board. With every game on PC we are improving. Far Cry 3 and Assassin’s Creed III on PC were very high quality."

What Perotti doesn't mention is Ubisoft's Uplay infrastructure, which, I'd imagine, was responsible for a lot of the PC community's animosity in the first place. Removing their always-on DRM requirement was an important and welcome step, but the Uplay launcher can still act as a barrier to easy game access.

Offering consumers a choice of digital shopfronts is great, but I'm yet to be convinced that Uplay currently provides a feature-set that justifies the service's rockier patches.

Hey! You guys are a community of PC gamers! How do you feel about Ubisoft's new-found affection?

Some weird cosmic alignment must be taking place today, because a number of EA games—including the sparkling Crysis 3 and pre-orders for SimCity—showed up on Ubisoft's Uplay store. It's no less strange on the digital shelves of EA's Origin, where Assassin's Creed III and Far Cry 3 sit prominently on the store's splash page. What's going on? As Ubisoft announces today in a press release, it's all part of expanding third-party support to bring titles from various developers.

And those various developers are:

Warner Bros. Interactive
1C Company
bitComposer Games
Bohemia Interactive
Encore Software
Focus Home Interactive
Freebird Games
Iceberg Interactive
Nordic Games
Paradox Interactive
Recoil Games
Robot Entertainment
Telltale Games
Torn Banner Studios

Ubisoft also says plunking down $20 or more on Uplay through March 4 nets you a free copy of Driver: San Francisco, From Dust, Might & Magic Heroes VI, Rayman Origins, The Settlers 7 or World in Conflict.

What say you? Are we all seeing the stirrings of stronger, teamed-up competition for Steam and GOG?

The first of three Assassin's Creed III Tyranny of King Washington DLC episodes releases next Tuesday, prompting Ubisoft to initiate tactical cross-promotion operation "Put Hoods in Ghost Recon Online." From today until March 1st, 11 Assassin's Creed-themed items are available for unlock or purchase in the free-to-play tactical shooter's open beta.

There are five new Recon class items—the trademark assassinatin' hood and four pieces of body armor—and six Abstergo Industries weapons: the F2000 SP AC, Fiveseven AC, MG36 KV AC, P90 C AC, Sentinel SR-1 AC, and Pentagun SP AC.

I'm going to imagine the hardened recon specialist below was called to action in the middle of putting on his PAX cosplay outfit.

Not a bad look, but I'd rather see Connor strut around 18th century America with an AR-21 and microwave emitter.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: calling all Tapirs, please be on guard. Ubi have revised their yearly profit estimates up to somewhere between 90 and 100 million Euros after better-than-expected sales late last year, and are going to need a much bigger wallet.

Gamasutra report that Assassin's Creed 3 shifted 12 million copies in the meatspace and online which is 70% more than AssCreed: Revelations managed. Far Cry 3 sold 4.5 million. A "much higher-than-expected performance," which means "fans certainly won't have to wait four more years for the next Far Cry."

The next Assassin's Creed was also briefly mentioned. It'll apparently take place in a fresh setting and star a new hero. So much for Connor, then. Requiescat in pace, brusque angry hatchet-dude. I will remember you always, apart from your face and everything you said and did.

That's all the info for now, but there's still time to honour Haiku Friday with a brief but moving summation of all our hopes and dreams for Far Cry 4.

Jason Brody-bot,
Turns dinosaurs into bags,
Stabby stabby stab.

What if Altair's knight-punching and eagle-diving across the ancient Middle East wasn't a solitary affair? As Assassin's Creed III Mission Director Phillippe Bergeron tells OXM, a "huge" drop-in co-op mode was planned for the first entry in the stalk-and-drop franchise, but the creation of modern-day Animus-warmer Desmond Miles sunk a spring-loaded blade into the idea.

“Co-op was one of those big things at the beginning that just didn’t make sense in the end,” Bergeron says. “For us, it was really part of the single-player experience to have in-and-out co-op, and in the end we never thought it made sense in the storyline that we had for the Animus. It just became too hard to do: the engine couldn’t support it, and then the metaphor we had above it didn’t support it.”

Bergeron also points out the glaring paradox of tracking a secondary player's branching storyline within the ancestral memories of their partner. "There was no way to reconcile having multiplayer or co-op in an ancestor's memories," Bergeron says. "Your ancestor lived his life in a certain way, so assuming you had branching storylines, it creates a snag. It didn't fit."

It's a little strange to hear that Ubisoft rejected co-op on the basis that it wouldn't jive with the plot, considering the ridiculousness of the game's premise (human DNA stores picture-perfect recollections of face-stabbing ancient warriors). Multiplayer Creed does live on in the cat-and-mouse versus modes that first appeared in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Read what we think of its current incarnation, Assassin's Creed III.

On the cusp of an open multiplayer beta for Crytek's maximally lustrous Crysis 3, Nvidia released an early version of its GeForce 313.95 drivers today. The GPU giant claims the drivers boost SLI performance for Crysis 3 by up to 35 percent in addition to other "sizeable SLI and single-GPU performance gains" in games such as Assassin's Creed III and Far Cry 3.

Nvidia says users should expect a 27 percent gain in graphics performance while playing Assassin's Creed III, 19 percent in Civilization V, and 14 percent for both Call of Duty: Black Ops II and DiRT 3. Just Cause 2 improves by 11 percent, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, F1 2012, and Far Cry 3 all improve by 10 percent.

Demonstrating its mastery over orderly green bars, Nvidia also supplied benchmark charts for these games using four of its most recent cards: the GTX 650, 660 Ti, 680, and 690. With the 313.95 drivers, the company declares GTX 690 users can max out all settings in Crysis 3 and still achieve 60 FPS.

Grab the new drivers and check out the charts at Nvidia's website. Also try out the GeForce Experience—which we've talked about at length—to automatically optimize and configure your games based on your PC's hardware.

The first part of an Assassin's Creed III DLC pack exploring an alternate-reality America in which Washington crowns himself king comes out on February 19, Ubisoft announced today. For $10, grizzled assassins can take a break from giving colonists surly looks and chasing after techno-balls for a chance to take on the imperious Founding Father.

In the first episode, named The Infamy, Connor "wakes from an unsettling dream" to come face-to-smirk with a power-mad Washington who ascended the throne with a platform less about liberty and a lot more about "off with his head." The next two parts, The Betrayal and The Redemption, arrive at a later date, and you can bet Connor won't leave his tomahawk un-bloodied before the end.

Have a close look at Washington's royal jewels in the trailer below.

2012 was a particularly great year for writing in video games. There was the harrowing campaign of Spec Ops: The Line, the consistently funny caricatures of Borderlands 2 or, like, a whole 90% of Mass Effect 3. Then, of course, standing way out in front was the emotional bombardment of Telltale's The Walking Dead. So it was no surprise that when the Writers Guild of America announced their shortlist for the Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing award, they of course included... wait, what?! They included 007 Legends? How does that make any sense?

Here's the full list of nominations. Set your facial expression to "huh?"

007 Legends, Written By Bruce Feirstein; Activision
Assassin’s Creed III, Story By Alex Hutchinson, Corey May, Matt Turner; Multiplayer Story By Richard Farrese, Jeffrey Yohalem; Lead Scriptwriter Corey May; Scriptwriter Nicholas Grimwood, Russell Lees, Matt Turner, Danny Wallace, Ceri Young; Ubisoft
Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, Scriptwriting by Richard Farrese, Jill Murray; Ubisoft
Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, Writing Consultant Marv Wolfman; Disney Interactive Studios
Halo 4, Narrative Design Christopher Schlerf; Microsoft Studios
Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Written By John Garvin; Sony Computer Entertainment America

It's worth pointing out that a WGA nomination is dependant on a couple of additions. Firstly, the game must have been released between December 1st 2011 and November 30th 2012. Secondly, and this is the big one, "Credited videogame writers must have been or must have applied to become members of the WGA Videogame Writers Caucus at the time scripts were submitted." WGA membership is less essential in the games industry than in film or TV, so it's entirely possible that many of the year's great game scripts simply weren't eligible.

The awards will be held on February 17th.

The tech world has gotten itself into a lather over the bombardment of announcements coming out of Consumer Electronics Show. Here's one that's relevant to us, though: NVIDIA's Project Shield. While it may look like an HD screen bolted to a parody of an Xbox controller, the Android powered device is also capable of streaming your PC game library.

Powered by the also-announced Tegra 4 mobile chip, Shield promises a full Android gaming experience. That may sound a bit rubbish, especially if, like me, your Android device is almost exclusively a platform for running Canabalt. Still, it means the handheld will be able to play the upcoming Hawken Android, as well as the newly announced ArmA Tactics, a turn-based ArmA for tablet devices.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Shield is its ability to hook into Steam for local network streaming through Big Picture mode. NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, showed off the streaming during the presentation, playing Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Assassin's Creed 3 with reportedly little to no lag. The downside is it requires a Kepler-based graphics card inside your rig, meaning you'll need a GTX 650 or better to push pixels towards the device.

Project Shield offers a 1280x720 screen, but can output to a standard 4k TV. It's expected for release in "Q2", but there's currently no word on pricing. In the meantime, you can see the Shield's website for details.

A shiny new PC-playing toy. Any takers?

Thanks, Engadget.