I'm probably not alone in thinking pirates deserve more beyond thick accents, Johnny Depp, and one seriously overrated Disneyland ride. After all, they're one-third of geekdom's holy trinity along with zombies and ninjas, and Sid Meier's Pirates is perhaps their best adventure on the PC so far that doesn't dive too far overboard with swashbuckling stereotypes. Ubisoft wants to pull off the same thing in Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, a naval-warfare-themed entry in the franchise born out of "clamor from the fans for a pirate game." Speaking to MCV, Lead Content Manager Carsten Myhill says Black Flag's goal is to "redefine piracy in entertainment."

"It’s not easy," he adds. "It takes a very talented team, a lot of experience, and great tech. It’s one thing having good naval combat, but combining that with good boarding and land-based gameplay in a seamless way is hard to do."

Myhill says pulling off piratical personality means "staying away from clichés" and showing the seafaring raiders in a harsher light. "We're avoiding things like walking the plank, parrots on the shoulder, and hooks for hands," he explains. "We're giving pirates the 'HBO reality' treatment. And that allows us to redefine piracy in entertainment. No longer is it for kids."

Black Flag's pirates won't mess around with theatrics, apparently, but they still seem just fine dressing as foppishly as possible. We've got more info on lead character Edward Kenway's assassineering across the tropical seas in our preview.

As revealed earlier this week, Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is a very real thing. Hot on the sails of the popular naval battles from Assassin's Creed 3, Black Flag charts the high-seas adventures of Connor's grand-sire Edward Kenway and his time moonlighting as a member of the assassin order while leading a pirate crew. Ubisoft's latest trove of screenshots shows more glimpses at plunder-prone tropical locales (including a couple concept art sketches), Kenway's totally non-compensating arsenal, and a frozen moment from a full broadside. We've also got more info and shots for all you landlubbers in our preview.

The first three Assassin's Creed games are about Desmond Miles. Oh, you don't remember? That's fine. It's easy to forget such a bubbling font of personality, even though we wouldn't have controlled his way cooler ancestors and their Templar-slaying skills if they hadn't sprung from the mind of the world's most vegetative assassin. He's no longer the center of attention in the upcoming Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, but Ubisoft isn't entirely ignoring Mr. Miles in the context of the franchise's meta-arc. In a self-published Q&A (via All Games Beta), Creative Director Jean Guesdon says the character constitutes "a very important legacy" for Black Flag and beyond.

"Desmond has been the main protagonist of the franchise so far," Guesdon explains. "This won’t be the case in Black Flag. That being said, the game isn't a reboot nor is it a spinoff, and we’re continuing to develop a consistent mythology. So yes, Desmond will be referred to as a very important legacy of the Assassin's Creed universe."

Ubisoft promised "more Desmond than you've ever had before" during the development of Assassin's Creed 3, and that game's culminating events wrapped up his saga in a clunky yet more engaging way beyond having him eternally lounge around in the Animus. It'll be interesting to see how the modern-day storyline progresses alongside the virtual assassinating we all know and love going forward.

After revealing the sequel's gun-strapped hero on the box art of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, Ubisoft wasted no time in preparing a debut trailer to leap from its towering marketing mast. A countdown ticks away the trailer's launch in three days, but DarkZero switched on its Eagle Vision and found a now-deleted hidden URL displaying a banner proclaiming an October 29 release date for the radically piratical fourth-quel.

Simply adding a "v" to the end of the trailer announcement's web address sent you to the banner, a crazily minute addition that makes me wonder if DarkZero's spot borders on sorcery. Both banner and address no longer exist, of course, having been stabbed in the face by Ubisoft's swift assassin response team.

The October release window lines up with previous autumn launches of an Assassin's Creed game, though PC versions tended to trail behind by a few months because of lingering bugs and...well, just because. Perhaps we'll enjoy this Creed sans delays this time around. In the meantime, check back right here on Monday for our full preview.

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.