One of the coolest things in Assassin's Creed Origins is the ability to fight against three of Ancient Egypt's immortal deities in spectacular boss battles.
Now, for the low, low price of $499.99 (about 350), you can get an official figurine featuring all three.
That's the crocodile-headed god Sobek on the left, accompanied by god of the dead Anubis in the middle and the feline-looking warrior god Sekhmet on the right.
One of the most fascinating things I ever read about Shakespeare revolves, rather perversely, around how little we actually know of him. Putting the plays and the sonnets to one side, everything we know about Shakespeare the man is "contained within a few scanty facts," according to Bill Bryson. In his book, Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, Bryson marvels that Shakespeare exists within the historical record in a mere hundred or so documents. Despite almost a million words of text in his drama and poetry, "we have just 14 words in his own hand - his name signed six times and the words 'by me' on his will."
Facts, as Bryson argues, "are surprisingly delible things." So delible, as it happens, that much of our knowledge of the physical realities of Shakespearean theatre - our knowledge of what Shakespeare's working environment would have looked like and how it might have operated - is based on a single sketch by a Dutch tourist visiting the Swan Theatre in London in 1596. The original sketch has not survived, of course - why make anything easy? - but a friend made a copy in a notebook that was rediscovered, in 1888, in the library of the University of Utrecht. Voila: "The only known visual depiction of the interior of an Elizabethan playhouse in London. Without it we would know essentially nothing about the working layout of theatre of this time."
When I think of history, I do not often think of what we do not know, and how much of what we do not know there must be out there. It messes with the head. Shakespeare's one hundred or so documents, according to Bryson, actually make him one of the more historically visible people from the late 1500s. Even so, much of his world, of its details and quirks and busy contradictions, has faded in the 400 years since his death.
Spoiler warning: This article discusses the ending of Assassin's Creed Origins.
With Bayek and Aya, Assassin's Creed Origins' husband and wife duo, Ubisoft is on to a very good thing. The main game's best story moments occur when the two interact, when they are allowed time to live on screen as a mature, authentic couple. But it's a difficult balancing act, because the meat of a typical Assassin's Creed game is seen through the eyes of one character - the series' stereotypical roguish loner who roams rooftops righting wrongs single-handed, while looking moody in a hood.
Origins plotted its way around Aya and Bayek's relationship by finding excuses to send Bayek off alone, by giving him jobs to do while Aya was off-screen doing other things, and sometimes - just sometimes - by letting you see what she was up to as well. Until, that is, the game's rather abrupt ending - when Aya, newly rechristened Amunet, ditches Bayek for good to oversee a new chapter of the fledgling Assassins in Rome. (Fans were not pleased at Baya's breakup.)
Ubisoft is adding a new game plus mode to Assassin's Creed Origins.
Fans hungry for more Assassin's Creed have been asking for a new game plus option for months (which is impressive, as Origins is enormous and despite having played it north of 100 hours I've still got loads to do).
Previously, Ubisoft has said it was investigating whether it was possible to add a new game plus option. (To my knowledge, there has never been one in an Assassin's Creed game before.) Now, Ubi has updated fans with good news.
Ubisoft has laid out its full timetable of expansions for Assassin's Creed Origins, which are due to launch over the next few months.
First up is The Hidden Ones, a 10-years-later story epilogue to Origins' main campaign set in a new region, the Roman-occupied Sinai. It arrives next Tuesday, 23rd January.
Next will be the Discovery Tour, Origins' educational "living museum" mode, which will be available to explore for free from 20th February.
Assassin's Creed Origins will get its big January patch tomorrow, which will pave the way for its upcoming expansion The Hidden Ones.
Xbox One and PlayStation 4 owners get a 3GB download. On Uplay the game weighs in at 2.6GB. On Steam, it's 1.2GB.
The Hidden Ones, Ubisoft's upcoming Roman-centric expansion, is set a decade after Origins' finale in two new regions: Sinai and the Valley of the Kings.
A note from the editor: Jelly Deals is a deals site launched by our parent company, Gamer Network, with a mission to find the best bargains out there. Look out for the Jelly Deals roundup of reduced-price games and kit every Saturday on Eurogamer.
While there may not be a staggering amount of games actually releasing this January (all eyes on you, Monster Hunter World), you may want to take this time to catch up on one of the many you've had sitting unplayed in your stack of shame - and who could blame you, it would be a wise use of your time. Alternatively, of course, you could add a few more things to that stack while they're discounted. I know my Steam backlog hasn't been getting any shorter lately.
With that in mind, there's a bunch of discounts available on a variety of games and accessories this week, so what better time to check them out.
The Hidden Ones, the first of two expansions headed to Assassin's Creed Origins, will arrive this month (January).
The DLC picks up Bayek's story after the finale of the main game in a new region ruled by Romans. You should expect a "vast" new story, Ubisoft says, and a level cap increase to 45.
There's free stuff coming to Origins as well - a new quest to set the scene for The Hidden Ones' arrival, a Warden outfit from fellow Ubisoft game For Honor, and the return of two Trials of the Gods. (Anubis returns today for a week, followed by Sobek on the 23rd.)
This piece contains spoilers for Assassin's Creed Origins.
Assassin's Creed has always had fun with nested narratives. The modern-day sequences get a lot of stick, and fairly: they often feel like awkward and unnecessary interruptions to the historical adventuring which draws many of us to the series. But they do make explicit the series' ongoing fascination with themes of historical memory - how we think about and remember our collective past. It's baked into the idea of the Animus: where other series might have gone for time-travel or done without the contemporary frame-stories altogether, Assassin's Creed bases its nonsense McGuffin on the idea that historical experiences are encoded in our DNA. For much of the series, the historical portions were explicitly labelled not as areas or time-periods, but as memories.
These themes have always been part of the series but the most recent entry, Origins, takes them and runs. There's the modern-day frame-story and the mainly historical adventure, as usual, but within the ancient Egyptian setting the game is particularly interested in the still more distant past. Ancient Egypt isn't equal in its ancientness. Its greatest icons and the central image of the box art - the pyramids - were more ancient in the game's Ptolemaic setting than that period is to us. The game's fascinated by this. Ruins are everywhere, ancient tombs punctuate the landscape and the game itself, casting hero Bayek as a Croft- or Drake-style tomb raider. Your reward for clearing a tomb: a stele inscribed with hieroglyphs. 'Ancient writing,' says Bayek, a note of awe as well as satisfaction in his voice, 'from the Old Kingdom.' The idea of ancientness-beyond-ancientness is there for everyone to hear.
Assassin's Creed Oranges owners will notice a 3GB update being piped to their consoles and/or PC today. It contains a selection of handy updates and changes.
First up, for folk who've noticed the game has struggled loading textures at a distance (we're looking at you, 2D trees), there are various fixes on the way to hopefully make things prettier.
Among the detailed patch notes are points including "Improved texture streaming selection to allow for more high-resolution texture", "Fixed loading grid setups for tall palm tree fields to improve their view distance" and various improvements specific to certain in-game locations (Siwa, Alexandria, and more).