If there’s one advantage to Assassin’s Creed’s just-a-simulation framing device, it’s that you can bend the rules (and timeline) occasionally. While it makes no sense temporally, those who have been hunting in-game achievements in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can cash in their earned Club Units to make Origins hero Bayek of Siwa an officer aboard your flagship, the Adrestia. While he doesn’t have much to say, it’s nice to see him still finding work four hundred years before he was born.

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Walk a mile in someone else s shoes.

It s a common enough idiom, a plea for empathy and understanding. Taken literally, it s also a phrase that rings true for gamers. We walk countless miles in the shoes of our favourite characters, learning to love and feel for them along the way. But despite all the miles we travel, we rarely give our well-worn virtual footwear its due. Virtual shoes are just another one of the many small, mundane details that make the worlds in which we play believable, and most players ignore them. Luckily, one photographer has made it his mission to document the art of virtual shoes.

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While we re all busy digging into ancient Greece, Ubisoft haven t forgotten last year s Ptolomaic playground, Assassin s Creed Origins. During development, they partnered with Egyptologists, and in doing so they apparently discovered that translating hieroglyphs is very difficult and time consuming. In response, they started looking into ways to streamline the process using machine learning, and this week, they presented their initial progress.

Take a look at their introductory video explaining what they re trying to achieve:

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There are a lot of dads in video games, and their number only grows. A rising tide of stubbled, emotionally-reserved dadflesh, heralding a new age of “serious storytelling” in games. Assassin s Creed Origins stands out from this paternal wave by showcasing a different kind of videogame dad. Egyptian proto-sheriff Bayek, who displays as much tenderness as he does the ability to stab things really, really well.

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With Assassin s Creed Odyssey just around the corner, I find myself thinking back to last year s entry in the series, Origins. It was packed full of side quests and collectables and set pieces in short, everything we ve come to expect from a Ubisoft open world adventure. But one moment in my playthrough still stands out to me. It was almost entirely unscripted, driven by my own exploration, and because this is an Assassin s Creed game we re talking about involves a dead body.

Spoilers for Assassin s Creed Origins and Revelations below the cut.

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Last week, after much hype and excitement, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card was finally unleashed on the world. Today, it’s the turn of its beefed-up big brother, the RTX 2080Ti, whose release was delayed by a week for reasons lost to the bowels of Nvidia’s marketing department. As you can see from my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080Ti review, this is hands down the best graphics card for 4K I’ve ever seen, and that’s all down to the monstrous power of Nvidia’s new Turing GPU. But how much of a leap does it represent over its immediate predecessor, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080Ti? To the graphs!

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In my Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 review last week, we discovered that Nvidia’s super duper new graphics card was about as fast as their GTX 1080Ti when paired with Intel’s Core i5-8600K CPU, representing only the teensiest bit of improvement to your overall frames per second output if you were to bung one in your PC today. That may well change once we start seeing more games take advantage of the Nvidia’s clever speed-boosting AI-driven Turing tech, but until developers get their act together and start patching in support for all of Turing’s best features, all we’ve got to go on right now is raw performance data.

With this in mind, I thought I’d take a closer look at how the RTX 2080 compares to its direct predecessor, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080. The former might not represent much of a leap past the GTX 1080’s souped up Ti cousin, but regular 1080 owners should see much better results compared to what they can do now, particularly when it comes to gaming at 4K. Let’s take a look.

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HDR on PC continues to be a bit of a mess these days, but provided you haven’t been put off by the astronomical prices of the best gaming monitors for HDR or, indeed, the ongoing debacle surrounding Windows 10 support for it, then the next step on your path to high dynamic range glory is to get an HDR compatible graphics card.

Below, you’ll find a complete list of all the Nvidia and AMD graphics cards that have built-in support for HDR, as well as everything you need to know about getting one that also supports Nvidia and AMD’s own HDR standards, G-Sync HDR and FreeSync 2. I’ve also put together a list of all the PC games that support HDR as well. There aren’t many of them, all told, but I’ll be updating this list with more titles as and when they come out so it’s always up to date.

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Ubisoft are giving their studios a moment to catch their breath after the launch of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in October. After debuting a new Odyssey trailer (below) at Gamescom, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot stated that there’s no sequels, spinoffs or side-games due in 2019, as reported by Gamespot. Their focus for next year will be live support for Odyssey. Probably for the best, as according to Odyssey director Scott Phillips (in a video interview with Game Informer), the new game will be “much longer” than the already massive Assassin’s Creed Origins.

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This year’s Amazon Prime Day is almost at an end. At midnight tonight, Amazon’s big day o’ deals will be over for another year (or, you know, until Black Friday in November), so if you had a look at the deals yesterday and thought, ‘Hmm… I could> do with a new SSD or graphics card’, then you’ve still got time to pick one up.

I know Amazon is evil etc, but just in case you do> fancy picking up a bargain, I’ve put together a list of all the best of the best PC Prime Day deals right here, covering hardware and games alike. Happy hunting.

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