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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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).

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This month will bring a slew of updates for Assassin's Creed: Origins, including a new difficulty mode, Horde mode and a big fan-requested feature: enemy scaling.

But perhaps most exciting, a "new surprise quest" will also pop up - which looks like Ubisoft and Square Enix's Final Fantasy and Assassin's Creed partnership coming full circle...

Yes, it looks like Assassin's Creed Origins is getting a chocobo horse. For context, Final Fantasy 15 got free Assassin's Creed-themed DLC back in August.

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Assassin's Creed Origins arrives on Xbox One X, giving us a fascinating insight into how a key developer aims to scale their multi-platform projects most effectively across the current generation of consoles - both base models and 4K mid-gen refreshes. On the face of it, there are few surprises here: the more teraflops your console has, the better the resolution, automatically meaning that, yes, the game looks best on Xbox One X. But the techniques Ubisoft has deployed to scale its game across consoles produces some interesting results: Microsoft's new console hands in by far the best raw metrics in terms of pixel counts, but PS4 Pro still holds up rather well.

It's all about temporal anti-aliasing, the process of refining quality in the frame currently rendering by drawing upon information from previously generated images. The truth is that there's a huge amount of common information from one frame to the next, so why not draw upon that existing data and allow the game to look even better? TAA has produced excellent results in existing games, with titles like Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, Battlefield 1, Uncharted 4, Doom and Wolfenstein 2 all but banishing the dreaded 'jaggies' - harsh, ugly geometric edges. It's typically this artefact that is the most obviously noticeable difference between the same game running at varying resolutions

Assassin's Creed Origins follows suit with its own TAA solution, providing a huge upgrade over the basic post-process solutions found in Unity and Syndicate. It's also a good fit for the new game as Ubisoft has jettisoned its previous approach to the fundamentals of image quality: the fixed 900p framebuffer on both PS4 and Xbox One is gone, replaced with a dynamic scaling technology that aims for optimal GPU utilisation at all times, increasing resolution in simpler scenes and lowering it on more complex scenes while maintaining a relatively consistent frame-rate. It's not a new technique, but the use of temporal AA helps to mitigate the visual side-effects as resolution decreases - you're losing the raw pixel count, but you're still super-sampling in more data from prior frames, so despite some big variations in pixel counts between platforms, it helps to bring PS4 Pro, Xbox One X and PC versions closer together from a visual standpoint

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Clocking in at just under a minute, this Assassin's Creed Origins video is but a morsel of a trailer. Still, amongst all the bombastic gameplay and review score braggery we usually see in promotional trails, it's well worth highlighting.

Created by Hong Kong-based Paperbox Creations, it shows Origins main character Bayek leaping into battle, after having his fate weighed up by the god Anubis.

History lesson: Egyptians believed your heart was weighed upon death, and in order to enter the afterlife you needed a heart as light as a feather. Good deeds in life made your heart lighter. Bad deeds would make your heart heavy, and leave you unable to enter the afterlife at all. (You would, instead, be fed to crocodile-head god Ammut.)

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