Ubisoft’s historical open-world murder simulator Assassin’s Creed Origins is getting a safe and friendly ‘Discovery Mode’ for tourism soon, and it seems they’re also brewing a new mode with even more murder. A New Game+ mode will come to Oranges some time in the future, Ubisoft have confirmed, which should mean people who have finished the game will get to start the story again with all their end-game weapons, tools, and murderpowers carrying over. I’d imagine enemies will be levelled to match you but going through will full murderpowers is likely to be a lark. (more…)

Now that everyone’s had a few months to wander and stab around Ancient Egypt in Assassin’s Creed Origins, Ubisoft are ready to share new sights and new murders. Today they announced the first paid expansion, named The Hidden Ones and set four years after events of the main story, will launch next Tuesday, January 23rd. While you’re drawing daggers in your calendar (bonus points: use a red pen for cool blood drops), you can also note that the educational sightseeing Discovery Tour mode will arrive on February 20th, then the second big story DLC on March 6th. Before all that, a new quest that’s a prelude to The Hidden Ones hits the game for free in a patch today. (more…)

Post-processing tools for games aren’t new – hello Reshade and SweetFX – but the world of dramatically altering a PC game’s appearance with what could loosely be described as real-time Instragram filters has always been a scrappy wild west. Nvidia have this week built themselves a governor’s mansion on this new frontier, introducing a feature called ‘Freestyle‘ to the GeForce Experience suite of game optimisation, streaming and screenshotting tools. It might lack the open source and community-driven scope of ReShade, but it’s easier and slicker to use on the games that support it – and the results can be dramatic. Gimmicky, sure, but making a game you’re otherwise tiring of into a neon fever-dream can be a real shot in the arm.

Presenting for your wide-eyed delectation and howling disapproval – Plunkbat: The Animated Series, Assassin’s Creed Oranges: Vice City and American Truck Simulator: Grindhouse Edition. (more…)

As the feedback loop of Steam successes reaches an ear-shattering scream, this week we see last year’s best sellers dominating the New Year’s first week. So I refuse to live in the past. Let’s look forward. Let’s imagine what we might want from these behemothic developers. (more…)

We’ve already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin’ and a-shakin’ in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol’ Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well – as do a host of other games from 2017’s great and good.

Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you’re so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I’d have gone for in each category. (more…)

Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games.> But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol’ breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.

Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.

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Sometimes it s good to go back to where you came from in open world games. When the content is the world, travelling through it can often feel like you re gobbling it up, every virtual kilometre a chunk of media you ve greedily consumed rather than occupied.

But they rarely give you much reason for retracing your steps. Levelled rewards are rarely worth the journey; storylines and quests are often all used up. Towns, jungles, villages are left frozen in time, a snapshot of less sophisticated times. Now their challenges are less keen, their demands on your expanded skillset simplistic. Their NPCs repeat the same declamations as they ever did, ignorant of your world-spanning achievements.

While these worlds are physically non-linear, they often feel the opposite, locations standing as staging posts on a winding trail rather than interconnected places. Then I played Assassin s Creed Origins, which goes out of its way to seed the places you ve barrelled through with reasons to return. (more…)

Yesterday, the very fabric of society was threatened when some people disputed, with terminally dangerous inaccuracy, my 100% objectively and factually correct assertion that the currently-free Assassin’s Creed 4 is the bestest best Assassin’s Creed game of all time. Some of these anarchistic perverts argued that this year’s Egypt-set Origins was the better man-stabber, despite its complete absence of ghost pirate ships and Welsh accents, and rest assured they will suffer for this blasphemy.

But I am a merciful dictator of gaming opinion, so before they are all rounded up and fired into the sun, I shall first allow them to enjoy the bountiful contents of Asscreed Origins Update 6. Also known as patch 1.1.0, this 1.2GB bundle o’fixes includes significant graphical improvements and the aforementioned new difficulty mode. Enjoy it while you still draw breath, heretics. (more…)

I like the boat-centric Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag so much that I just went and added it to Uplay even though I already own it Steam. That’s right: an Asscreed I dig enough to voluntarily load up Uplay. Last week, Ubisoft were giving away the tragically de-Steamed RTS World in Conflict, and, as we promised then, here’s your nudge about this week’s Festivus freebie.

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Have you been finding Assassin s Creed Origins, a game where you can control the trajectory of your arrows, a bit on the easy side? Don t fret — the December update will add a new “nightmare” difficulty mode, level scaling and two new quests, one of which introduces horde mode.

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