PC players can download the excellent Assassin's Creed: Black Flag for free next week, as part of Ubisoft's Happy Playdays seasonal promotion.

If you fancy downloading the rip-roaring, piratical high seas adventure (which I still reckon is the best Assassin's Creed game, but then I'm easily swayed a peg leg and a palm tree), it'll be available between Monday December 11th and Monday December 18th.

If you're after a more immediate freebie, however, Ubisoft is also giving away a PC copy of alternate-history RTS World in Conflict, plus its single-player Soviet Assault expansion, right now. You've got until December 11th to grab it.

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The first of EA's adjustments to the loot box ecosystem in Star Wars Battlefront 2 have gone live but they're insignificant and skirt the bigger issue. In other words, the loot box system remains the same.

What's changed is the speed at which you can earn things.

End-of-round credit pay-outs have been upped across the board, "specifically bumping the top players on each team by even more". This means skilled players will earn credits more quickly.

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DayZ will finally - after more than four years - shed the Steam Early Access label and launch in 2018.

Czech developer Bohemia committed to a console - Xbox - version in 2018 as well.

"DayZ will be out of Early Access next year," wrote Bohemia in an end-of-year DayZ update, "and we'll also finally deliver it to console players in 2018.

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I never thought I'd write about a game called Legendary Gary.

It's a hand-drawn adventure about an unspectacular man playing a fantasy game on his computer, only all of a sudden the game and his life begin mixing as one, and Gary's life gets very weird.

By rights it should be terrible, yet somehow the wry tone and self-awareness - not to mention synth soundtrack - keep Legendary Gary afloat. Maker Evan Rogers has interesting ideas about turn-based combat, too.

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ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2 is an interesting beast. Since 2012, the Fantasy MMORPG has offered players the chance to delve into the world of Tyria any time they want without ever being charged a subscription fee. Not something we see very often.

The model must be working, however, as publisher NCSoft boasts over five million sales of the game to date. And with Season 3 of their "Living World" story - a constantly evolving, morphing narrative - hitting last week, they're hoping to bolster that further.

To celebrate the occasion, NCSoft have offered us 10 copies of the "Ultimate Edition" of Guild Wars 2's latest expansion, Path of Fire - which usually commands an RRP of 69.99 - to give away to lucky readers.

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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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UPDATE 5th December 2017: The streamer who hit the headlines after broadcasting a real-life UFC pay-per-view event while pretending to play the latest UFC video game says he's been issued a 24-hour ban on Twitch.

Adrian Lester, from the US, streamed the entire UFC 218 broadcast on Saturday night across multiple platforms, including Twitch - with controller in hand.

Currently, Lester's Twitch channel is unavailable.

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There may be spoilers for the Dishonored series of games ahead.

"The Void is unspeakable. It is infinite and it is nowhere, ever-changing and perpetual. There are more things in the endless black Void, Kirin Jindosh, than are dreamt of in your natural philosophy" (Letter from Delilah). Despite the best efforts of natural philosophers, the world of Dishonored is defined by occult, unknown influences. Here, we performed dark magicks, battled witches, conversed with spirits, and even traversed the distance in-between worlds during our vendetta-fueled travels through Dunwall and Karnaca.

Any inquiry into the metaphysics of Dishonored stands and falls by the Void, that shadowy realm that is the source of all magic, witchcraft and arcane knowledge. Even the Outsider, who appears as an ancient god that grants his arcane mark to the player, ultimately derives his powers from the Void, not the other way around. But the Void is an elusive place that doesn't give up its secrets readily, and we as players don't understand it any better than the seekers of Gristol or Serkonos who struggle to catch so much as a glimpse of it. So, what exactly is the Void, or rather, how should we think about it to make sense of it?

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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.

We're back, after all that Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales mania. While the vast majority of what some people like to call 'doorbuster' deals are over and done with, there's still no shortage of retailers offering up various sales and discounts right now. We've got a brief period between the end of Black Friday and the beginning of Christmas sales, so let's make the most of it and take a look at the best deals from around the internet right now.

As usual, we've got deals that'll work in the UK, deals that'll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places. Let's get started.

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Two things happened this week that made me think about beautiful stuff vanishing from the world, and about the strange notion that there might be a kind a melancholic pleasure to be had - if melancholic pleasures can be had - in the spaces created by fresh absence. I'm not ghoulishly thinking of death or anything as serious as that. More the weird kind of beauty you sometimes get when you look at a wall of framed pictures and notice the ghostly parchment patches where something else once hung and now hangs no longer. Ghoulishly, ghostly. We are not off to a great start here.

The first thing that happened was that I read a piece on Eurogamer about the fact that Demon's Souls is going to have its online elements turned off for good next February. I never played Demon's Souls properly, and I now suspect that I am not going to. In a vague way it is something I had always planned to do, though, and I know how I would have had to approach it. I have seen this game many times, a world of darkness in which the action unfolds in little pools of golden light that hover around the player. There is a hub world of sorts - in my memory a huge part of it is spiral walkways made of old stone - and there is the Souls DNA in rich form: waiting for an opponent to move, waiting for the perfect opening, thrilling to the energising thwack of a sword hitting a shield: still alive!

Mostly what I know about this game, though, I don't know from the screen. I know from long conversations with Simon Parkin over coffee in which he talked me through these dazzling discoveries he kept making in a game that kept its whole cosmology, as it were, a thing that had to be understood by the player tentatively and over a number of hours. He talked about the messages people left for others, and he talked about the way that some of these messages could not be trusted. I think he maybe talked about invasions, other people suddenly turning up in his game? Or was that Dark Souls? I guess I'll never know now.

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