Assassin’s Creed Odyssey offers more player freedom than any other game in the series, including letting you steer your protagonist’s sexuality. As a feature, it was widely praised, and Ubisoft have proudly marketed the game on how much it respects and reacts to player freedom. Unfortunately, the latest chapter of the Legacy Of The First Blade DLC undermines this in favour of leading the player into an inescapable ‘canon’ heterosexual relationship. Understandably, some players are upset, to the point where Ubisoft have issued an apology and a statement on the issue. Potential spoilers abound below.

Update: Kotaku have a more detailed statement from Odyssey creative director Jonathan Dumont, which you can find below.>

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Ever since Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 came out in 2016, it’s not only been the de facto, bestest best graphics card for flawless 1080p gaming, but also the go-to GPU for cash-strapped 1440p-ers, offering smooth, if slightly less shiny, frame rates for a much lower price than Nvidia’s more capable GTX 1070 or GTX 1070Ti. It was a fantastic card when it launched for $249, and it continues to be one now for even less, with some of today’s cheapest 6GB cards going for $240 / 220.

Its RTX 2060 successor, however, kicks things up a notch. It’s another 100 / $100 more expensive than the GTX 1060, with Nvidia’s Founders Edition on test here going for 329 / $349 while third party cards currently start at 350 / $350, but when it comes to speed, it’s in another league altogether. Whereas the GTX 1060 struggled to hit 60fps on higher quality settings at 1440p, the RTX 2060 sails past that number and then some. It can even push into the realms of 4K without throwing a hissy-fit. In truth, this is what today’s GTX 1070 owners should be looking to for their next upgrade, because this, dear readers, is one seriously powerful graphics card that goes way beyond what we’d normally call ‘mid-range’.

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Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 launches in March, but those confident enough to put money down on Ubisoft Massive’s MMO-lite shoot n’ looter get to play around in its post-apocalyptic Washington DC early. A beta weekend will be running from Thursday, February 7th to Monday, February 1th, it’ll be open to all pre-ordering players, but those merely curious in the game can sign up for a chance to get in free here. Below, a predictably patriotic and bombastic story trailer, and a breakdown of some of the PC version’s finer features.

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The past week’s flurry of accusations, counter-claims, big-money deals and license revocations between Unity and Improbable seems to have come to an end. Developers using Improbable’s SpatialOS cloud server tech can breathe easy, and resume development as normal without fear of the floor dropping out under them. In a Unity blog post here, the company say they’ve reinstated Improbable’s Unity licenses, and have altered the terms of service so that they are no longer in breach. Developers are now free to use any third-party services they wish, although not all will be officially supported.

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Riot Games have unveiled a new set of company values, intending to look forward to a bright and friendly future following last year’s public dissection of their garbage workplace culture of harrassment and exclusion. The League Of Legends developers say the manifesto they wrote in 2012 “served us well for many years, but didn’t evolve along with us.” What they continue to miss is that their company values–the actual values their company fostered and hushed protestations against, rather than any values they might claim to have–did not serve all people well, only those who thrived in that environment. Rewriting a webpage doesn’t mean anything when their actions demonstrate they’re unwilling to make big changes.

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There are few thrills as videogamey as weaving through a barrage of very deadly bullets in slow motion. Katana Zero looks to have that in spades, plus the never-not-cool ability to deflect bullets with your sword, back to their unwitting owners. Askiisoft’s samurai platform slasher has been on my radar for a while now, thanks to looking like a blend of Hotline Miami and Samurai Gunn, and today’s trailer has me itching to play it. The pseudo-80s ‘neo-noir’ aesthetic may be a well worn groove at this point, but synths, swords and slow-mo still makes a potent cocktail. Take a peek below.

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The Adeptus Mechanicus are one heck of a Warhammer 40K faction. These shadowy racist warrior monks are more machine than human and worship a trinity of machine gods. They say stuff like, From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I prayed for the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine.

Those words are from the intro to Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus, an excellent turn-based tactics game that really gets> the AdMech. Yet developer Bulwark Studios hadn t even played 40K before they took it on. In order to make it, this small team had to negotiate decades of sacred lore and intense fan expectation while also being disallowed from following existing tactics templates, even 40K s. Such is the challenge of making a licensed game, but sometimes great things can emerge from stricture and a dose of inspiration.

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I was told before playing Metro Exodus that, as with the previous Metro games, it is important to think before you act. Seize every quiet opportunity to craft another med kit, a molotov, another filter for your mask. Continually take stock of your, er, stock. And it s true, there is grim satisfaction in sneaking up behind a weird anti-electricity pseudo-Christian cultist and knocking him out without making a sound. In disarming the noisemaker traps before you run into them. In taking out a ghoul-like Humanimal with a throwing knife to the head, and pulling the knife out to use on something else. Reduce, reuse, recycle, as they say.

But it s also good to pull out a sawn-off shotgun and blast a Humanimal in the face with it, alerting all the other Humanimals in the area so you can faceblast them as well.

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IO Interactive, the Danish mob behind Hitman and Kane & Lynch (look, I still swear K&L2 is interesting), today announced they’ve opened a new studio in Malm , Sweden. Given that there were ditched by former owners Square Enix and faced an uncertain future only 20 months ago, before going independent, this is a pleasing turnaround. I am glad they’re apparently doing well enough to expand, especially as 2018’s Hitman 2 is a cracker. Surely now it’s time for Kane & Lynch 3, eh? Eh? Anyone? Eh?

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What if tech support helpline jobs weren’t a crushingly unhappy grind for poor pay but a gateway to a world of intrigue? You can catch a glimpse of that in the Tech Support: Error Unknown free demo released today. It’s one of those games where your whole view is presented as a computer desktop–Uplikes, as the genre is known far and wide in honour of Uplink–and we play with a variety in-game applications and scripted responses to resolve customers’ issues to their satisfaction.

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