Former Assassin's Creed director Alexandre Amancio has shared his thoughts about AAA development, suggesting we need "smaller teams" and admitting that big-budget developers cannot "solve a problem by throwing people at it".
January is the month that, where I live, in the south of England, everyone gets serious again. All the paraphernalia of Christmas - all the merriment and cheer and colourful lighting - is cleared away in favour of sobering goals for the year ahead. It's never something that's appealed strongly to me, making goals, but I do feel the allure of wiping a slate clean and starting again. It's like a run in a roguelike game, I like to think. Time for a new me.
The world has gone blue once again. James Cameron's Avatar: Fire and Ash is torching the box office, having already passed the $1 billion global mark and probably kickstarting serious conversations about Avatar 4 and 5 (both are written but waiting for the green light). And it looks like 2023's Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is also benefitting from some brand synergy.
We've been hearing rumblings of a full-blown remake of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag for the longest time now. After Skull & Bones' troubled development, those current-gen assets could boost the production of such a project, so the idea never sounded too far-fetched. We've yet to receive official news on it though. Now, a new Raid: Shadow Legends event has got hungry Assassin's Creed fans all hot under the collar.
It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.
Rainbow Six Siege is still struggling today after hackers gave out "billions" in in-game currency, forcing Ubisoft to briefly "intentionally" shut down the game.
Following the parliamentary debate of the Stop Killing Games campaign's petition to the UK government last year, a group of Green Party members have announced plans to propose an amendment to the party's policy which would "compel" its MPs to support the campaign.
Skyblivion, the massive mod remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine, won't be making its previously announced 2025 release goal, the team behind it have confirmed. Instead, the mod'll be coming out at some point in 2026, giving the team behind it extra time to overcome the final few hurdles and get it polished up.
This news comes a few months after ex-Skyblivion level and world designer Dee Keyes called the 2025 release goal the mod's team set in 2023 "pointless and unachievable". Keyes also accused Skyblivion project lead Kyle 'Rebelzize' Rebel and implementation lead Heavy Burns of rushing the project out the door and mismanaging communication within the team, subsequently sharing more of his perspective on the project in a video interview with RPS sister site Eurogamer. In a response to Keyes' original claims, Heavy Burns asserted that "many of the statements in his post are either misrepresented or just untrue".
Right, so. There's Oblivion Remastered, the official Oblivion remaster which released earlier this year. There's Skyblivion, the fan-made Oblivion remake mod which still currently looks due out relatively soonish, despite its release window having been a source of drama a few months ago. There's also Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil, another massive Skyrim modding project, but this time seeking to re-create the province in which Oblivion's set as it might be at the time The Elder Scrolls five takes place. Simple. The last one of those has just released a fresh teaser.
I'm distressed to report that Ubisoft are still making Beyond Good and Evil 2, which used to be the follow-up to a great open world Zelda-like game, but has evolved over 17 years of chaotic development into the concept of infinity.
Far Cry is set to be turned into a live-action TV series on FX, something Ubisoft reportedly let slip back in August, but has now been formally announced by the publisher in a post that's yet to be randomly zapped into the ether.
Ubisoft racer The Crew has avoided yet another shutdown after being ressurected in server-emulated form by fans earlier this year. According to the modders behind its revival project, The Crew Unlimited, a bug would have seen the game stop working once 2029 rolled around. Thankfully, they say a solution's been found.
If Ubisoft's rumoured Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag remake were an actual ghost ship, we'd be long past the point of snatching glimpses of the vessel through unnaturally dense fog at two bells during the morning watch. We'd be long past the point of spotting a spectral Jolly Roger between stormy crests, its deathshead wreathed in St. Elmo's Fire. The damn ghost ship is square abreast of us now, the hollow-cheeked revenant of Edward Kenway dangling from the rigging.
People keep pointing at the ghost ship and screaming, but Captain Ubisoft has his eyes firmly on the horizon. "Steady as she goes, lads!" he trills, as hordes of translucent pirates pour over the rail. "Steady as she goes till some hypothetical future time when we might announce a thing, maybe!"
The leads behind the, potentially surprisingly, hit superhero game Dispatch, AdHoc Studio, have been all over the place. Telltale Games, Ubisoft, Night School Studio, some pretty notable names, but today we're honing in on their time at Ubisoft in particular. That's because a recent report that dives into the long story that led AdHoc to making Dispatch revealed that before doing so, they were working on a completely new Splinter Cell game at Ubisoft.
At the tail end of 2024 the original PlayStation turned 30 years old. While the Xbox 360 is only hitting 20 and it's not an industry shaker to the degree the PS1 was, there's no doubt it earned its place as one of the most important consoles of all time. Xbox managed to challenge Sony in the traditional home console space the PlayStation had dominated with PS1 and PS2, and the console's brilliant line-up of games played a major role in that.
It's hard to believe it's been over five years since Ubisoft unveiled its troubled - and much-delayed - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake, but we're now one step closer to an actual release date, with Ubisoft's latest financial results narrowing its launch down to "Q4" of its current financial year.
It looks like we could be seeing Ubisoft's long-rumoured Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Remake set sail really rather soon.
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