Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

An Assassin’s Creed designer who publicly spoke out against Ubisoft’s return-to-office mandate claims the company have now fired him. Developer David Michaud-Cromp posted on LinkedIn last week that he’d been put on unpaid disciplinary leave after recently criticising the policy change on the social media platform.

If you’re out of the loop, Ubisoft have recently revealed plans to push remote staff back into offices amid a bloodbath of game cancellations, restructuring and voluntary redundancies. The company intend to have employees return to working in-office five days a week, with an annual allowance of work-from-home days. All of these moves have understandably not gone down well with French unions, who’ve subsequently called strike action.

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As any Civ player knows, time has a habit of passing. Next week, Civ 7 will turn a year old. It’s been a year of regular additions and tweaks following the mixed initial reception to Firaxis’ attempt to do something different with their grant strategy behemoth. Fitting, then, that the devs have rung in that first birthday by revealing when they’re hoping to drop some big changes that’ll have “major implications” for Civ 7.

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I’m going to a toddler’s birthday party on Saturday and I have it on good authority from Alva’s dad that there will be trays of sandwiches and a couple of cakes from M&S. There is no booze provided. I’m not sure if that’s because there should be no booze consumed at a two-year-old’s birthday, or only that we should bring our own. I guess I’ll find out for sure if they frisk on the door. However, if Valheim‘s latest anniversary update is anything to go by, I am now looking forward to Alva’s fifth birthday.

To mark five years in Early Access, developer Iron Gate have released an anniversary patch that is a damn sight better than the prospect of watching a sad looking Colin the Caterpillar cake getting pawed at by hungry toddlers. There are flower garlands, mysterious axe heads, and a steady 60 fps on Steam Deck performance mode. Who doesn’t want mysterious blades at a birthday party?

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After being accused last week of using AI-generated artwork to promote their store’s new year sale, retro game sellers GOG have reportedly addressed the issue in a private Discord server for paying supporters. According to this fresh response from a GOG staffer, the banner was made “with the help of Al tools” and was “mistakenly allowed” to be pushed live on the storefront.

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NaissancE developers Limasse Five have released a big update for SenS, their early access open world spelunking game in which you search an enveloping Structure for Unique Places, tools and artefacts. The ExistencE of SenS is news to me, despite it being very much my cup of ImpossiblE ArchitecturE.

Launched on Steam in 2022, it’s a work of torqued cuboids, sunken pockets of city, and vaguely fractal fissures. While there are no living or active threats, as far as I can tell, you do have to worry about traps and Unstable Zones – “simple or even abstract architectural structures at the beginning, but getting more complex, vast and labyrinthine the further you go.” Unstable Zones change in the dark. So you’ll need to use Luces – glowballs – and other tools to solidify paths and access points.

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Mark’s on holiday today, which means we can’t do our usual thing of workplace-bullying him into writing about Fallout 76 while we sit around in wingback chairs drinking Glenfiddich. But if he were here, he’d surely be thrilled to note this PCGN interview with Bethesda Game Studios creative director Jon Rush, who says he hopes the multiplayer RPG can become “thicker” in 2026. Oh my.

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HBO’s The Last of Us TV adaptation is likely ending with its upcoming third season, according to network CEO Casey Bloys. Speaking to Deadline, that boy Bloys used his voice to address the noise that the joys of the Naughty Dog-inspired series would end with season three, saying “It certainly seems that way.” Pedro Pascal’s dreams, destroyed.

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Nine years after securing $3.2 million on Kickstarter and mere weeks after launching into Steam Early Access, MMORPG Ashes Of Creation is in humongous difficulties. The game’s entire leadership team have allegedly quit “in protest” at decisions made by the board of Intrepid Studios, with creative director Steven Sharif accusing board members of “directing actions that I could not ethically agree with or carry out”. Other staff have announced that they’ve been laid off, with one calling it the end of the studio.

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This week in new PC games: some new PC games. Look, sometimes I have the energy and fortitude to write a 500 word overture about four dimensional tapeworms, and sometimes I look upon the intro as nothing but a hateful chore. I just want to list some games, but internet etiquette requires that I occupy your eyeballs with a proper paragraph or two before we break out the bullet points.

Is this enough of a preamble yet? No? How about now? Come ooooon, there’s a tasty new tactics RPG at the bottom of the page. Scroll down, you apes!

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Crafting a world that begs to be explored is a tricky thing to do, especially when the world is kind of sucky, doubly so when it’s woven mostly through words with only supplementary imagery to provide a broader context. Yet Citizen Sleeper’s is one I’m often thinking about because amongst all the grand sci-fi concepts is a grounded sense of reality that you’ll always find in the best of the cyberpunk genre. And here I am, a year on from the second game’s release, tempted to return once more, but this time in a form based on its tabletop origins.

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