Assassin's Creed Mirage was envisioned as an homage to its franchise—a celebration of how it began and what it accomplished between 2007's Assassin's Creed and 2023's Mirage. Beginning as an idea for a DLC expansion that would take Eivor to the Middle East, it grew into a standalone prequel starring Basim, the enigmatic Hidden One from Valhalla. Developed as a shorter experience by Ubisoft Bordeaux, the return-to-roots game presented a distinctive set of challenges, which are explored in the March 22 GDC talk "Between Legacy and Modernity: Creating an Homage Game to the 15-Year-Old Assassin's Creed Franchise."

During the talk, Creative Director Stéphane Boudon and Lead Producer Fabian Salomon discuss the game's beginnings, its growth into a "remoot"—that is, something between a remake and a reboot - and how a streamlined approach helped them make tough choices and focus the game on the Assassin experience. To find out more, we spoke with Boudon and Salomon about some of the early concepts behind the game, a few features that didn't make the cut, and how Mirage re-introduced and redefined stealth as a gameplay pillar.

Nations have long invested in domestic infrastructure to advance their economies, control their own data and take advantage of technology opportunities in areas such as transportation, communications, commerce, entertainment and healthcare. AI, the most important technology of our time, is turbocharging innovation across every facet of society. It's expected to generate trillions of dollars in economic dividends and productivity gains. Countries are investing in sovereign AI to develop and harness such benefits on their own. Sovereign AI refers to a nation's capabilities to produce artificial intelligence using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business networks.

Why Sovereign AI Is Important
The global imperative for nations to invest in sovereign AI capabilities has grown since the rise of generative AI, which is reshaping markets, challenging governance models, inspiring new industries and transforming others—from gaming to biopharma. It's also rewriting the nature of work, as people in many fields start using AI-powered "copilots." Sovereign AI encompasses both physical and data infrastructures. The latter includes sovereign foundation models, such as large language models, developed by local teams and trained on local datasets to promote inclusiveness with specific dialects, cultures and practices. For example, speech AI models can help preserve, promote and revitalize indigenous languages. And LLMs aren't just for teaching AIs human languages, but for writing software code, protecting consumers from financial fraud, teaching robots physical skills and much more.

Our next Developer Update Livestream begins on January 18 at 9 a.m. PST and will unearth details about the next season's gameplay features, Season Journey, and quality-of-life updates. Plus, we'll also share information about the new competitive leaderboard system—The Gauntlet. Join associate director of community Adam Fletcher, game design manager Daniel Tanguay, quest designer Madeleine James, and lead class designer Adam Jackson, as they delve into the danger awaiting you in Diablo IV's third season.

We'll also hold a Q&A segment at the end of the stream for players to field their questions directly to the team. Visit our official Diablo Twitch and YouTube channels to watch live! Following the Developer Update Livestream's conclusion, we'll post another article with a video of the livestream so you can still catch up on the details if you miss them.

Sanctuary beckons you forth, wanderer. On November 4, at 2:30 pm PDT, a glimpse into the future of Diablo IV will be revealed live to all at BlizzCon. Join associate game director Brent Gibson, production director Tiffany Wat, lead game producer Kalyeigh Calder, game director Joe Shely, and associate director of community Adam Fletcher, who will introduce content releasing during Season of Blood and beyond.

On the first day of BlizzCon, Q&A questions for the Campfire Chat will be gathered in-person from a box in the Diablo hall, along with any from social media. Then, we'll have a Q&A segment at the end of the stream where the team will answer questions collected from the community.

Just when you think the post-apocalyptic world being overrun by hordes of deadly enemies couldn't get any worse, along comes Remnant 2 with a whole new terrifying world of deadly creatures and god-like bosses. Remnant 2 is the continuation of the best-selling game Remnant: From the Ashes, and we (Xbox Wire) connected with David Adams, President of Gunfire Games, to talk about what you can expect from this intense Remnant combat experience.

Since this is a sequel, the first and most obvious question is, how does Remnant 2 align with everything we experienced in Remnant: From the Ashes, and what do those players who never played the first game need to know? "Story wise it picks up from the end of the first game's final DLC. The main threat has been seemingly defeated, and mankind is starting to fight back and take back the Earth," shares Adams. "However, something is obviously not perfect, or we wouldn't have a sequel. We try to keep the stories in our games simple, so players should have no trouble picking it up."

Logitech has announced the merging of its microphone and audio equipment brands - their G Gaming Twitter account posted about this decision yesterday, and directed customers to a question and answer session on the official subreddit: "Where do you get support? How will ASTRO, Blue and LFC integrate into Logitech G? Will there be new ASTRO products? Get your questions answered with our official FAQ." A brand manager has since confirmed (via a fan query) that the Blue brand is getting nixxed: "We will be keeping the Yeti brand and moving it under Logitech G. The Blue name will be used to describe our technologies." Logitech spent a cool $177 million when it acquired Blue Microphones back in mid-2018, so it is odd that the company has chosen to drop a very recognizable and popular brand name in the worlds of podcasting, streaming and audio recording.

News outlets have discovered that Blue has been removed from the brands section of Logitech's website, and the Bluemic.com domain now directs back to the parent company's main online presence(s). The Logitech G sub-page has been updated with listings of Yeti, Snowball and other microphone models. A brand manager also outlined ASTRO's future: "(it will) continue to live on as a premium console audio product series underneath the Logitech G brand. Stay tuned for more information regarding ASTRO including a launch that we think our community will be very excited about...We're (also) very excited about ASTRO as a product series under Logitech G."

Nintendo has released another of its "Ask the Developer" discussions, the first segment of this week's edition is obviously part of a marketing drive to drum up even more interest in the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (scheduled to launch this Friday). Included in the roundtable conversation is Eiji Aonuma, project manager of the The Legend of Zelda series, who has RPG development experience dating back to the SNES and N64 days at Nintendo. The veteran developer confirms that the follow-up to 2017's Breath of the Wild functions as a direct sequel - the fanbase has long suspected that this was always the case - in his introduction he gets down to the facts sharply: "Once again, it takes place in the vast land of Hyrule after the conclusion of the previous game."

Aonuma reiterates the chosen setting: "Yes, this title is set in Hyrule shortly after the end of the previous game. There are many reasons why we chose this setting. After finishing development on the previous title, we wondered if we could make it possible for players to continue exploring the world after they've reached the game's ending." Given the previous entry's massive success in terms of sales - Breath of the Wild is approaching 30 million units sold - and critical reception, it would be natural for Nintendo to build on that foundation. A section of the fanbase has been critical of Nintendo's decision to not produce an unconnected sequel - Aonuma addresses this matter when he is asked whether an entirely new setting/visual style was in the cards: "No, not really. Although The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, has its own conclusion, we started to come up with new ideas that we wanted to bring to life in this already realized version of Hyrule, so our direction in making a sequel did not change."