Earlier this week it was reported that Ubisoft had cancelled development on its sequel to Immortals Fenyx Rising (2020)—Video Games Chronicle gathered information from multiple anonymous sources. The article proposed that: "a follow-up game was in early development at Ubisoft Quebec, but company leadership ultimately decided to cancel it earlier this month due to perceived challenges around establishing the IP." This studio was best known for its work on Assassin's Creed Odyssey (2018), but a brave decision was made to produce a new intellectual property—Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb understood that Ubisoft had grand ambitions to turn Immortals into a big time franchise, with a continued multiplatform release strategy, as well as spin-offs.

Ubisoft has been going through a rough patch in recent times—several unannounced games were canned earlier this year, and many of the publisher's 2022 releases underperformed at retail. According to VGC's inside sources, Ubi leadership has prioritized prominent brands (e.g Assassin's Creed), and this rethink put the Immortals sequel's future in jeopardy. A company spokesperson has responded to the news site's article, and confirmed that development staff are now working on more important IPs: "As part of our global strategy, we are redirecting and reallocating some creative teams and resources within the Quebec studio to other unannounced projects. The expertise and technologies these teams developed will serve as an accelerator for the development of these key projects focused on our biggest brands. We have nothing further to share at this time."

We knew this was coming, especially after Google's teaser from earlier this month. Project Stream was a proof-of-concept in collaboration with Ubisoft, to see whether AAA gaming was possible over the internet. Things were smooth most of the time in our own experience, but there remained questions over how the concept would translate over to a finished product, especially with infrastructure challenges on the client side of things. Google's keynote at GDC just wrapped up, and the main focus was Stadia- the now named cloud gaming service borne out of Project Stream.

Stadia is built with instant access in mind. An example demo came in the form of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which was used in the public test before. It is integrated with partner YouTube channels such that a trailer for a supported game would have an option to play said game, which would then launch immediately. Stadia is built with support from a wide partner network including AMD, Unity, id Software, and more, with details seen past the break.

We covered Project Stream in a more detailed news post recently, so this is a short update. The test period is active as of the time of testing, and will remain so through January 15, 2019. Selected entrants now get a bonus incentive of retaining a copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, with all progress from the test retained, even after the stream test is done. Indeed, users (who are limited to the USA as of the test period) with a minimum of an hour of game play will see the game added to their Uplay account on file and this should prompt more of the testers (which you can still apply to be, from everything we have seen) to try out Google's take on game streaming over the internet. Yours truly happens to be one who applied, was selected, and played all of five minutes thus far, but be on the lookout for another post early next year with impressions galore on how it goes.

As Thanksgiving nears, Steam's Autumn Sale has officially started. Offering multiple deals to be thankful for, such as, Assassin's Creed Odyssey (33% off), NeiR: Automata (50% off), Monster Hunter World (34% off), Shadow of The Tomb Raider (50% off) and Civilization VI Gold Edition (69% off) just to name a few. Even virtual reality titles like Doom VFR, Skyrim VR, and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality are now on sale for (50% off). That said, PC gamers can breathe a sigh of relief as the latest Steam sale will run from November 21st until November 27th at 10:00 AM Pacific. Meaning you have plenty of time to spend all your hard earned money, so open up your wallets and let the shopping spree begin.

AMD has released today the Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.10.2 beta drivers. These drivers focus on a few key fixes with the first one solving the issue of Vulkan API titles that experience crashing when launching the game. Next is a specific fix for Assassin's Creed Odyssey which keeps the game from randomly exiting when it is restarted after applying Adaptive Anti-Aliasing on multi-GPU systems.

That said, a few issues have been specifically noted. Strange Brigade can still experience application hang when using the DirectX 12 API. Radeon Overlay does not play nice with the latest Windows 10 October 2018 Update. It can cause intermittent instability or game crashes for the time being. Finally, RX Vega series graphics cards may experience elevated memory clocks when the system is idle. Other than that nothing else is mentioned by AMD in regards to possible driver performance improvements etc. Instead, this latest beta focuses on a few key fixes and nothing more. It should also be noted that it is available in 64-bit only, as AMD confirmed earlier today they will not be supporting 32-bit operating systems going forward.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.10.2 BetaThe change-log follows.

In 2010, a company called OnLive believed that game streaming was the future. The problem was that they believed that this future would come sooner than what ended up happening. The company (or rather, its IP) would end up being bought by Sony instead. The Japanese company then launched PlayStation Now later, which in itself is a cloud gaming platform that finally brought us closer to that future.

They weren't the only ones hedging this bet, however, and soon the cloud gaming fever spread to other companies and manufacturers. NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is one of the clearest examples of that venture, with its own pros and cons. But now we have a new, promising competitor in this field: Google, which announced yesterday the birth of the so-called "Project Stream". As the name suggests, this initiative is intended to offer end users the possibility of playing any game from any device and with only one requirement: to have access to the Google Chrome browser.

NVIDIA today released version 411.70 WHQL of their driver package which brings green performance to your graphics card. The 411.70 WHQL drivers are a Game Ready release, bringing support for Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Forza Horizon 4, and FIFA 19, with improved performance profiles and stability while rendering polygons from these games. Also included is a fix for the high idle power consumption of RTX 2080 & RTX 2080 Ti. We tested it with mixed results. Some other bugs were fixed, too, refer to the changelog for details.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 411.70 WHQL

Update: The full changelog is available now and listed below.

NVIDIA today released the GeForce 411.64 WHQL "Game Ready" driver to go along with the embargo release for their latest and greatest Turing-based RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards. These drivers come with optimization for upcoming AAA game launches including Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Forza Horizon 4, and Fifa 19. For those of you who pre-ordered the new GPUs, or are going to purchase them imminently, this is the driver you will need to get the most out of the hardware.

Other new features include support for CUDA 10.0, NVIDIA RTX technology, and the new Vulkan 1.1 API. As with any GeForce driver released after April 1, 2018, the driver adds performance enhancements, new features, and bug fixes only on Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal and Volta series GPUs. NVIDIA reaffirms that critical security updates will continue to be available on Fermi series GPUs through January 2019. Full release notes, as well as the download options to the driver, can be found in the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 411.63 WHQL

We are less than a month away from when the latest installment of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed (AC) series comes out. It may have seemed only months ago that Assassin's Creed Origins came out, probably because that is indeed the case, but this has not stopped the hype machine from building up fervor as players get to explore the anticipated ancient Greece era done Ubisoft-style. As with AC Origins, Ubisoft says the PC version of AC Odyssey is not a straight port of the console versions and received a dedicated team at Ubisoft Kiev who worked hand-in-hand with Ubisoft Québec.

This is all great news to us, although memories of AC: Unity still linger around to ensure caution before pre-ordering this. As it stands, Ubisoft says the PC version of AC Odyssey will include exclusive features not found in the console versions, including uncapped framerate toggles and an in-game benchmarking tool. Read past the break for PC system requirements as well as more information based on previews from other media outlets.