Last year, we posted an article on decommissioning online services for some older games. Today we have an update for you, as some additional online services will be decommissioned across several platforms on January 25, 2024. Decommissioning such services for older games is not something we take lightly, but is a necessity as the technology that drove those services has grown obsolete.

Below, you can find a list of the games and platforms affected. For a detailed breakdown of the effects of this decommissioning, please refer to our updated self-help article. Rest assured that the decommissioning of online services will only affect certain online functionalities; if you purchased these games, you will still be able to play them.

Ubisoft has recently announced during their quarterly earnings report that four games had been canceled including Splinter Cell VR & Ghost Recon Frontline while Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be delayed until late 2023. Ubisoft's Red Storm studio and Meta had been jointly developing Splinter Cell VR before the game was canceled due to the "uncertain economic environment". The free-to-play battle royale Ghost Recon Frontline title that was being made at Ubisoft Bucharest was also scrapped after a previous delay and significant fan backlash. The open-world Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora game has been delayed until FY2023 with indications that the launch could occur towards the end of the year.

Ubisoft's latest entry to its smash-hit open-world tactical combat sim "Ghost Recon" is getting its latest chapter "Breakpoint," bound for an October 4 release. Breakpoint builds on the open-world presentation of "Wildlands," and transports you to the fictional world of Auroa, across its diverse landscapes and drone-patrolled wilderness. Ubisoft today posted the system requirements for "Breakpoint." Nothing serious, the average gaming desktop should comfortably run it at 1080p thru 2K resolution, as detailed in the slide below.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint appears to be closely developed in collaboration with AMD, which means a high-level of optimization for AMD Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics cards. In particular, the game supports AMD FidelityFX image-quality enhancement introduced with "Navi." The PC version has texture-resolution suited for 4K Ultra HD, supports ultrawide monitors, has uncapped frame-rates, tobii eye-tracking support, and Discord integration. It's available for pre-order on UPlay and Epic Games Store.

The 9.75 TFLOPs figure in the leaked specifications slide of the Radeon RX 5700 XT "Navi" graphics card from earlier today got many guessing if AMD is essentially putting RX Vega-level performance into a GPU that sips a fraction of its power. It turns out that AMD's claim of the RX 5700 XT being faster than the GeForce RTX 2070 wasn't just specific to the odd super-optimized game title, but a whole selection of games, many of which some with GameWorks varnish, some of which even support NVIDIA RTX.

AMD's [leaked] performance slide for the Radeon RX 5700 XT sees the card beat the RTX 2070 in "Assassin's Creed: Odyssey," "Battlefield V," "CoD: Black Ops 4," "Far Cry: New Dawn," "Metro Exodus," Tom Clancy's "The Division 2," "The Witcher 3," and Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon: Wildlands." The card is also striking distance behind the RTX 2070 at "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," and Sid Meier's "Civilisation 6." All games in this slide are tested at 1440p resolution, with in-game settings maxed out (although we're waiting to read the Endnotes on whether "max out" in NVIDIA's context means turning on RTX on some of these games). The RX 5070 XT beats the RTX 2070 by as much as 22 percent in "Battlefield V," and 15 percent in "Metro Exodus," and is claimed to be within single-digit percentage ahead of the RTX 2070. There's another picture of the RX 5070 XT reference board in this slide, and unless we're mistaken, we spy two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. We'll learn more about this card in a few hours from now.

Slight heads-up: NVIDIA has announced that it is committed to providing gamers the best possible experience in the recently released - and TPU reviewed - Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands. The company reiterated its complete support for the game with its Game Ready drivers (version 378.66). However, NVIDIA is counting on launching a new Game Ready driver later this week, which will "introduce Ansel support for Ghost Recon Wildlands as well as some other surprises for gamers."

MSI, world leader in gaming hardware, announces the Camo Squad Limited Edition series! Selected from MSI's powerful gaming lineup, the series include supreme gaming laptops, compact gaming desktops, heavy-duty gaming motherboards and high-performance gaming graphics cards. The military-themed collection is designed to make combat feel more visceral and is definitely an array that hardcore FPS fans wouldn't want to miss!

From March 7th until June 30th 2017, fans who buy selected MSI Camo Squad series products get the Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands Game or Season Pass for FREE! The game, developed by Ubisoft, is scheduled to be released on March 7. In Wildlands, you are part of The Ghosts, an elite spec ops team, sent behind the enemy lines to break drug cartels in Bolivia, South America. Your task: take down the vicious criminal organizations in mind-blowing landscapes like mountains, rainforests and deserts. Moreover, in the MSI Camo Squad version of Ghost Recon Wildlands, a unique in-game T-Shirt with MSI logo is selectable for elite operatives in character customization. (Note: the game bundle deal is not available in China).

NVIDIA and AMD have, over the past five years, innovated giving away AAA game releases with their graphics cards, through game codes that can be redeemed on DRM platforms such as Steam. The two have their own internal pricing with game publishers, which makes giving away $60 (retail value) games with $400 graphics cards tolerable to their bean counters. To consumers, these games made for great tradable commodities, a sort of "discount coupons," even. Say you don't want to play the included games, already have them, or bought two graphics cards and have one game to spare; you had the ability to give away, trade, or even sell those game codes. NVIDIA is about to change that.

With its latest game bundle that lets you choose from "For Honor" and Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon: Wildlands," on purchase of new GeForce GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 graphics cards, NVIDIA changed the game redemption method. You first need NVIDIA's GeForce Experience app installed and logged in. The app then one-time redeems the game of your choice on verifying that you have the graphics card participating in the offer (i.e. a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080). The app doesn't appear to be checking serial-numbers of the cards, but rather if the right GPU is installed in the machine. After redeeming the game, however, you are free to uninstall GeForce Experience, or even change your graphics card. The game is handled by the DRM platform its developers intended (Steam, UPlay, Origin, etc.). We tested how game code trading works under the new system.

AMD today released a new version of Radeon Software Crimson ReLive. Version 17.1.2 brings with it support for the beta versions of Conan Exiles and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands.

This driver also includes several fixes for previously identified issues, of which you can read all about after the break. Feel free to download the newest version of the AMD drivers right here on TPU through our recently-revamped downloads section, by following the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.1.2 Beta

Following launches of its GeForce GTX 660 and GTX 650 graphics processors earlier this day, NVIDIA released the latest stable version of its GeForce driver suite. GeForce 306.23 WHQL was released for Windows 7/Vista and Windows XP. This is NVIDIA's first WHQL-signed driver launch after GeForce GTX 660 Ti was launched last month. Hence, it includes official support for GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GeForce GTX 660, and GeForce GTX 650. The company also notified that the next WHQL-signed drivers will remove support for legacy GeForce GPUs such as 6-series and 7-series.

GeForce 306.23 WHQL also adds GPU and game-specific performance improvements. Along with the latest patch by its developer, Total War: Shogun 2 will see up to 60% performance improvement with GeForce GTX 680. Performance is also significantly improved for games such as Batman: Arkham City, Dragon Age II, STALKER: Call of Pripyat, and Battlefield 3 (in SLI). SLI profiles were added or improved for a large number of games. The drivers provide early support for applications built with CUDA 5 Preview.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 306.23 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

A list of changes follows.

The games market went to Hell in May. Diablo III topping retail software sales for the month, according to the latest sales figures from NPD, and helped fuel a resurgence in the PC games space. Other top performers included Max Payne 3, which launched the same day as Diablo III, as well as Sniper Elite V2 and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
While action titles continued their dominance of the top 10, 2K Sports' NBA 2K12 held the fifth spot for the second straight week. Blizzard continued to show its impact in the PC market with Diablo III at number 1, the first time since July 2010 that a PC-only title has accomplished that feat. The game that did it in 2010? StarCraft 2, another Blizzard mainstay.

Total video game sales continued to shrink, down 28 percent from last year. However, the PC market jumped 230 percent from the same time last year to $80 million, fueled by Diablo III sales. The overall spend in May, including digital sales and microtransactions was estimated to be $1.17 billion.

Owners of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 will be happy to know there will be a reason to pop in that disc again soon, as Ubisoft will release a new set of co-op and adversarial maps through an Xbox Live Marketplace package titled Co-op Collection. The Co-op Collection will come with nine maps; four of them adversarial exclusive, five others shared with co-op. Most of the maps are based on levels from the original Ghost Recon and Ghost Recon: Island Thunder, but two of the adversarial maps are brand new. New achievements will be included as well, adding a total of 110 points to the game. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 Co-op Collection will be released next month.

The latest patch for Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2", v1.04, is now available. There have been a few fantastic changes made, including multicore support and the ability to run multiple dedicated servers on a single machine! The patch includes various minor fixes as well.

As promised, Ubisoft has released a multiplayer demo for Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, allowing you to try out this action sequel developed by Ubisoft's Paris studio and Red Storm Studios. The demo contains 1 map (Calavera) and 2 modes (Recon vs Assault & Team Deathmatch). Click here to download GRAW2 directly from Fileplanet.

Ubisoft has released a new trailer and five new screenshots from Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, this time showcasing the PC version of this action sequel developed by Ubisoft's Paris studio and Red Storm Studios. The game again puts you in control of the Ghosts who have to change their holiday plans to go to El Paso and put a stop to a growing rebel threat. The game is scheduled to be released this summer. Download the 2:01 min of gameplay footage from here.