Months after stepping down from his duties on Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the game’s former creative director, Ashraf Ismail, has been fired.
Ubisoft fired Ismail on Friday, August 14, saying that it made its decision after launching an investigation into allegations made against him earlier this year. The company didn’t say when the decision was made and didn’t respond to Digital Trends’ request for comment.
Ismail served as the creative director for the highly anticipated Valhalla before he abruptly announced in June that he was stepping aside “to properly deal with the personal issues in my life.” His decision came after tweets surfaced that implicated him in extramarital affairs and accused him of hiding his marital status to the women he had been communicating with.
“The lives of my family and my own are shattered,” Ismail said in a tweet at the time. He also wished his Valhalla team “all the best” and said they didn’t “deserve to be associated” with his alleged affairs.
Ubisoft has been reeling over the last few months after both current and former employees went public with stories of widespread sexual assault, harassment, and sexism at the company. Ubisoft has hired an outside consultant to investigate all of the allegations and has fired several prominent executives and creative leads, including chief creative officer Serge Hascoet and Canadian studios head Yannis Mallat.
Ismail, however, had been spared a firing when he stepped down from his role in June, making him one of the few individuals to not immediately lose his job. It appears now that the investigation revealed enough for Ubisoft to fire him.
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has publicly apologized to those who have come forward and shared their stories and promised to “change Ubisoft for the better.” He ultimately wants to build “an environment that its employees, partners, and communities can be proud of — one that reflects Ubisoft’s values and that is safe for everyone.”
Ismail’s firing shouldn’t impact Valhalla or its launch. The development team continued after Ismail stepped down and continues to promise a late-2020 release date.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.