During today’s Ubisoft Forward stream, Ubisoft announced that it has partnered up with Netflix to bring several projects over to the streaming platform. Valiant Hearts 2, Mighty Quest 2, and an Assassin’s Creed mobile game will be coming exclusively to Netflix. Plus, there’s a live-action Assassin’s Creed show coming to Netflix as well.
Few other details about the Assassin’s Creed mobile game or the TV show were revealed, but Valiant Hearts 2 is a brand new game announcement. it’s a sequel to 2014’s Valiant Hearts: The Great War.
According to a blog post released during the showcase, Netflix has major plans for the Assassin’s Creed IP. In addition to the live-action show, the game will get “multiple different series,” including animated and anime adaptations. The live-action show currently has no showrunner.
The move is a major development in Netflix’s new push into the video game industry. Most recently, the platform announced that it would be adding Desta: The Memories Between on September 27 alongside a host of other indie titles. Netflix also acquired Night School Studio last year, the developers behind Oxenfree. The acquisitions of Finnish mobile games studio Next Games and Texas-based developer Boss Fight Entertainment followed back in March.
It’s interesting to see Netflix go into the gaming space, but the platform still has a long way to go. According to recent analytics, Netflix’s games have been downloaded 23.3 million times and are played by 1.7 million subscribers daily. However, that makes up only less than 1% of the platform’s worldwide subscriber base of 221 million.
So far, the platform has seen the release of several high-profile indie games, including Spiritfarer, Into the Breach, and Moonlighter. Some other titles, such as Immortality, are coming to Netflix as well.
For years, Call of Duty’s campaign mode has used big, scripted set pieces to tell the overarching story amid all the adrenaline-pumping action. The 2023 Modern Warfare 3 tried to shake up the established formula by introducing a handful of short open combat missions, and I genuinely liked the idea, but the game's overall negative reception seeped into how those missions were received.
I feared the next iteration might abandon the idea because of the backlash, but I am glad it didn't. MW4’s “Stranded” mission uses the same approach, but instead of fragmenting it across the campaign, it puts it all in a single large-scale open-world mission.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.