assassins-creed posts

Ubisoft is a company based in France, a country that has a solid respect for comic books. French comics include creations that are even known in the US including Tintin, Asterix and XIII (which Ubisoft adapted into a cel-shaded shooter a few years ago). Now their upcoming sequel Assassin's Creed 2 will be getting some marketing back-up from a French-made comic.

Bleeding Cool has three pages from the upcoming Assassin's Creed comic which will be published in France on November 13, a few days before Assassin's Creed 2 ships to stores on November 17. The preview pages from the comic, written by Eric Corbeyran and drawn by Djilalli Defaux, seem to show the assassin in the days of the Roman Empire rather than the Middle Ages setting of the game sequel. Hopefully some comic book publisher in the US can bring this comic to our shores.

Looks like Direct2Drive isn't the only downloadable PC game site to offer a $5 game this week. Today Steam announced a sale on Ubisoft's original game in the Assassin's Creed series for only 5 bucks. That's a 75 percent savings off its normal Steam price. The sale will remain in effect until Thursday.

Of course, the PC version of Assassin's Creed was released several months after the console version shipped to stores. However the PC port did have some extra missions and tweaks to the game. However it looks like the upcoming sequel, Assassin's Creed 2, will follow the original as the PC version. While the console ports are due on November 17 the PC version won't be released until the first quarter of 2010.

One of the most well known people at Ubisoft (and let's face one of the best looking game developers period) has just gotten a promotion. Jade Raymond has just been named the head of the publisher's recently revealed development studio in Toronto.

Raymond previously gained fame as the producer for Ubisoft's hit Assassin's Creed which was developed at Ubisoft's Montreal studio. As head of the new Toronto team, Raymond will still report to Yannis Mallat, who is the CEO of both Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Toronto. The Toronto office will open by the end of 2009 but at the moment there's no word on what specific games Raymond will be in charge of at the new studio.

The PC game subscription-download service GameTap has been adding more and more games to its library of titles. A few months ago it announced it would be adding titles from Microsoft and today the company announced a new deal with Ubisoft that renews its current contract and will add over 50 Ubisoft games to its subscription service.

GameTap plans to add titles like the Brothers In Arms series, the Rainbow Six Vegas series, the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter series, Far Cry 2, Assassin's Creed and more to its monthly subscription service. In addition Ubisoft games will be added to GameTap's digital download store.

It was one of the highest selling games of 2007 (and it wasn't even a sequel). It was Assassin's Creed and the Ubisoft developed-and-published open world action game set in the Middle Ages (but not really) came out for the PC in April 2008. Now Ubisoft is teasing us with some new images at the game's official site that signals the publisher's first marketing of the sequel.

Yep, Ubisoft is prepping a follow-up to the game (shocker, we know) and the first teaser images seem to link Assassin's Creed 2 to Leonardo Da Vinci (which makes us wonder if Tom Hanks is wandering around the game) . We shouldn't have much longer to get the full scoop on the sequel. The web site teases (via a mirror text) that more info will be revealed in the next Game Informer print issue.

Steam users are used to getting sales on the weekend for one or two games but this week Steam's operators Valve are doing something a little different as they plan to put one game on sale every day. All of the game's come from Ubisoft's catalog of titles.

Today the first of these games have been put on sale. For today only you can purchase and download the PC port of the stealth action game Assassin's Creed for $9.99. That's a 50 percent discount off its normal Steam price of $19.99. Again this sale price is for today only with another Ubisoft game put on sale on Tuesday and so on until Friday.

The NPD Group has released its latest list of the top 10 best selling PC games, this time for the week ending Nov. 29. That happens to include the "Black Friday" shopping date and because of this a number of older PC games that got big discounts found themselves back for one week only on the list.

Among the reappearences: Bioshock, Assassins's Creed and The Sims 2 Deluxe, all of which had Black Friday discounts at one or more retailers. Blizzard's MMO expansion pack World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King still hit the number one spot for the week, which proves that Blizzard fans still want their game no matter what the price.

1. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King - Blizzard
2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe - Electronic Arts
3. Spore - Electronic Arts
4. BioShock - 2K Games
5. The Sims 2 Deluxe - Electronic Arts
6. Left 4 Dead - Valve/EA
7. Call Of Duty: World At War - Activision
8. Assassin's Creed - Ubisoft
9. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest - Blizzard
10. The Sims 2 Apartment Life - Electronic Arts

It's not a shock to learn that Ubisoft is working on a sequel to their open world action game Assasin's Creed. The first game in the series (released for consoles a year ago and for the PC last April) sold several million copies worldwide. Our sister site Joystiq reports that in this week's conference call with financial analysts, Ubisoft execs stated the sequel is in production and is due out sometime in Ubisoft's 2010 fiscal year which actually begins April 1, 2009.

Once more, Giant Bomb reports that during a taping of an episode of Gametrailers.com's Bonus Round series, financial analyst Michael Pachter revealed that according to his sources the sequel will change historical time periods to the 1700s rather than the original's time frame of 1191 (of course people who have actually played the game know that things are not what they appear to be in the title).

It's hard enough that PC games get pirated and are made available over the Internet after the game ships. It's even harder when a publisher has to deal with a leak that happens before the game is released. One example is the PC port of Ubisoft's action game Assassin's Creed which was made available on pirate locations on the Internet several weeks before its planned April 2008 release.

Now Gamespot reports that Ubisoft is going after a company that it claims helped to release that leaked version of the game. The story states that Ubisoft is suing Charlotte, NC based Optical Experts Manufacturing who was in charge of duplicating the game on PC disk for shipment to stores. Apparently one of their employees managed to gain access to the game and made the port available on the Internet. Ubisoft states this was in violation of OEM's own security measures. According to Ubisoft that pirate leak was downloaded 700,000 times which cost Ubisoft millions of dollars in sales. So far OEM has yet to comment on the lawsuit.

We mentioned earlier today that this is the season for earnings to be revealed by publicly traded companies including game publishers. Today Ubisoft released their latest numbers for their first fiscal quarter which ended June 30. Revenues were €169 million for the time period, up from €134 million for the same period a year ago and exceeding Ubisoft's previous expectations. The sales figures were helped in part by the release of the PC game ports of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Assassin's Creed.

Sales for the current quarter are expected to come in at €169 million, a 25 percent increase from the same period the year before as expectations are high for the release of the WWII shooter Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway. One piece of expected bad news was that the long-delayed Splinter Cell Conviction has now been pushed into Ubisoft's 2009-2010 fiscal year which begins on April 1, 2009.