I have played many Assassin's Creed games over the years, but I've rarely loved them. Ubisoft's historical fiction is perennially almost-great. A lot of players would say it reached its peak in the late 2000s, with the trio of renaissance Italy games beginning with Assassin's Creed 2, and their charismatic hero, Ezio Auditore. Since then, the series has become bloated, offering hundreds of hours of repetitive open-world exploration and assassination in ancient Greece, Egypt and even Viking Britain. Odyssey (the Greek one) was the last I played seriously; I found the setting exquisite, the gameplay somewhat irritating and the scale completely overwhelming.

The publisher had a rough 2024, with Star Wars Outlaws failing to meet sales expectations and word of XDefiant's demise coming around six months after the tactical shooter debuted. Skull and Bones finally arrived too, but it was a bit of a damp squib. Amid rumors of the company being sold or spinning out some of its assets into a joint venture with Tencent, Ubisoft really needs a win. It's not going to have a better chance to do that anytime soon than with Assassin's Creed Shadows. After a couple of delays, the latest entry in the company's flagship series is set to arrive on March 20.

Editor's note: This article contains mild spoilers for Assassin's Creed Mirage. The deeper I got into Assassin's Creed Mirage, the more a sense of warm nostalgia washed over me. It felt like a cozy hug from an old friend. The latest entry in Ubisoft's long-running open-world adventure franchise takes the series back to its roots. Mirage mostly forgoes the RPG approach Ubisoft adopted in the last three main games: Assassin's Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla.

Assassin's Creed Infinity won't be a free-to-play online game, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has confirmed during the developer's latest earnings call. Bloomberg first reported about the project's existence back in July, and the company has shared details about it bit by bit since then. The publication said that AC Infinity, which is the project's name that could change upon release, will be a live online service similar to Grand Theft Auto Online that requires you to own the base game. "This game is going to have a lot of narrative elements in it. It's going to be very innovative game, but it will have what players already have in all the other Assassin's Creed games, all the elements that they love... right from the start. So it's going to be a huge game. But with lots of elements that already exist in the games that we published in the past."

You play as Templars (the antagonists of the series) who are training by using the Animus, learning how to hunt and kill assassins, which is a neat twist. It's a game of cat and mouse: you're given a target to track and kill while other players are hunt you as well. The premise is so unique, and so satisfyingly tense. I can't think of any other multiplayer experience that put so many resources into building a compelling stealth experience to play with friends. I loved being able to sneak up to a target and poison them silently, then watch them collapse like a rag doll moments later.

In the absence of trade shows and other physical preview events, publishers are getting creative with their video game marketing. Today, Ubisoft casually launched a livestream that will reveal the setting of the next Assassin's Creed game. But here's the wild part: instead of a simple countdown, Ubisoft is broadcasting an artist working in Adobe Photoshop. At the time of writing, the canvas shows a mysterious silhouette of a powerful figure (the next game's protagonist, presumably) in front of a split background that contains icy waters and luscious fields. Will it end with some kind of trailer, or a finished poster?

Ubisoft's most-spotlighted (and most-leaked) game of E3 was definitely Assassin's Creed Odyssey, a new entry in the game that is…going back to making the series an annual franchise, even if Ubisoft said they were steering away from that. While Odyssey looks a lot like an Origins reskin, this time set in ancient Greece, it's going pretty hard into full-on RPG territory, complete with individual pieces of armor with different rarities, dialogue trees and even romance options for your character, where you can play as either the male Alexios or female Kassandra, both angling to become Spartan legends. What has been consistently weird about Assassin's Creed Odyssey is that other than looking like an Assassin's Creed game, there are almost no traces of…Assassins at all, at least as we've come to know them. There is an "assassin" skill tree, but that's a lower case "a" along with hunter and warrior skill trees. The only thing that seems remotely connected to the Assassin's Creed universe at all is that it seems pretty clear that your treasured weapon, the spear of Leonidas, is a Piece of Eden, giving you supernatural powers in combat.

We are going to probably be seeing E3 leaks every hour on the hour until the show is over, and the trend continues with Assassin's Creed Odyssey today. It was leaked via a promotional keychain (a keychain!) that Assassin's Creed Odyssey was Ubisoft's next game in the series last week, but today we have a fresh Odyssey leak courtesy of the PlayStation store. We already knew the game focuses on Greece and Spartans (that much was clear from the helmet on the keychain and Ubisoft's follow-up teaser), but this description is noteworthy for a couple reasons. "Take control of your destiny and write your own epic odyssey as you journey to become a legendary Spartan hero. Rejected by your family, you must embark on an adventure from outcast mercenary to legendary Spartan hero to uncover the truth about your past.

Even if you're not particularly interested in video games, you'll probably have heard of Assassin's Creed. They're a series of historically themed action games that take place in digital recreations of places such as Revolution-era Paris, medieval Jerusalem and 1860s London. Playing Assassin's Creed involves climbing up ancient buildings and mingling with the residents of cities of the past, meeting (and occasionally assassinating) historical figures as a member of an ancient, clandestine brotherhood working against the Templars. The games have been around since 2007 and have made an awful lot of money for their publisher, Ubisoft. The company employs a team of hundreds of artists, historians, writers, coders, sound designers and more to create these virtual places.

Ubisoft's upcoming new Assassin's Creed game has leaked once again ahead of its official reveal at E3 2017. A preorder card for Assassin's Creed: Origins has surfaced online, confirming the game's Egyptian setting and bonus content. The leaked preorder card for Assassin's Creed: Origins was first shared online on the NeoGAF forums. The card appears to be from retailer Target and confirms the game will have a steelbook gold edition. This version of the game appears to include the deluxe pack and season pass.