Ubisoft is continuing its efforts to course-correct after several challenging years. Today, the video game company announced that it will launch a subsidiary centered around three of its most familiar franchises: Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. The as-yet-unnamed subsidiary will fold in the teams working on those three series, including Ubisoft studios in Montréal, Quebec, Sherbrooke, Saguenay, Barcelona and Sofia. This new business will receive an investment of 1.16 billion (roughly 1.25 billion) from its longstanding partner Tencent, granting the conglomerate a minority ownership stake. Following the transaction, Ubisoft will narrow focus to its other franchises, such as The Division and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon.

We are looking for a highly talented, motivated, and experienced person to work with us on XDefiant, a new multiplatform online multiplayer action game based in our San Francisco studio. XDefiant is a free-to-play, fast-paced arena shooter that combines intense gunplay with personalized loadouts and specialized factions, as teams of gunfighters battle for domination. As an AI Engineer, you'll focus on designing and implementing the AI players that our users battle in a variety of game situations. Your creations will challenge the players, teach valuable PvP skills, and provide smackdowns as needed. You'll extend the Snowdrop engine's capabilities with XDefiant-specific improvements and systems, designed to heighten the player's game experience.

Sometimes a video game can be thoroughly entertaining, not for any new ideas it brings to the table, but for the way in which it combines a lot of old ideas into an excitingly fresh experience. The latest shooter from Ubisoft's Tom Clancy interactive universe is a fine example. Set in an alternative Rainbow Six timeline where Earth has been invaded by a race of swampy, Lovecraftian aliens known as the Archaeans, it stars the spec-ops warriors from the multiplayer shooter hit Siege as they set out to kick ET's ass. Players form teams of three operatives, each with their own special skills and weapons, and then go into alien invasion sites to kill monsters and get things done. Every site is divided into three escalatingly difficult zones, with different objectives, and players can choose to exfiltrate after each section or gamble on not getting killed and continue on to the end, for greater rewards.

We are now more than a month past the point when E3 2020 would've ended. It lives in your heart, in your soul, and on your television. Today we finally reached the "1PM Monday Afternoon" slot, a.k.a. Much of what Ubisoft showed at its faux-press conference, we already knew about--Watch Dogs Legion, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and the recently leaked Far Cry 6. But hey, they managed to keep Tom Clancy's Elite Squad under wraps (for what that's worth), and the Assassin's Creed footage looked pretty neat.

AI and Games is a crowdfunded YouTube series hosted on Patreon. If you enjoy reading this piece please consider supporting the show at www.patreon.com/ai_and_games In part 1 of my case study on Tom Clancy's The Division - a 2016 rpg shooter by Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment - I looked at the overall structure of the game and it's core AI antagonists. As players carve their way through the streets of New York City, they're faced by a variety of roaming and designer-placed AI characters both friend and foe. An extensive behaviour tree implementation handled decision making, with many of the attributes used in these behaviours managed courtesy of systems that oversee character factions, as well as skill profiles and rankings.

In 2016 Tom Clancy's The Division brought players together in the war-torn streets of Manhattan fighting against a variety of enemy factions, as well as one another. Ubisoft's RPG-shooter carries a diverse range of enemies to keep the player on their toes. But unlike other games I've covered to-date, The Division needs to deal with the practical issues of being an online co-operative game and how to manage all sorts of AI systems for thousands of players across the world. In this first of a two-part series, I'm going to be looking at how developers Massive Entertainment sought to create a variety of interesting and challenging encounters throughout the world of The Division; how they designed their enemy opponents and manage their behaviours as thousands of players rush to battle online every day in the mean streets of New York City. After an outbreak of weaponised smallpox, New York city breaks down into chaos and is quarantined from the outside world until the contamination is contained and order is restored.

The other streaming war – bringing video games to the cloud – is heating up. Google flips the switch Tuesday on its Stadia cloud gaming service, which lets you stream games to your television, computer, tablet and Android phone. Stadia lets you play marquee video games without the need of a game console or PC to house the game. Instead your game resides on Google's expansive array of data servers. As part of the monthly subscription fee, Stadia stores your games and connects you with other gamers in games that support multiplayer gaming.

LOS ANGELES – Google's Stadia video game streaming service just got a hefty collection of games to attract newcomers to its forthcoming cloud-based subscription offering. But Ubisoft's announcement Monday that its new Uplay service with more than 100 games will be available on Stadia, may have clarified – or confused – players about what's to come. Ubisoft will be making its new Uplay all-you-can-eat PC video game service ($14.99 monthly), which launches Sept. 3 with 100-plus games including "Assassin's Creed" and "Rainbow Six" titles, available to Stadia users next year. This will make it easier for players to play Ubisoft's games, said Brenda Panagrossi, the publisher's vice president of platform and product management. "Stadia is a new generation platform where you can play our games on any device," she said.

The Google Stadia controller used for playing games on Google's video game streaming service. The Stadia controller (priced separately at $69) uses WiFi to connect directly to the game running in Google's video game streaming service .the Google has shed some more clarity on its upcoming cloud-based video game service: an entry price, launch window and some of the games you will be able to play. Google's Stadia will become available in November with an entry price of $129.99 for the Founders Edition package (pre-order on Google's Stadia site), which includes a game controller, Chromecast Ultra streaming device and a three-month subscription. Cloud gaming promises to make it easier for consumers to play online games, as it sidesteps the need for pricey gaming PCs or console video game systems.

What makes a game fun to play? At Massive, we not only develop games – we also research them and use different innovative technologies and tools to understand the motivations behind playing them. In this article, Alessandro Canossa, who works as a Data Scientist in our Massive Consumer Experience team, talks about the research he and some colleagues have done on player motivation in Tom Clancy's The Division and how it can help shape gameplay as we know it. Every developer wants to make a game that is fun, but fun isn't the same for everyone. When I joined Massive and Ubisoft two years ago, I was thrilled to work at a company where I could actively work with the exciting challenge of deducing advanced intelligence from gameplay data.