Ubisoft is giving away a bunch of free gear to all Assassin's Creed Valhalla owners, including a cosmetic Altair armor set.

As a thank you to all Valhalla buyers, Ubisoft has a new freebie pack on the Animus Store, The so-called "Godly Reward" isn't as good as the amazing Carolingian set included with Amazon Prime, but it does let Eivor dress up as Altair from the first Assassin's Creed.

As far as actual gear goes, the Godly Reward unlocks the full Yule seasonal set that includes the Modraniht armor, dagger, and shield. The stats and quality of the set will vary based on your current gear rating, so don't redeem the offer until you level up and boost your current equipment.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla's first expansion, Wrath of the Druids, will release April 29, Ubisoft today confirmed.

AC Valhalla is a great game--I gave it a 93/100 in my official review--but it really wears thin after a while. The endgame loop is centered around tons of grinding for very little gain outside of gear upgrades. The real problem with Valhalla's late game is lack of substantial content. Luckily, that should change next month with the arrival of the game's first major expansion, Wrath of the Druids.

Ubisoft today announced two big things for Valhalla: The free seasonal Ostara Festival, and the exact launch of the Wrath of Druids expansion. Not much is known about the expansion other than a brief description. Based on this, we can infer the expac will delve into the weird primal rabbit hole of Valhalla's most enjoyable moments--the Grendel quest, the side mission where Eivor trips on mushrooms, the awesome Daughters of Lerion boss fights, etc.--and explore the more exotic side of 8th century Angland.

Remember Project Athia, the crazy action game that looked like Final Fantasy 15 on speed? The project now has a name and Square Enix reveals more details on the fantasy title.

Project Athia is now officially called Forspoken, and Square Enix today introduced us to Frey Holland (played by Ella Ballinska), the game's main character. The new gameplay footage shows off some amazing animations and one of the most fun-looking game traversal systems I've seen in a long time, with Frey air-diving forward with frenetic momentum that would make Dante jealous.

So what did we learn from the update? The world is apparently called Athia, and it's one of unique fantasy power, reminding us of the Final Fantasy ethos meshed with something akin to Labyrinth. There's dragons, untamed beasts that look like Behemoths from FF, and unique biomes to explore. Luminous Productions, the developer of the game, says Forspoken is a "narrative-driven adventure."

Gamescom 2021 will be a hybrid event with both a digital stream as well as on-site events, the showrunners today announced.

Unlike E3 2021, which is pivoting to an online-only venue, Gamescom 2021 will welcome fans into Cologne's expo center for on-site demos, showcases, and hands-on trials of new games. Publishers and exhibitors will attend the event and hold physical venues with booths demo reels, but the entire show will also be streamed online to a global audience.

The event will adhere to new safety protocols in the #B-SAFE4business model, which includes mandatory mask-wearing, extensive disinfecting measures, adequate ventilation, and always-open doors to offer contact-free exits and entrances.

Sony is stepping up its game and will give away 10 free PS4 titles as part of its Play At Home initiative to help gamers get through tough times.

As the U.S. government doles out $1,400 stimulus checks, games-makers are also doing their part to aid consumers. Microsoft is adding tons of great games to Xbox Game Pass, and now Sony is giving out 10 games for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 owners. Most of the games are indies--and some of them appeared on PS Plus as freebies--but the headliner is the Horizon Zero Dawn complete edition, which will be free from April 19-20 and again on May 14-15.

Starting March 25, the following games will be free to download and keep. A good portion of them are PSVR titles, though, so keep that in mind. PlayStation Plus isn't required, and you can redeem the games on your PSN account even if you don't own a console.

Soon Xbox players will be able to boost their game download speeds with a new console-level feature.

A new Xbox quality of life feature improves one of the most annoying things about modern gaming: Download speeds. According to Microsoft, the new feature unlocks the full download bandwidth speeds available on your network. The only catch is that you can't play a game while you're downloading something.

The feature will show up in the Xbox's queue section that manages downloads and uploads. Toggling it on will suspend any gaming session you currently have running, but the console creates a suspend and resume point (or a Quick Resume point if the game supports it) to ensure you don't lose any progress.

Following months of radio silence and a recent scathing report, Dying Light 2's future was pretty grim. Now Techland has stepped in to clear thing sup.

Dying Light 2 has been confirmed to launch in 2021, Techland today announced. Sadly, no exact release date nor platforms were revealed, but expect a current- and next-gen version. During today's stream, the developers gave a brief explanation on what's happening behind the scenes and call for support of fans everywhere

"This is a huge and complex project, and we've needed time to ensure it will live up to our vision. All of us here are putting our hearts into delivering a game you will continue to play for months. We'll be ready to talk about Dying Light 2 very, very soon.

Rip, tear...and smash. id drops a new trailer for Doom Eternal's final expansion that encompasses every metalhead's power fantasy.

Doom Eternal's Ancient Gods Part 2 expansion release tomorrow, and to celebrate, id is completely redefining the word epic. The latest Ancient Gods trailer is like a Dethklok metal saga, complete with dragons, demons, buff sci-fi warriors, gigantic hell-powered mechsuits, towering Godzilla-sized archdemons battling against Pacific Rim/Gundam mechs, and a new fiery war hammer that annihilates everything.

Before the epic showdown with the Dark Lord, Doom Guy has to rip, tear, and (thanks to the new Hellbreaker hammer) smash his way through hordes of monstrosities. The whole thing looks like a testosterone-boosted Lord of the Rings battle scene and we can't wait to try it out.

One of the actors in Call of Duty was hosting some Warzone on Twitch when she noticed something very interesting about a couple of streamers.

The streamer Alex Zedra is the face behind one of the characters in Call of Duty, Cade Janus, and was hosting Sarah "Icy Vixen" Belles and BearedBanger. Zedra's community of watchers noticed some quite peculiar behavior as both of the players seemed to have an aim that just wasn't possible. An example of what I'm talking about can be seen above.

Both Belles and BeardedBanger have denied all claims of using any hacks in Warzone, but both have since had their channels suspended for cheating. The pair of streamers were accused of using wallhacks that allow the player to see through solid objects and aimbot hacks that automatically aim the player's cursor at enemy players. For more information on this story, visit this link here.

On Tuesday, a team of archaeologists announced the discovery of new Dead Sea Scroll fragments that date back to a Jewish revolt against Rome nearly 1,900 years ago.

The first of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in a desert cave near the Dead Sea located in Qumran in the 1940s and 1950s. According to the researchers, the scrolls date from the third century B.C to the first century A.D and include readings of some of the oldest biblical texts and documents that outline the Jewish sect's beliefs. As for the newly found fragments, they were found in the desert south of Jerusalem at Cave of Horror in the Judean Desert reserve of Nahal Hever.

Researchers believe that the fragments of the scrolls were placed there during the Bar Kochba Revolt, which was an uprising of Jewish people that armed themselves against Rome between the dates of 132 and 136 A.D. The archaeologists also found rare coins that dated back approximately 2,000 and a 6,000-year-old skeleton of a child that was mummified and what may be the oldest surviving basket made out of woven reeds in the world.

I was only just reporting that some new GeForce drivers removed the ETH crypto mining hash rate limiter from the newly-released, impossible-to-find, stupidly-expensive GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card.

Well, that driver seems to have been the winning ticket here with NVIDIA now confirming the news themselves. NVIDIA said in a statement to The Verge: "A developer driver inadvertently included code used for internal development which removes the hash rate limiter on RTX 3060 in some configurations".

NVIDIA added: "The driver has been removed".

Micron has announced that it will be ceasing development of its 3D XPoint technology, something it had co-developed with CPU giant Intel.

The company has announced it will be increasing its investment into memory products around the Compute Express Link (CXL) and that it needed to move resources from 3D XPoint over to CXL-based products. Micron said in a statement: "Micron plans to apply the knowledge it has gained from the breakthroughs achieved through its 3D XPoint initiative, as well as related engineering expertise and resources, to new types of memory-centric products that target the memory-storage hierarchy".

Micron's bigger push into CXL-enabled memory products sees the interface running on the PCIe bus that enables flexible connections between compute, memory, and storage. The goal of CXL is to make more memory available to the user, and easier to manage -- memory not attached to the CPU, like traditional RAM is.

Google has just unveiled its second-gen smart display with the new Nest Hub that has some new sleep-detecting features that will help you better understand your sleep. Google calls this new technology Sleep Sensing, which they explain in the video below:

Inside, the new Google Nest Hub speaker has the same audio technology as Nest Audio but now packs 50% more bass over the original Hub. These upgrades in audio are welcomed as the Nest Hub makes for the perfect device to play your music through Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Pandora -- as well as TV shows and movies on Netflix, Disney+ and YouTube TV.

All of the normal goodies and brains of Google Assistant that were in the original Nest Hub are in the new second-gen Nest Hub, with Google upgrading this area with a new dedicated on-device machine learning chip that the company says "moves some Assistant experiences from our data centers directly onto the device, so responses to common commands become faster over time". This is unfortunately only for the US for now.

Intel's new Xe-HPG GPU has been spotted with their next-gen Alder Lake-S CPU, with the Xe-HPG teamed with a 16-core, 24-thread CPU that succeeds the just-revealed Rocket Lake-S 11th Gen Core CPUs.

The new Xe-HPG graphics card we're looking at is the GPU codenamed DG2-512EU, which in this form packs 512 Execution Units, with a maximum GPU clock of 1.8GHz and 12.6GB of RAM -- we should see DG2 launch with 16GB of RAM but this is just the VRAM count with other shared system resources.

Intel seems to be testing out its Xe-HPG graphics card with its next-gen Alder Lake-S processor, which features 16 cores and 24 threads... yes, not the traditional 8 cores and 16 threads or 16 cores and 32 threads (which it normally is). This CPU has a max clock of 4.6GHz, which will either be for the high-efficiency (small) cores or the high-performance (big) cores and I'm leaning (hoping) on the latter.

NVIDIA has just released their very latest GeForce Game Ready driver, which provides optimizations and enhancements for NVIDIA's kick ass Reflex technology in Overwatch... and so much more.

The main part of the new official drivers is that NVIDIA and Activision-Blizzard are enabling NVIDIA's in-house Reflex technology, which you can read more about here, being enabled in Overwatch with these new GeForce 461.92 drivers. If you've got a Reflex-capable GeForce GPU then you will get a radically smoother, more responsive gaming experience in Overwatch.

You'll need to follow a few steps to enable NVIDIA Reflex technology in Overwatch, here's what you need to do:

Australian custom PC retailer AfterShock PC have crafted one of the most beautiful gaming PCs, no scrap that -- one of the most beautiful things that I've ever seen.

The company was tasked by gamer Ali Kaos, who wanted AfterShock to build the most insane PC they could with teh components available at the time. Inside, the PC has AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor at its heart which is inside of the flagship ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha motherboard.

AfterShock used not one but two ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards for the ultimate in GPU performance, which is staggering in its own part. It seems AfterShock has half of the global supply of GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards in this single gaming PC.

Activision-Blizzard is firing dozens of employees as it pivots away from live-based esports events in the Overwatch and Call of Duty Leagues, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

Activision made more money in 2020 than it's ever made before, raking in $8 billion in revenues (and over $2 billion in profits). That hasn't stopped the company from continually firing employees and chasing digital revenues. Activision-Blizzard plans to fire 50 employees across multiple divisions, including its esports live events teams and even developers at King, the maker of the mega-popular Candy Crush games.

"Players are increasingly choosing to connect with our games digitally and the e-sports team, much like traditional sports, entertainment, and broadcasting industries, has had to adapt its business due to the impact the pandemic has had on live events," a rep told Bloomberg.

A cursory glance shows that Apple's app store revenues have risen astronomically in the last 10 years, driven by massive consumer-level hardware adoption and widespread app access.

According to figures collected by journalist Jon Erlichman (sourced by Sensor Tower), Apple's app store earnings have spiked by 3500% in the last 10 years. In 2010, the app store made $2 billion, and in 2020 the digital marketplace raked in a whopping $72 billion. Over half of these earnings--roughly 66%, or $47.5 billion--was from games and in-game purchases sold on the storefront, Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad said.

This services growth is attributed to increased access points from more hardware availability, as well as the recent emphasis on digital sales and content from COVID-19 lockdowns. Apple has yet to reveal official data on its app store revenues, but CEO Tim Cook affirmed the store grew throughout 2020.

In a new paradigm-shifting policy, Google will now let app developers keep more of their initial revenues earned on the Play store.

Google today announced a new revenue split in favor of app developers. The company will now let devs keep 85% of revenues made on the first $1 million in earnings. Google has halved its collection rate from 30% to 15% for this range, but devs who make over $1 million will owe Google 30% of their revenues.

This new model will help smaller-scale developers avoid the current loss loop, which sees many of them paying out more to Google than they receive from apps and in-app purchases made on the Google Play store.

Industry vet Jade Raymond (producer on Assassin's Creed II, Watch Dogs) has opened up a new indie studio in Montreal called Haven. The team's first project is a game for Sony's PlayStation platform.

Today Sony and ex-Stadia leader Jade Raymond announced a new games studio based in Montreal, Canada. The new team is called Haven, and it's working on a new unannounced IP for the PlayStation ecosystem. Next to nothing is known about the game itself, however we expect it to target the PS5.

Raymond originally helped lead the team behind the first Assassin's Creed games and founded Ubisoft Toronto, then moved to EA to lead its Motive studio on a new unannounced project. Raymond left EA in 2018 when the company shook up management and added Motive to EA Worldwide Studios. She found a home at Stadia where she led the first-party games division, but also left after Google cancelled all first-party games and closed its games studios labels.