Month: July 2020

With the success of Star Trek: Discovery and Picard, CBS continues to expand its offerings within the Star Trek universe, this time with a new animated comedy series: Star Trek: Lower Decks.  The series boasts a unique angle: it focuses on telling the stories of the lower-ranking crew members, with all the big dramatic events of a typical Star Trek episode happening in the background. As Ensign Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome, Space Force) says in the new trailer, "We're not really elite. We're more the cool scrappy underdogs." That sounds like a Star Trek series the fans can get behind.

This is the first animated Star Trek series since the Emmy-award-winning Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS) which ran from 1973-1974. That show served as a sequel to the live action Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS)—effectively a fourth season—with many of the original cast members returning to voice the characters. Among the new characters introduced were a three-armed, three-legged alien crew member named Arex, and a Caitian (a cat-like alien) crew member named M'Ress. The 22 episodes included a sequel to the famous "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode from TOS, in which the breed is genetically altered to not reproduce—with the tradeoff being that they grow extremely large (or rather, clusters of tribbles are able to function as a single whole).

Star Trek: Lower Decks is a different beast. It's part of a five-year overall deal Discovery co-creator and showrunner Alex Kurtzman signed with CBS to expand the franchise. Kurtzman tapped Rick and Morty head writer Mike McMahan to spearhead the project. “Mike won our hearts with his first sentence: ‘I want to do a show about the people who put the yellow cartridge in the food replicator so a banana can come out the other end,’” Kurtzman told Variety back in October 2018. “His cat’s name is Riker. His son’s name is Sagan. The man is committed. He’s brilliantly funny and knows every inch of every Trek episode, and that’s his secret sauce: he writes with the pure, joyful heart of a true fan."

Enlarge / If you're looking for an open-world adventure full of generic, unclear rebellion, Watch Dogs: Legion might hit the spot when it launches later this year. (credit: Ubisoft)

Last year, Watch Dogs: Legion emerged from Ubisoft's coffers with an ambitious pitch for the open-world genre: play as any character in the game. Security guards, grandmas, and even members of rival factions can be "recruited" to become a playable character (with some being trickier to convince than others). It's certainly a first for a GTA-like: why run people over with your car when you can sign them up to your cause?

But is this twist enough to boost the Watch Dogs series to a compelling romp, years after its "GTA with hacking" conceit was already wearing thin? After a delay from its original 2019 launch window, players across the world will find out October 29 on PC (UPlay, Epic Games Store), Stadia, Xbox One, and PS4. (The game will also launch on next-gen consoles "upon their launch," Ubisoft reps have told Ars.) In the meantime, I got to play a preview build for nearly four hours last week to find out for myself. And while the play-as-anyone conceit really works as advertised and is impressive as a feat of engineering, its execution within a video game is currently hard to recommend.

Taking the “N” out of NPC

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  Look, it's the hero of Watch Dogs Legion! No, I'm kidding. Every single person in the game can be your controllable hero. (Note: Every image in this article was captured from live demo gameplay.) [credit: Ubisoft ]

This version of Watch Dogs is set in a near-future version of London (with most of its historic landmarks intact) on the eve of a terrorist attack. A spate of explosions goes off across the city, and the evil mastermind behind it frames a vaguely anti-government, anti-corporation group called Dedsec. A privatized, automation-minded security firm wrests control of London's police forces, then ramps up body-scanning checkpoints and security drones. Dedsec's ranks are arrested and otherwise detained, but their message—of, uh, fighting the power, but not in any specific or controversial way—lives on, carried in part by an AI entity.

Enlarge / Assassin's Creed Valhalla stars Eivor, a Viking in the Early Middle Ages. Note: all images in this article were captured directly from live demo gameplay, not altered or sweetened by the publisher. (credit: Ubisoft)

Assassin's Creed's many-year transition to becoming a full-blown RPG is complete. The November 17 launch of Assassin's Creed Valhalla on PC (UPlay, Epic Games Store), Stadia, PS4, and Xbox One follows the progression we saw in 2017's AC Origins and 2018's AC Odyssey, which guided the series' open-world formula away from sneak-and-assassinate parkour and toward a full-fledged hero story.

Ahead of today's Ubi Forward reveal event, Ubisoft invited us to a 3.5-hour hands-on session with a prerelease build of AC Valhalla. And our experience confirmed exactly what we'd assumed when the game's concept (codenamed Ragnarok) leaked late last year: the series has gone full Witcher. Sadly, thus far, that comparison isn't as watertight as AC fans may hope.

The world feels real, but not the characters

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  Your other option for how Eivor can look in the game; both variants can be further customized with outfits and more, Ubisoft says (though we didn't see anything in the way of hair or facial customizations).

My demo put me in control of Eivor, the game's Viking protagonist, roughly halfway in the middle of the game. (AC Valhalla's protagonist has the same name whether you pick their male or female version.) I've arrived in East Anglia in the Early Middle Ages with the goal of helping a deposed local king regain command from an invading force—to stabilize the region and thus engender my Viking brethren to its leadership.