Daily Briefing: Friday 29th October

Ubisoft quarterly financials turn up new information on Assassin's Creed Infinity

Ubisoft held their second quarter earnings call earlier this week and it revealed a whole load of information on the Assassin's Creed franchise, including a few new details on the mysterious Assassin's Creed Infinity. Answering a question on the upcoming title's business model, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed that the game isn't "going to be free to play and this game will have a lot of narrative elements in it.”

• Guillemot said that Infinity is "going to be a very innovative game but it will have what players already have in all the Assassin’s Creed games, all the elements that they love to get in them right from the start." The game is still early in development, but is going to be a huge game that borrows a lot of established and beloved elements from the greater franchise. Elsewhere in the financials, we also learned that Assassin's Creed Valhalla is the company's second most profitable venture ever.

Call of Duty's kernel-level anti-cheat is launching in December

Call of Duty's Ricochet anti-cheat was announced a wee while ago, and this week Activision confirmed that the kernel-level piece of security software will go live in December. The software will begin rolling out alongside Call of Duty Vanguard's release early next month with a suite of server enhancements, though the actual driver will drop alongside Warzone's new Pacific map. It won't fully launch in Vanguard until "a later date," so it really is a bit of a weird rollout schedule.

• Activision are planning a pretty canny strategy for bringing players across to the new premium release. Vanguard will launch its first season of content at the same time that Ricochet fully integrates with a few new multiplayer maps, a new battle pass, and more weapons. Vanguard owner will also get 24 hours of early access to new Warzone content, which is a bit of a bonus.

Facebook to ditch Oculus branding amid wider rename

As part of Facebook's wider company rename to Meta, they will also be ditching the Oculus branding for their range of Oculus devices. That branding has been essentially inseparable from VR gaming for going on ten years, which is why Facebook originally decided to keep that naming going when they purchased Oculus back in 2014. That name will soon be no more as Facebook seek to align their entire range of products with their new Meta branding.

• There is at least one tiny upside to all this corporate branding nonsense. Facebook (or should that be Meta?) are finally looking into ways to remove Facebook account requirements for using VR hardware. Oculus players have suffered the full extent of recent Facebook outages because the type is linked to an active account, so players finally being able to actually enjoy the tech they paid money for without a silly amount of extra stipulations bolted on. Neat.