Ubisoft Montreal

Ubisoft has confirmed that it has removed the creative director on upcoming tactical shooter Rainbow 6 Patriots from his position. The publisher has confirmed to Game Informer that David Sears has been removed from the project, and replaced by Jean-Sebastien Decant, adding: "The development team is still hard at work to deliver the next installment of the revered Tom Clancy series, and more details on the game will be revealed at a later date." More >

Yves Jacquier, executive director of production services at Ubisoft Montreal, believes AI will be the strongest feature of new console hardware. "AI has always been the real battleground," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "In general the industry expects that graphics will not be a strong feature any more... Obviously, graphics are better for marketing purposes because you can show things. AI you can't show… The challenge is that, if you see an AI coming, you've failed. And that's a problem we have to overcome as we create the impression of flawless, seamless worlds." Achieving this goal on current hardware is a tricky proposition, according to Jacquier. "Our challenge with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox [360] is that we're extremely limited in what we can do. It's a challenge for the engineers to provide nice graphics and nice AI and nice sound with a very small amount of memory and computation time. We think that the next generation of consoles won't have these limits any more.”