Ubisoft says Ghost Recon Breakpoint will no longer receive content updates, leaving the tactical shooter essentially frozen in time. In the last few months, the developers added a mode called Operation Motherland and a bunch of items. In all, Ubisoft released 11 content updates for Breakpoint. The publisher will keep the servers for both that game and its predecessor Ghost Recon Wildlands online for the foreseeable future.

Breakpoint wasn’t well received when it was released in October 2019. Ubisoft swiftly went into damage control mode to resolve some of the bugs and stability issues in the weeks after release. However, the game's perhaps best known these days for being home to Ubisoft’s first rollout of NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

In December, the publisher announced plans to add NFTs (though it calls them "Digits") to its games through the Quartz platform. The news didn't go over well with players or employees, many of whom cited concerns about the environmental impact of NFTs and accused Ubisoft of trying to milk more money from consumers.

Breakpoint was the first target of the NFT project. Ubisoft gave away Digits to players, including gun skins with small, barely noticeable serial numbers. Players didn't exactly flock to buy them on secondary markets, though. An Ubisoft executive claimed in January that players could benefit from having a secondary market for in-game items, "but they don't get it for now."

"Thank you to all Ghost Recon Breakpoint players who claimed their first Digits," a message on the Quartz site reads. "You own a piece of the game and have left your mark in its history. As the last Digit for Ghost Recon Breakpoint was released on 3/17/2022, stay tuned for more updates with features to the platform and future drops coming with other games!"

Bringing development on Breakpoint to an end at this point isn't a massive surprise. It wasn't exactly designed to last as a live service title for many years, and Ubisoft is well-known for churning out sequels to its core franchises. 

Still, the move will severely diminish the perceived value of Breakpoint's NFTs. It's unlikely that interest in Breakpoint will increase in the future, which will make it more difficult for Digits owners to sell them. Holders of the NFT items won't be able to transfer them to other titles either, leaving them in possession of in-game goods with little real-world value.

Even though Breakpoint is on life support, the Ghost Recon brand isn't going away anytime soon. In October, Ubisoft announced a free-to-play battle royale title called Ghost Recon Frontline.

The entire* principal cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation will appear on the third and final season of Picard. Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis and Brent Spiner, who have already featured in the series, will be joined by LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden and Michael Dorn. In a statement, executive producer Terry Matalas said that “it’s most fitting that the story of Jean-Luc Picard ends honoring the beginning, with his dearest and most loyal friends from the USS Enterprise.”

Matalas added that the final season will offer a “final, high-stakes, starship-bound adventure,” which, at a guess, nods at the predominantly planet-bound series so far. Of course, long-time fans might be nervous at what the show’s writers will have cooked up for our beloved crew, especially after giving Riker and Troi a minor-key postscript to their Star Trek tenure. Maybe Dr. Crusher is now pushing medical misinformation over subspace while Geordie spends his retirement as a crypto evangelist.

* Sadly, no in-series return for Ready Room host Wil Wheaton, despite the fact he was in almost half the episodes, or Diana Muldaur.

Rainbow Six is coming to phones and tablets. On Tuesday, Ubisoft announced Rainbow Six Mobile, a new entry in its long-running first-person shooter franchise that will be exclusive to Android and iOS devices. Set to come out later this year with Ubisoft’s Montreal studio leading development, the company says the free-to-play release will bring the “true” Rainbow Six Siege experience to mobile. Expect five-on-five matches with your team taking turns to play both offense and defense. As with Siege, you’ll need to use the specific weapons, gadgets and skills available to your operator to win.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft Montreal says it has tweaked the game to make matches shorter, but players can look forward to classic Rainbow Six Siege maps, including Bank and Border, making a return. The same goes for game modes like Secure Area and Bomb. Starting today, players can sign up to take part in a series of upcoming tests Ubisoft plans to hold before the game becomes widely available later this year.

Not two weeks after Epic Games removed the feature, Building is back in Fortnite. On Saturday, Epic re-addedFortnite’s classic Battle Royale mode to the game’s casual queue. It now lives side-by-side with the recently introduced Zero Build mode, and you can queue for both either individually or as part of a group made up of two or more players.

Epic announced it would temporarily remove building from Fortnite at the start of Chapter Three, Season Two on March 20th. The studio’s decision to do so was surprising given that the feature was what made the game stand out when Epic eventually decided to release a battle royale mode in 2017 after seeing the success of PUBG. Judging by the response to Saturday’s announcement, most people weren’t happy about the change, even if it was always intended to be temporary.

Digital thieves just pulled off another major crypto heist. Motherboard has learned hackers stole 173,600 Ethereum (about $591.2 million) from the Ronin blockchain that powers Axie Infinity, a popular "play to earn" game where players can receive crypto in exchange for playing and paying some starting costs. The perpetrators reportedly exploited a backdoor in a Remote Procedure Call node from Axie creator Sky Mavis to get a signature, letting them "forge fake withdrawals" using compromised private keys.

Sky blamed the flaw on a holdover from the fall. The firm asked for help from the Axie DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) to handle free transactions and help cope with an "immense user load" in November. The move let Sky sign transactions on the DAO's behalf until December, but the access wasn't revoked after that point.

The company has responded by 'pausing' the Ronin bridge to close off avenues of attack, and has temporarily disabled the Katana decentralized exchange. It hoped to minimize near-term damage by increasing the threshold necessary for validation, but also said it was in the middle of a node migration that would leave the old system behind. Sky intends to track the stolen Ethereum with help from Chainalysis, and is contacting security teams at "major" crypto exchanges.

The theft compounds existing worries for Sky. Motherboard notes Axie Infinity has suffered from plummeting values for its NFTs and tokens in recent months, prompting reforms in a bid to keep the game afloat. An incident like could easily make things worse by not only starving the game of much-needed funds, but rattling the confidence of players.

The National Football League is developing its own streaming, according to The Athletic. NFL officials reportedly showed off a service tentatively called NFL+ to team owners at the league’s annual offseason meeting in Florida this week. Among other content, the service would include games and podcasts.

The Athletic reports the platform likely won’t be ready until team owners meet again in May. At that point, a vote would decide whether the NFL moves forward with the project. Potentially complicating the rollout of a subscription service is the state of the NFL’s various media deals.

In 2021, the NFL and Verizon extended their longstanding marketing and technology partnership but did so without agreeing on new terms related to mobile streaming. Up until 2018, the carrier had exclusive rights to that content. One analyst The Athletic spoke to suggested the league could use NFL+ as a way to leverage a better deal from either Verizon or another mobile carrier. The league also recently entered into an 11-year deal with Amazon for the retailer to carry Thursday Night Football games through its Prime Video service.

We’ve reached out to the NFL for comment.

A recent Gran Turismo 7 update sparked outrage, not just because it raised the prices of in-game cars, but also because it led to a server outage than lasted for over a day. Now Polyphony Digital President Kazunori Yamauchi has issued an apology "for the frustration and confusion" caused by the patch, along with the announcement of a big update rolling out in early April to "improve player experience." 

Players complained that the presence of microtransactions and higher car prices made it harder to obtain new vehicles and upgrades without paying real money and spending a lot of time grinding for in-game currency. Yamauchi said back then that he believes it's important for the cars' prices to be linked with their real-world counterparts to convey their "value and rarity." 

That obviously didn't go over well with fans, who also had to deal with downtime because the update came with an issue that prevented the game from starting properly on the PS4 and the PS5. The game ended up being review bombed on Metacritic, where it currently has a score of 1.5 that translates to "overwhelming dislike."

The updates coming in early April include higher rewards for events, as well as more events and opportunities to earn in-game currency. Polyphony is also working on more additional features that don't have a release date yet, such as the ability to sell cars. At the moment, there's no way to do so in GT7, even though its predecessors had the feature. 

Unfortunately, Yamauchi didn't mention whether the company is exploring the possibility of making the game available to play offline, so it will likely continue requiring an internet connection for the foreseeable future. He did say, however, that Polyphony is giving players who may have been affected by the server outage a credit pack of 1 million Cr. Only those who already own the game before his post had been published and who log in between March 25th and April 25th will get the free credit pack. 

Golf fans will have to wait another full year to play EA’s next PGA Tour game, with the publisher announcing a delay this week. When it first revealed it was returning to golf games last March, EA said its plan was to release EA Sports PGA Tour sometime in the spring of 2022. The company has now set a spring 2023 launch window. EA did not share a reason for the delay, nor did it say what platforms the “next-gen” revival would be available on when it finally does launch.

What it did do is reiterate that the title will feature all four major tournaments – the Masters, the US Open, the Britsh Open and the PGA Championship – and run on its proprietary Frostbite engine from Dice. Speaking of Dice, the delay is significantly longer than the one EA gave the Swedish studio to work on Battlefield 2042 ahead of its rocky launch. Months after release, BF2042 is still missing key features, including in-game voice chat support, and Dice only recently added a proper scoreboard to the game.        

The NFL is making its first-ever VR game. And rather than work with longtime partner Electronic Arts on the project, the league is partnering with StatusPro, a startup that uses real-time player data to “create authentic extended reality experiences." The NFL promised to share more details on the game, including release date information, in the future. What we know for now is that the game will come to Meta Quest and PlayStation VR and will allow fans to experience playing as a professional football player through a first-person 3D perspective.

It will be interesting to see how StatusPro designs around some of the motion sickness issues that come with playing a VR game in first-person. Games like Half-Life: Alyx offer multiple locomotion options so that players can find one that doesn’t leave them feeling nauseous. Two of the game’s options fall back on allowing individuals to teleport their avatar between on-screen locations. For most people, those are ideal for preventing motion sickness, but they also wouldn’t make for a very fast-paced (and therefore immersive) football game.

You'll have to wait a while longer to slay Superman. Rocksteady Studios has delayedSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League from sometime in 2022 to spring 2023. Company co-founder Sefton Hill didn't explain the decision, but promised the extra time would be used to "make the best game" possible.

The title has Harley Quinn, King Shark and other Suicide Squad villians fight mind-controlled superheroes like Superman and The Flash as they cause chaos. Rocksteady hasn't shown gameplay, but Kill the Justice League will be available for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

This isn't the only DC Comics game in the pipeline. WB Games Montreal's open-world RPG Gotham Knights is still due in October 2022. All the same, this could prove frustrating for fans of Rocksteady's work. The developer hasn't released a new game since 2016's Batman: Arkham VR, and the last conventional release was 2015's Arkham Knight. Players have been waiting several years to see what the company will do next, and the months-long delay won't exactly quell any impatience.