Battle Jack the Ripper in new Assassin’s Creed Syndicate DLC next week

By Gabe Gurwin December 10, 2015

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate has been out for well over a month, and given the speedy release calendar for Ubisoft’s flagship series, the game should be receiving its first DLC before the end of the year. On schedule, Jack the Ripper joins your Victorian London murder party on December 15.

“In the autumn of 1888, five women were brutally murdered in the Whitechapel district of London, England,” the narrator says in the DLC’s trailer. As with other historical figures in Assassin’s Creed games, Jack the Ripper almost certainly has a direct link to either the Assassins or the Templars.

In contrast to the bulk of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Jack the Ripper appears to be going for a horror-inspired tone, not unlike the disappointing The Order: 1886, which just so happened to also take place in Whitechapel. Hopefully there aren’t any vampires or werewolves in this, though … even that might be a little too crazy for this series.

“How many more must die before you see the truth?” Jack asks the DLC’s protagonist Evie in a calm tone. “Welcome with the reunion, Miss Frye.” This last line suggests that he may be a character that appeared earlier in the main game — the 20-year time gap between the two would make this possible.

While the Assassin’s Creed franchise has had a mixed reception for the last few entries, its expansion content has been fairly well-received. Assassin’s Creed: IV – Freedom Cry garnered particular praise, and Ubisoft ended up giving away Unity’s Dead Kings DLC for free after the game’s botched launch, and abandoned its original season pass model. That’s back in full force again, this year, however, with the season pass selling for $30.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate – Jack the Ripper will be available for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on December 15. A PC release will follow on December 22. If you don’t have the season pass, it’ll set you back $15.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…

Gaming

The best skills to get in Assassin’s Creed Mirage

Basim about to assassinate a dude.

With Assassin's Creed Mirage going back to the series' roots with this entry, it also makes sense for us to start from scratch as well. Basim will begin his journey as a young street rat, but slowly evolve into the skilled assassin you later meet in Valhalla. This will be a long and arduous journey for our hero, and for you as a player, but one thing this entry doesn't abandon from the more RPG-focused titles is the skill tree. Basim's skills are broken down into three different trees, Phantom, Trickster, and Predator, that you can invest your points into as you see fit. While none are technically useless, there are some standouts that are much more useful across your journey through Baghdad. These are the best skills you need to get in Assassin's Creed Mirage.
Best skills to get

Unfortunately, nearly every skill in Assassin's Creed Mirage is on a linear tree meaning you need to unlock prior skills to get to the more powerful ones. Even so, there are some trees far more valuable to invest in in general than others. Note that you can freely refund any spent skill points by highlighting a skill and holding the button prompt to get your point back at no cost if you want to reallocate your points.
Auto-Collect - Trickster Tree
Let's be real, no one can resist looting a body. The problem with that is that when you're trying to stealth your way through an area, taking the extra time to dig through the pockets of a freshly assassinated foe will more than likely end up with you getting discovered. What is a greedy assassin to do? With the Auto-Collect skill you can steal an enemy's life and their goodies all in one fell swoop so you don't have to worry about getting caught or backtracking to all the bodies you left later to collect your spoils.
Chain Assassination - Phantom Tree
The only real essential skill in the Phantom Tree has to be Chain Assassination. This will be a familiar skill to those who played prior games as it allows you to stealth kill one target, and then chain that into a second if they're close enough, or in line of sight so long as you have a throwing knife handy to toss at a nearby target. Not only is this more efficient, but opens up tons more possibilities since you don't have to wait until each enemy is completely alone to stealth them.
Extra Tool Capacity 1,2, and 3 - Trickster Tree
The tools you unlock as you level up and complete missions are essential parts of Basim's tool kit. The more tools you can have at the ready, the more situations you will be equipped to deal with.
Knife Recovery - Trickster Tree
Throwing knives are almost too overpowered in Assassin's Creed Mirage. The only real balance to them is that you can only hold so many, and once you use one, you need to head to a shop to get more. Or, if you unlock the Knife Recovery skill, you can salvage any knife you use by looting it off the unlucky soul who was on the receiving end. If you play smart with this skill, you can save tons of currency and time by recycling your blades.
Pickpocket Master - Trickster Tree
Basim grew up as a thief, but he can still learn a few tricks to get better. Pickpocket Master has two effects, the first is to vastly decrease the difficulty of the QTE for pickpocketing higher-tier loot from targets. The second is to completely remove the QTE from basic pickpocketing making it an automatic success.
Stealth Recon - Predator Tree
Last up, we have the Stealth Recon skill from the Predator Tree. So long as you're in stealth and crouched or in cover, any enemy in the area will be highlighted and their patrols shown to you, even through walls.

Gaming

iPhone 15 Pro can natively run the latest Resident Evil and Assassin’s Creed games

Leon and Ashley in the Resident Evil 4 remake.

In a major stride forward for mobile gaming, Apple announced during today's event that console games like Assassin's Creed Mirage, Resident Evil 4's remake, and Resident Evil Village are coming to the iPhone 15 Pro. These aren't watered-down mobile spinoffs or cloud-streamed games either; they're running natively with the help of the A17 Pro chip.

During the gaming segment of Tuesday's Apple event, the power of the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip was highlighted. The 3-nanometer chip has 19 billion transistors, a six-core CPU, a 16-core Neural Engine that can handle 35 trillion operations per second, and a six-core GPU that supports things like mesh shading and hardware-accelerated ray tracing in video games. Several game developers were featured following its introduction to explain and show off just how powerful the A17 Pro Chip is. While this segment started with games already native to mobile, like The Division Resurgence, Honkai: Star Rail, and Genshin Impact, it didn't take long for some games made for systems like PS5 and Xbox Series X to appear.
Capcom's Tsuyoshi Kanda showed up and revealed that natively running versions of Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4 are coming to the iPhone 15 Pro before the end of the year. Later, Apple confirmed that Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage, which launches next month on PC and consoles, will also get a native iPhone 15 Pro port in early 2024, while Death Stranding is slated for a 2023 iPhone 15 Pro launch.
Historically, console-quality games like these have been impossible to get running on a mobile phone without the use of cloud gaming. Confirming that these three AAA games can all run natively on iPhone 15 Pro is certainly an impactful way for Apple to show just how powerful the A17 Pro chip is.

Gaming

Assassin’s Creed Mirage takes the series back to 2007 in all the right ways

The main character of Assassin's Creed: Mirage perches on a ledge and looks out over the city of Baghdad.

Ubisoft bills Assassin’s Creed Mirage, its upcoming stealth adventure launching this October, as a return to the franchise’s roots. Go back to the original Assassin’s Creed in 2007 and you’ll find something that looks entirely different from the massive open-world of Valhalla. It was a more focused experience with an emphasis on methodic and stealthy gameplay, all taking place in Jerusalem.

Each subsequent entry would expand that existing formula while switching settings and time periods: 13th-century Italy, the American Revolutionary War, and the Golden Age of Piracy. However, 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origin transitioned the series to a much larger open-world structure in Egypt, a trend that would balloon further with 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and 2020’s massive Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.