Update: EA revealed Season 2 details during the EA Play event ahead of E3 — and it looks awesome. Read all the details here.
Season 2 of Apex Legends, Respawn Entertainment’s popular battle royale, is on the horizon and the game studio is set to share some details during E3 2019. Before that, though, Respawn is delivering the first limited-time event and will also be hosting a double XP weekend during E3. The event is called Legendary Hunt, and features a special player queue for the best players around. Completion of its challenges nets you unique skins for one of the legends.
This is the first look at limited-time events in Apex Legends, something fellow battle royale titles Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds use to great effect. This first experience takes advantage of something the competitors don’t have: Unique heroes. The legend Bloodhound is the focus of the first LTE and it’s called Legendary Hunt.
During this new event, Apex Legends players can jump into the Apex Elite Queue to take on the best players around. Your goal is to place top 5 in any match and you’ll have to keep placing top 5 to continue playing. Participating in Legendary Hunt challenges will earn you rare, epic, and legendary skins, including the Master of the Hunt skin for Bloodhound.
Legendary Hunt is part of the first season, called Wild Frontier, and the developers are improving the Battle Pass before the next season rolls in. Three legendary items are being added when the update goes live on June 4, making it so that every 25 levels on the premium track include a legendary item. The final reward at level 100 is an evolving weapon skin with an addition recolor version that unlocks for those that push to 110.
The Apex Legends team is also gearing up to show more of what season 2 will feature. Respawn will be participating in the EA Play livestream during E3 2019 on June 8 and the team is already throwing out some of the things that will be discussed. Players can expect are daily and weekly challenges that level up your battle pass, fine-tuned battle pass progress, new rewards, and new content categories to replace badge and stat trackers. Things not mentioned in this particular blog post but expected: A new playable character, new theme, and changes to the game’s map.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.