Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming RPG Avowed has been delayed till next year. An Xbox post on X (formerly Twitter) says that the game is now set for a February 18, 2025, release.
Xbox announced the change Friday evening, saying that it delayed Avowed “to give players’ backlogs some breathing room.” The publisher is releasing quite a few titles over the rest of the year, including expansions for World of Warcraft and Diablo 4, as well as the new games Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Frankly, considering how popular the next Call of Duty will be (and it will), it’s probably best that Avowed won’t get overshadowed. The delay also allows more time for development.
So many games coming! As such, we're moving Avowed to Feb 18, 2025 to give players’ backlogs some breathing room.
Stay tuned for more from our games across Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda & Xbox Game Studios at gamescom, including our Aug 23 livestream for a look at Avowed:… pic.twitter.com/3RnyVwlHRa
— Xbox (@Xbox) August 2, 2024
The original release window was set during Xbox’s January Developer Direct, but there haven’t been any updates since. We’ve gotten some more information on the game itself during 2024, including some first- and third-person gameplay and how it’ll be hub-based rather than a free-roaming open world. It’ll also follow the Obsidian tradition of providing the player with a lot of choices that can impact gameplay or the narrative, and it’ll take place in the established Pillars of Eternity universe in a world called Eora. However, there’s a lot we don’t know about its story.
We’re expecting some kind of update at Gamescom later this month, where Xbox has three big presentations prepared for Avowed, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Starfield: Shattered Space. The latter two games also don’t have full release dates, but Xbox seems confident that they’ll both release in 2024, if the aforementioned X post is any indication.
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.