While Larian Studios has said there won’t be any new content for the critically acclaimed Baldur’s Gate 3, that doesn’t mean it’s slowing down on updates. The studio announced a new update Wednesday that will bring highly requested features to the 2023 game.
Patch 8, which will release sometime in 2025, is highlighted by three huge features. First up is crossplay and cross-progression, so players can hop into the game with friends on different platforms. Then there’s photo mode, a feature that, quite frankly, most games of this size should have. I can’t tell you the amount of times I paused Baldur’s Gate 3 to take a photo and had to deal with the UI getting in the way. It’ll allow for camera and lens adjustment, post processing, stickers, and, most importantly, over 40 character poses.
However, since Baldur’s Gate 3 is known for its customization, it makes sense that Larian is adding new subclasses for each class in Patch 8. This will allow players to equip new abilities and specialize their experience further. For example, barbarians can choose Path of the Giants for Giant Rage, while warlocks can form a pact with a Shadowfell entity for Hexblade abilities. You can read up on the full list on Steam.
Larian will be testing the update sometime next year ahead of release on all platforms to help catch any bugs and problems.
The studio has been releasing consistent updates for this must-play PC game, and its patches are usually huge affairs with new features. Patch 7 earlier this year brought official modding support. The studio said that there have been over 3,000 mods downloaded over 70 million times since the patch’s launch, and it’s brought in countless players. In fact, the company’s director of publishing Michael Douse wrote on X in November that the game’s player numbers are actually up across the board, including 20% daily active users and 61% average daily Steam Deck users. “Mods are very good,” he wrote.
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.