As news began to break about the numerous issues affecting the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight, players of the console version breathed a sigh of relief and got back to playing the game. Now players of the PlayStation 4 version are having problems of their own, albeit much less severe ones.
Players firing up Batman: Arkham Knight are still able to play the game just fine, but they’re being greeted with a message about the game’s leaderboard support: “A connection to PlayStation Network cannot be established. Gameplay will continue without leaderboard access until a connection is made.”
Not all players are experiencing the issue, but from the number of reports on the game’s message boards and Sony’s community help pages, a significant number of players are affected. Leaderboards are used for the game’s Gotham’s Greatest feature, which lets players see how their friends measure up as Batman.
This isn’t the first time this has happened with a Warner Brothers game at launch. Mortal Kombat X also suffered from similar issues at launch, GameSpot points out.
While it’s surely annoying for some players, this issue pales in comparison to those affecting the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight. Bugs and performance issues ran rampant, even for those with powerful graphics cards like Nvidia’s Titan X. Nvidia released a new driver which helped some graphical issues, but file integrity bugs still caused players to have to re-download multiple gigabytes of the game.
Problems were severe enough that Warner Brothers eventually suspended further sales of the game while it worked to fix the issues. Players who had already bought the game had the option of keeping the game and waiting for a patch, or trying out Steam’s new refund system.
At the time of this writing, reports are still coming in regarding PS4 leaderboards, though neither Sony or Batman: Arkham Knight developer Rocksteady have issued a statement.
Related: 15 minutes of gameplay from Batman: Arkham Knight
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.