Blizzard its preparing to launch the next major expansion for its free-to-play collectible card game Hearthstone, noting that further details will be revealed at BlizzCon in November.
A teaser tweeted this week suggests that the next expansion will take place in Gadgetzan. In a novel twist, fans who dig deeper into Blizzard’s recent teasers may find themselves chatting up a Facebook chatbot masquerading as a goblin barkeep in their search for clues.
Blizzard began teasing its upcoming expansion via Twitter this week, as the company’s official Hearthstone account uploaded a postcard image stating “Greetings from Gadgetzan. It’s as clean as it is safe!”
Polygon points out that Gadgetzan is a goblin-run trading outpost within Blizzard’s MMORPG World of Warcraft. Notably, the outpost serves as a universal auction house that allows Horde and Alliance members to trade with one another, despite the factions being adversaries elsewhere in the game.
Blizzard continued teasing fans with an image depicting a faux newspaper from Gadgetzan. Much of Blizzard’s recent media focuses on Gadgetzan’s “unbreakable” bank vault, suggesting that a robbery of some sort will play a role in Hearthstone‘s next expansion.
Hearthstone fanatics who scrutinized Blizzard’s recent newspaper image discovered a link to “chat with Talan,” the goblin proprietor of Talan’s Tavern. The link leads to a Facebook Messenger session with a Blizzard-authored chatbot. From there, players can prod Talan for further details regarding Blizzard’s future plans for Hearthstone.
Fans who keep up a conversation with Talan are rewarded with several images featuring Hearthstone production artwork, which could later be repurposed as character art for new cards. Blizzard’s chatbot also accepts unique commands and dialogue options, making it likely that players will uncover further details before the next expansion is revealed at BlizzCon.
BlizzCon 2016 kicks off on November 4 at the Anaheim Convention Center in California.
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.