Activision announced that Call of Duty: Warzone will relaunch as Call of Duty: Warzone Caldera. The game will go offline temporarily on November 16, 2022, before returning on November 28. When it does so, it will only include the large Caldera map; Rebirth Island and Fortune’s Keep will no longer be playable when Warzone Caldera launches.
Warzone Caldera will be a separate experience from the upcoming Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0. Activision confirmed that only a standard battle royale playlist will be available in Warzone Caldera and that the free-to-play title will no longer include an in-game store. Your COD points are transferable across Warzone Caldera and Warzone 2.0. Despite that, nothing else will carry over from Caldera to Warzone 2.0. That means all your weapon camos, charms, emblems, and any other cosmetics will remain on Warzone Caldera. It’s currently unclear if those maps will come to Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 at a later time.
All of this seems to be done to encourage players to migrate over to the new Warzone 2.0 experience, which launches on November 16, 2022. This free-to-play battle royale is built from the ground up alongside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, featuring brand-new weapons, progression, and the fresh Al Mazrah map. Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2.0 will share progression systems, allowing players to level up weapons in one game to access them in the other.
Activision confirmed that users who played the original version of Warzone will gain “a few items” to use in Warzone 2.0, but it’s unclear what they are or when they’ll come to the game.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.