The latest developer video from CD Projekt Red features an interview with Charles Dance, the British actor of stage and screen who is best known these days for his commanding performance as Tywin Lannister, the current royal family’s brutally pragmatic patriarch in HBO’s Game of Thrones. The Witcher 3 will be Dance’s first time performing in a video game as Emhyr var Emreis, emperor of the Witcher’s world’s superpower, Nilfgaard.
Much like his Westerosian counterpart, Emreis is a no-nonsense kind of guy. “This is my first video game, that I’ve performed in. It’s a whole new world for me. It’s quite exciting, actually,” Dance explains in the video. “My character is, he’s a very, very powerful man, probably the most powerful man, and as such he doesn’t need to throw his weight around. He’s a man of few words, the words he speaks, speak volumes. And he’s ruthless — he’s ruthless because he has to be.”
Dance also offers some choice insight into how fantasy is “no longer the realm of children’s entertainment — it is real.” The quality of the storytelling and cinematic techniques means that fantasy games are now also for “quite discerning adults.” Dance understands this well, coming from Game of Thrones, which has cemented the position of fantasy in popular culture that Peter Jackson established with The Lord of the Rings.
From gameplay clips in the video, it appears that Emreis is the one who hires Geralt for the quest of chasing down the “living weapon” Ciri, quarry of the game’s eponymous Wild Hunt. From what little we’ve seen, Dance seems fantastically cast, giving the imposing emperor the gravitas that such a character deserves.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt comes out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows on May 19.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.