Ubisoft’s RPG satire South Park: The Fractured But Whole will miss out on its planned December launch. A retail release for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC platforms is now slated for early 2017.
Ubisoft’s official blog briefly discussed the delay, explaining that “The development team wants to make sure the game experience meets the high expectations of fans and the additional time will help them achieve this goal.”
Revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June, South Park: The Fractured But Whole is a console-style role-playing game based on the popular Comedy Central animated series. The Fractured But Whole serves as a sequel to the franchise’s 2014 debut South Park: The Stick of Truth.
The Fractured But Whole pokes fun at superhero tropes and cliches throughout its single-player campaign, singling out Marvel’s many recent films in particular. Gameplay follows suit with the introduction of several new playable classes inspired by comic books and high fantasy, including Cyborg, Psychic, Assassin, Brutalist, and Gadgeteer.
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone demonstrated The Fractured But Whole‘s expanded combat mechanics during Ubisoft’s E3 2016 presentation, revealing that players can rearrange their party’s turn order by deploying “farts [that] are so powerful that you can use them to rip the fabric of time itself.”
The Fractured But Whole is the latest in a string of recent delays for prominent up-and-coming console RPGs. Publisher Square Enix recently announced that its long-awaited RPG sequel Final Fantasy XV had slipped from a scheduled September launch to November of 2016, while the Disney-themed action-RPG compilation Kingdom Hearts 2.8 was pushed back from December to early 2017.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole is now set to launch for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PCs in the first quarter of 2017.
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.