Kojima Productions officially announced the sequel to 2019’s Death Stranding, under the working title DS2, during the Game Awards 2022 on Thursday. It will use Sony’s proprietary Decima engine that powered Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West.
The game’s reveal trailer showed actress Lea Seydoux as Fragile, a character from the first game, holding a baby. As they are escaping, Fragile gets hit by a bullet, crashes her motorcycle, and drops the baby.
The baby starts bleeding and Fragile seems to either pass out or succumb to her wounds. The trailer also shows actor Norman Reedus reprising his role as protagonist Sam Porter Bridges, albeit older than he was in the first game and sporting white hair.
No release date window was revealed for DS2, but the end of the trailer shows the PlayStation 5 logo, so it will at least launch there. It’s unknown whether it will also come to PC at launch or later on considering that the first game was also on that platform too.
The original version of Death Stranding was also released on PC Game Pass, so it’s possible that Death Stranding 2 could come to the subscription service as well.
Earlier this year, Reedus seemingly confirmed the existence of a sequel to Death Stranding, even though Kojima Productions hadn’t officially announced anything yet.
After the DS2 trailer debuted, Kojima said that he is currently working on another game, as well as other different projects. The other game that he mentioned is most likely his Microsoft project for Xbox, which is reportedly code-named Overdose. He didn’t provide any more details and said he hopes to share more information soon.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.