Bungie announced big changes to Destiny 2 with the hope thatthey’ll help bring in new players and free up developers following massive layoffs in July.
In a post published Monday, the development team laid out the Codename: Frontiers road map, which will bring the live-service shooter through the end of 2025. Each Destiny 2 year will have a new makeup going forward; instead of one major expansion per year and and three episodes, the game will now have two medium-sized expansions and four “major updates.”
“We’ve loved creating annual Expansions and are especially proud of The Final Shape. But the truth is that they dominate almost all our development effort. We need to free ourselves up to explore and innovate with how we deliver Destiny 2 content so we can invest in areas of the game that will feel more impactful to players,” game director Tyson Green writes.
All of this will be split up evenly throughout the year — so one expansion every six months, with one major update releasing alongside each expansion and another three months later. The second expansion will add new free content to the game.
The first two expansions are called Codename: Apollo and Codename: Behemoth, respectively, and they’ll kick off the post-Light and Darkness saga, which ended with The Final Shape in June. The expansions will also be following a different format than any previous one, moving to a nonlinear structure that allows players to explore it in any order.
“The order in which you explore will be something you choose, but we have built Codename: Apollo in a way the story always makes sense and flows from beginning to middle to end,” promises narrative director Alison Lührs.
Besides these massive structure changes, Bungie is also working on making the Director UI easier to navigate for newer players and on a more varied challenge system so players at any skill level can check it out. The rewards are also getting reworked, with more ways to earn new rewards and more tiers for legendary weapons and gear. All of these are still in the works.
All of this comes after a rough month for the studio, which announced layoffs that impacted hundreds of workers in July and a new studio inside parent company PlayStation to work on an unannounced game. And this was all after layoffs at the end of 2023 and multiple delayed projects, including The Final Shape. CEO Pete Parsons blamed the latest round on too much rapid expansion amid an “economic slowdown.” The studio is also working on the extraction shooter Marathon, which has recently become a higher priority. We were expecting some sort of big rework from Bungie as a result, and it seems like the new structure for Destiny 2 and some other improvements could be the start.
These changes are also mildly in line with reports following the layoffs that Bungie would be focusing on smaller, free updates instead of yearly paid expansions. While the new major updates will be free, the expansions won’t be, although it’s unclear at this time how much they’ll cost.
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.