In an admirably responsive move, Square Enix and Eidos-Montreal have cancelled the “Augment Your Pre-Order” program for their upcoming action/stealth RPG, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Although the customizable pre-order packages certainly gave more agency to players than other recent releases, such as Batman: Arkham Knight, which divided up bonus content by retailer, fans responded vociferously and negatively to what they felt was an arbitrary partitioning of content.
You asked for this: we are cancelling the "Augment your Pre-Order" program. Read all the details here – https://t.co/L7c4axjmuV
— Deus Ex (@DeusEx) October 1, 2015
The pre-order campaign, launched in August, offered a range of unlockable rewards, such as character skins, music, and bonus missions. As more pre-orders came in, additional tiers of perks would unlock. If all goals were met, players would be able to select a custom “loadout” of one reward from each of five different tiers. The final bonus unlocked would be access to the game four days ahead of its scheduled February 23, 2016 launch. Players that wanted all of the bonus content would have to buy the $140 Collector’s Edition.
Now everyone that pre-orders or buys the Day 1 edition of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will be given access to all of the announced pre-order perks. Furthermore, no one will be given earlier access to the game, which launches globally on February 23.
In the linked announcement, the developers expressed the initial reason for structuring the pre-releases that way, and why they opted to cancel it:
“When it was first conceived, we wanted the program to give you more choice about what you received in terms of pre-order incentives — because we’ve seen in the past that when we choose those packages ourselves, and split the across regions, it has caused frustration. We quickly noticed that this approach created even more frustration than before, resulting in a resounding amount of negative feedback.”
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided picks up a few years after the events of the fantastic Deus Ex: Human Revolution. As cybernetic enhancement has become more widespread and tensions between the augmented and the natural threaten to boil over, badass cyborg protagonist Adam Jensen has joined a global, Interpol-like task force for dealing with cyborg terrorists. Because this is Deus Ex, however, nothing is quite as it seems, and everyone has secret agendas. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided launches everywhere for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on February 23, 2016.
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.