Bethesda’s E3 press conference started with quite the bang. The publisher spent the first thirty minutes of their stage show with a lengthy demo of id Software’s upcoming revival of the classic shooter franchise, DOOM, after nearly a decade of dormancy. Simply titled DOOM, the upcoming game runs on id’s new engine, id Tech 6 (or “id Tech 666,” as it was jokingly refered to) seems to have captured the spirit of the original game, eschewing realism and instead doubling down on what made series an instant classic.
The gameplay demo began with a frenetic and gory battle through a Martian space station — a familiar setting for the series. The audience went giddy at the sight of classic enemies like the Imp and Hell Knight slinking through the space station. The player-controlled space marine wielded iconic weapons like the double barreled shotgun and chainsaw, and committed surprisingly violent melee kills on all manner of hellspawn. A second glimpse at the single player later in the presentation plunged the lone space marine deep into the game’s version Hell — a twisted, fiery locale teeming with cybernetically-enhanced demons. After several minutes of battling hell beasts in a brimstone arena, the gameplay clip closed out with a BFG-armed face-off against a massive Cyberdemon. The entire gameplay snippet was blood-soaked, lightning fast, and everything fans have come to expect from the series.
While the single player was admittedly impressive, the most interesting part of the game’s reveal was its multiplayer. The competitive multiplayer looks just as fast as the single player, with power-ups and even the ability to play as a demon, ramping up the action. But DOOM‘s multiplayer looks to be far from just a player-on-player gib fest. The game will ship with a feature called “DOOM Snapmap.” Snapmap will enable all players — regardless of platform — to create custom multiplayer content in the form of maps and game types. During the demo, matches featured co-op and competitive game types, including a horde-like points-based game and, of course, the seminal game type pioneered by the series, death match.
While concrete details on gameplay were sparse in the footage shown, there was enough there to glean that DOOM looks bloody promising.
DOOM is set to launch on PS4, Xbox One, and PC in Spring, 2016. Until then, let our gallery of screenshots sate your bloodlust, and check out the official gameplay trailer below.
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.