BioWare is continuing to hype up the upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard by introducing the companions and their voice cast in a unique way.
The studio announced that it worked with Pod People, a podcast production and marketing firm, to create Dragon Age: Vows & Vengeance, an eight-part narrative audio series where you’ll experience a new story while also meeting the seven companions of your character, Rook.
Vows & Vengeance stars Mae Whitman, Bridgette Lundy-Paine, and Armen Taylor as original characters for the podcast. Nadia is a thief who is unknowingly working for the Dreadwolf and takes on a heist that goes wrong. Her lover, Elio, ends up banished to the Fade and she has to work with a mysterious writer named Drayden to get him back. This is all for the podcast specifically, but all your companions — Harding, Davrin, Bellara, Neve, Taash, Lucanis, Emmrich, and Emmrich’s skeletal assistant, Manfred — will make appearances starting in episode 2. The series will complete on October 17, which should give you time to catch up or relisten to the whole thing again before the game debuts on October 31.
You can check out the schedule below.
This is a huge addition to Companions Week, a previously announced aspect of BioWare’s prerelease celebration. BioWare describes it as a “sidequest” for Companions Week, which properly starts on August 26, so expect more ways to learn about the companions. Up next is a developer Q&A on the Discord on August 30, followed by exclusive coverage at IGN starting on September 3.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is set to release on October 31 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.