Dragon Age: The Veilguard will have a long list of accessibility settings you can play around with when it launches on October 31, like with many AAA releases these days. This includes five difficulty presets, ranging from the easiest for players who just want to go through a new BioWare story as quickly as possible, to a nightmare mode for the most skilled or masochistic players.
And while most difficulty settings can be changed as you play, that doesn’t include nightmare, which cannot be turned off once you start. So you need to make absolutely sure you’re ready before starting a playthrough.
EA showed off all the new accessibility settings in a new blog post on Tuesday, and there is a lot to go through. You can customize almost everything about your playthrough, from turning on aim assist to adjusting the timing for parries, and even forcing the game to auto-save more frequently. The five presets are as follows:
Of course, you can also just go “Unbound” and customize every setting yourself. We previously knew about four of these settings; the newest one is Keeper, which offers a new take on the balanced approach. Instead of a general universal experience like in Adventurer, Keeper focuses on balancing your party and equipment instead of the combat overall.
Even with presets, you can still tweak settings as you go. Some might not be immediately connected to the game’s difficulty, but say you want to be able to explore the map without dealing with objective markers or a mini map — you can turn those off. You can turn off the HUD completely if you want.
EA also used the post to reveal some of the other settings for The Veilguard, including being able to turn off camera shake, customize subtitles beyond just making them bigger or smaller, and even make it easier to spot interactable objects or waypoints in the distance.
All these accessibility and customization settings make sense considering that Dragon Age: The Veilguard also has a ton of customization options for the player character Rook and your party members, including armor transmog.
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.