EA took the stage at this year’s E3, and the company plans to double down on beautiful and engrossing indie games. There is now a name for the new initiative, too: EA Originals.
Executive Vice President of EA Studios, Patrick Söderlund, got up on stage to give details on the new push. After referencing last year’s Unravel announcement, he laid out the three core pillars of EA Originals. First, it’s about taking unique, gorgeous, and innovative experiences and bringing them to the masses. Second, it is about supporting small developers and helping them with development, marketing, and publishing. And third, EA wants to offer a level of security by giving all profits back to the developers.
After Söderlund stepped off, Klaus Lyngeled of Zoink! Games in Gothenburg, Sweden jumped on to introduce Fe. It’s an open world game that about our relationship with nature. There are no words, but music will undertone emotions and themes. You’re a cub who awakens in an unknown world to discover extraordinary creatures that communicates with songs. As you learn songs, you can connect to the forest. Like Metroid style games, the more songs you learn, the more of the forest you can unlock. There’s also the looming menace of the Silent Ones, who with each step silence the forest.
It’s a very personal experience. There isn’t one set path for the game, and Zoink! wants every experience to be unique.
EA’s foray with EA Originals should serve the publisher well. To help fund beautiful projects by small teams without asking anything in return is unprecedented. It is uncertain what EA’s long term goals are with EA Originals, but one thing is: those polls showing EA as the most evil company in the America may change.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.