People review-bombing games even before they’re released is a common problem on sites like Metacritic. To combat this, Epic Games announced that it’s come out with a new user rating system on the Epic Games Store that should address the issues.
The Fortnite maker said on Friday it updated its digital gaming storefront with the user rating system to ensure its games receive direct feedback from the community as they’re playing them. It works like this: Epic will randomly ask players to score a game on a five-star scale after playing a game for more than two hours. Their scores will be calculated into the game’s overall score, which will appear on the game’s Epic Games Store page to help other gamers determine whether or not it’s worth playing.
Epic says that the randomization process prevents spamming, and it won’t ask players to rate every single game they play. It also wants to make sure that people assigning the scores are actual players instead of bots or people who are giving games low scores based on preliminary game information, such as gameplay footage and bad reviews from critics.
In addition to the rating system, Epic said it will ask players to answer polls after each gaming session. The polls will ask a broad range of questions, such as whether the game is good to play as a team and how challenging the boss fights are, and will be given in the format of “Yes or No” or multiple-choice questions.
Epic will then use the responses from the polls to generate tags for store pages, which will improve discoverability and help people find other games that deserve as much attention as the mainstream ones. The tags will eventually be used to create category pages and custom tag-based categories that will show up on the home page.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.