We know it’s hard to accept, but parts of Fallout 4 didn’t turn out exactly the way its creators intended. There are vestigial pieces of content — weapons, locations, characters, art — that show some of the ideas that developer Bethesda Softworks had to cut for some reason or another. A fascinating new video report from Kotaku has surfaced some of that content, piecing together some missions and other more ephemeral ideas showing how much larger and more dense the game could have been.
Some of the items come through in simple concept art, but the video also showed how digging into the game’s files can yield references to new missions, such “20 Leagues Under the Sea,” which would have taken place in an underwater vault. Similarly, some locations in the game might have played larger, more important roles. A raider den called “The Combat Zone,” for example, was originally going to serve as an arena where players could play gladiator for caps, and might have featured a longer storyline that fleshed out a narrative for one of the players’ companion characters.
Of course, Fallout 4 (like its predecessors) has plenty of intentional easter eggs, winky references, and secrets sprinkled throughout the Commonwealth, including transcendentalist raiders at Walden Pond, Nirnroot from the Elder Scrolls series, and, of course, a rogue UFO. Meanwhile, one player has taken to the command line to create his own crazy scenarios … Ok, so he’s really just making the game’s enemies and NPCs fight each other, but it can get pretty epic.
Though it is not in the video, the report added something about a “trash collecting game,” which may have just been too meta for Fallout 4, a game where players spend most of their time going through other people’s garbage.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.