Fate Trigger: The Novita is a new battle royale game from Saroasis, a Chinese studio made up of developers who worked on mobile versions of games like Call of Duty and Apex Legends, and Tencent. It’s free to play and will be available on PC, consoles, and mobile.
I saw a match of Fate Trigger: The Novita in action, and it looks like a healthy mix of Fortnite and Valorant with an anime aesthetic. As with most battle royales, players fight each other to be the last person standing on a map where the safe area is ever-shrinking. Fate Trigger emphasizes vertically as its map comprises three floating islands, and players can glide or ride a flying car between them.
From moment to moment, the shooting seems much more tactical and akin to something like Valorant rather than Fortnite. Players choose pre-built characters with distinct abilities, many of which are smokescreens or elemental walls with direct comparisons to skills in Valorant. Others are more unique, such as a bunny gamer who can build up defenses around herself or a magician who can create streams of water to move herself and her teammates faster.
Fate Trigger: The Novita is a free-to-play game that only plans on charging for cosmetics. That’s a good thing, as being able to buy heroes or weapon parts seems like it would likely kill the game’s progression systems and balance. The press release announcing the game also promises “a commitment to fair competitive play and a zero-tolerance stance on cheating,” which will utilize an AI-driven anti-cheat system.
Fate Trigger: The Novita will be released globally across PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and mobile in the third quarter of 2025. Its first PC closed alpha will start on September 25, alongside a presence at Tokyo Game Show.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.