Fortnite players will see a big change to how they gain experience starting in December. Epic Games announced Monday that it’s simplifying progress so that players can earn experience toward all three battle passes at once.
This battle pass for the battle royale portion already works like this: You can earn experience to progress through the battle pass track by playing in any Fortnite section. However, this wasn’t the case with the Festival and Lego passes for Fortnite Festival and Lego Fortnite, respectively. That’s changing after the current seasons and passes end later this year.
These changes might make it easier for players to get rewards like skins, but Epic also revealed in the announcement that it’ll be making pass rewards available to buy directly with V-Bucks, although there will be a limit on how many can be bought.
The Fortnite Festival‘s Festival Pass will be getting rebranded to the Music Pass starting with Season 6 launching on November 2, while the Lego Pass will make the change on December 1. Not only will you be able to level up your passes through play in any part of Fortnite but free and premium tracks will be combined into one. This does mean that Festival Points, along with Battle Stars and Studs, will be phased out when their respective games make the change.
But this will hopefully simplify how you progress to earn rewards. With one currency and no restrictions on how you get through each track, you can earn experience with whatever part of Fortnite you wish.
“We hope this change encourages you to play where you want, how you want!” Epic wrote in a blog post.
Epic Games has made a few changes recently that cut back on some of Fortnite‘s most egregious money-making strategies — although as the change to allow players to buy items directly off the pass shows, not all of them. It revealed in August that certain limited-time items will be available to buy in the Shop 18 months after their battle passes expired. These changes all come as Fortnite makes its way back to mobile stores.
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.
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