Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games’ Fortnite is starting to take shape. The battle royale game had a special showcase at this weekend’s D23 Expo (also streamed in Fortnite, of course) that revealed an upcoming season event and tons of skins.
Chapter 5, Season 4: Absolute Doom, launching on August 16, sees Doctor Doom, the longtime Marvel villain, as a new big bad. He opens Pandora’s Box, coating the map in green fog. He was also recently announced as the next grand foe in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and is set to be played by Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr.
The cinematic trailer, which you can watch above, features a bunch of Marvel characters, including a whole batch of X-Men like Cyclops, Cable, and Colossus. The skins are a bit more varied. The Gwenpool skin will be unlocked right away, but you can also get War Machine, Emma Frost, Mysterio, and Shuri as Black Panther, along with the Fortnite-specific Peelverine and Captain Jonesy. You can also see a Meowscles Sabretooth in the trailer, although it’s not on the official skin list at the time of this writing.
Since this is a Doctor Doom-centric event, there’s a Doom skin that you can unlock via battle pass quests this September.
We know little else about Absolute Doom right now, but following D23 on Monday, Epic Games started teasing the map, which is coated in green fog. Eagle-eyed Fortnite players can really zoom in and see that some areas have been hit harder than others.
Every place has a story. And every story is undiscovered… for now 😉
Help us out @Marvel? pic.twitter.com/WaDrhm06BF
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) August 12, 2024
There are lot more Disney skins coming to Fortnite later this year. First up is a group of Disney villains this fall: Cruella de Vil, Captain Hook, and Maleficent. Then we’re set to get the first Pixar characters — Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl, and Frozone — also this fall.
Finally, there’s Star Wars, because there’s always Star Wars. We’ve had Star Wars in Fortnite before, and we didn’t get any details about specific skins or additions, but the trailer showed IG-11 and Moff Gideon from The Mandalorian, along with Grogu Back Bling (a previous version was available during Season 5).
When it was first announced that Disney was investing in the battle royale in February, we saw concept art that depicted multiple Disney universes inside the game, similar to one of the company’s theme parks. There hasn’t been any update on these plans just yet, but we can assume that the partnership will go beyond just some more fun skins and crossover events.
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.