Microsoft is integrating data from the website How Long To Beat into Game Pass. The company announced its partnership with the IGN-owned website Wednesday, saying it will update the Xbox app on Windows to give Game Pass subscribers time estimates on the game details pages for most of the service’s titles on PC.
How Long To Beat is a community-driven website that specializes in calculating the amount of time it takes to play through games, depending on your playstyle. If you just want to get through the main story for Death Stranding, for example, it will take you 40 hours to see the credits roll. If you’re a completionist and want to finish the main story, side quests, and unlock every single achievement the game has to offer, it will take you 113 hours (which is a little less than five days) to achieve 100% completion.
In addition to seeing playtime details upon clicking View Details, users will be able to submit their own times and see community reviews, playthrough notes, and data breakdowns based on playstyle and platform. They’ll also have the ability to organize their game library and help other players clear their backlog.
To help gamers play games on Game Pass even faster, Microsoft also improved the performance of the Xbox app.
“With the most recent update, the app now launches up to 15% faster, and we’ve also made some fixes for overall better responsiveness when you interact with key experiences in the app,” said Jason Beaumont, Xbox’s partner director of product management for player experiences and platform. “We’ve seen crash-free sessions improve to 99.9%, and player reports of games that didn’t download or didn’t install successfully reduced by nearly half.”
The integration of How Long To Beat into Game Pass is a welcome change for players with busy lives. The website already shares completion times for the latest games on Twitter, so sharing those times on Game Pass titles will be even more helpful.
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.