The Horizon series is seemingly everywhere right now, with Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and Lego Horizon Adventures on the way, and there’s more in the pipeline beyond just the expected third entry in the main series. Bloomberg video game reporter Jason Schreier reports that the next franchise game won’t be that third game, but rather an online project that “a lot of people” are working on.
“Horizon online is their next project not whatever the third single-player game looks like, so that one might be a ways off,” Schreier said on the Spawn Wave podcast over the weekend. The conversation starts at around 54:27.
PlayStation has been leaning into live-service titles over the past few years that has resulted in some hits, like Arrowhead Game Studios’ Helldivers 2, but also extreme misses like Concord, which was taken offline two weeks after launch following poor sales performance. Combined with the recent layoffs and restructuring at Bungie, which had to dedicate more resources to upcoming extraction shooter Marathon and reconfigure its Destiny 2 release strategy, and a live-service scene that makes it impossible to break through if you aren’t Fortnite or Call of Duty, and there are a lot of questions around whether a Horizon online game is a strong investment.
“Guerrilla is an interesting place, because they’re working on this Horizon online game that — I’m not sure how many people want that,” Schreier said. “They’ve got this remaster coming and the Lego game coming … What happens if neither of those hit, and it turns out there isn’t a ton of interest in Horizon anymore? Are they still gonna be doing the online game? There are a lot of questions around their strategy and around that online game that I certainly have.”
Other live-service titles for Sony include Haven Studios’ Fairgame$, which is still in development, but also the cancellation of The Last of Us Online. Schreier said the Horizon project is one of the few that hasn’t been canceled.
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.