We never got to see In the Valley of the Gods, the indefnitely delayed game from the makers of Firewatch after the studio was bought by Valve and shut down. However, a former developer on the game has shared footage on what could’ve been.
Matthew Wilde, a visual effects developer at Valve and previously on the In the Valley of the Gods team, shared a clip on Bluesky of what the water looked like in testing, and it looks incredibly realistic. Even the compression on the video from posting on social media can’t hide that.
Matthew Wilde, the Valve developer behind the water shader for Counter-Strike 2, has shared a rare gameplay footage. It shows the water technology that was tested for In The Valley of Gods before Valve acquired the company Campo Santo. Team shelved the game not so long after… pic.twitter.com/wIs6Im8KYx
— Gabe Follower (@gabefollower) November 11, 2024
Wilde, who most recently worked on water effects and shaders in Counter-Strike 2, previously wrote about how the team accomplished this. We’ve seen similarly realistic water physics over the past couple of years, but in 2018, developers at studio Campo Santo had created a GPU-based simulation that would take into account the water’s depth, velocity, and distance from a “blocking object.” The resulting textures were then fed into the shader.
You can see the clip in the post linked above, but it’s been a number of years since many of us have thought about In the Valley of the Gods. Campo Santo struck critical gold with Firewatch before getting acquired by Valve in 2018. In the Valley of the Gods was a single-player adventure game that was originally just under Campo Santo, but with the deal, it would be then released under Valve. The plan was to release it in 2019.
Unfortunately, the team was moved onto other projects inside Valve like Half-Life: Alyx. At the time, Campo Santo co-founder Jake Rodkin said the game wasn’t canceled but was “on hold.” Oddly enough, the Steam page is still live and lists the release date as “December 2029.”
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.