Riot Games detailed its plans for League of Legends in 2025 ahead of Worlds 2025. The most notable change coming to the game concerns its seasonal model, which will shift to be more like League of Legends‘ live service peers.
Typically, each year of League of Legends is considered one season, with several patches released throughout it. In 2025, Riot Games will hold three distinctly themed seasons of the game. Each season will bring a new Champion alongside narrative, progression, and general gameplay content updates tied to the season’s theme. This is more similar to how games like Fortnite approach their seasonal models with more clearly scheduled themed updates.
We still don’t know a lot specific details about the new content coming to League of Legends in 2025, although Riot Games says it wants to explore “the feeling of a game being doomed when the losing team has an exposed Nexus” in the year’s first season. Riot Games also addressed the future of modes like Arena and Swarm, which it has been testing. Unfortunately, Swarm and Arena will not become permanent game modes; Arena will return for a limited time sometime in the first half of 2025, though.
In the more immediate future, players can expect patch 14.20, coming October 9, to feature an art and sustainability update for the Champion Teemo and adjustments so that players don’t feel like they lose more with a loss than they gain with a win. A League of Legends Player Days Event will also occur between October 9 and October 27, bringing special missions and champion skins.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.