In a post on its website, BioWare announced that there will be no Mass Effect: Andromeda DLC, and that support for the single-player campaign has come to an end: “There are no planned future patches for single-player or in-game story content.”
The game was put on “temporary hiatus” back in May 2017, with many team members relocated to EA Motive for the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront II. Several game websites had speculated that there would be no more DLC for the game following a mixed reception, underwhelming sales, and middling reviews.
The announcement leaves the future of the franchise in doubt. Plagued by numerous delays, staff changes, and technological difficulties, the ambitious game didn’t seem to realiz its full potential from the beginning, and has relied on the multiplayer loot-box system for much of its revenue.
The other three Mass Effect games had major single-player DLC packs that complemented the main narrative, and this cancellation leaves much of the unfinished Andromeda story in limbo. Whatever happened to Ryder’s family, and who was the Benefactor behind the Andromeda initiative? What about the Quarians? We may never know.
However, BioWare promises that they “will continue to tell stories in the Andromeda Galaxy through our upcoming comics and novels, including the fate of the quarian ark.” More details about multiplayer enhancements and “N7 Day” (November 7th) will be revealed in the coming weeks.
EA and BioWare never seemed happy with the game. In an interview with Engadget, EA Executive Vice President Patrick Soderlund was quite candid about their disappointment with Andromeda. “A game that we launched in the market that doesn’t function and is full of bugs, that’s not who we are and that’s not who we should be,” he said. “With Mass Effect [Andromeda], the game wasn’t maybe as finished as people wanted it to be.”
BioWare is hoping to right the ship with a new franchise set to debut in 2018. Anthem is an open-world sci-fi RPG set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland featuring giant monsters and Iron Man-esque suits of armor.
Still, the announcement about Andromeda marks an inglorious and unfortunate end to an epic franchise that redefined the art of single-player narrative games.
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.