Xbox Live, the undisputed jewel in Microsoft’s online gaming crown, is getting a lot more personal. At its E3 press conference in Los Angeles on Monday, the company announced Clubs, a new feature that’ll allow players to form close-knit online groups of like-minded folks.
Clubs are Microsoft’s attempt at making Xbox Live more attractive and palatable for gamers otherwise intimidated by its broader, 46 million-strong community. Club membership can be tweaked on a granular level — Club managers have the ability to allow anyone to join, require invites, or even exclude uninvited members entirely — and club members can set profanity filters, age restrictions, and even boot members who don’t play nicely with others.
“If you went in and befouled the club or somebody’s house, [you would expect] that there would be some personal consequence to it,” she told the Wall Street Journal. Clubs, she said, will ideally be “the bar or the house that you would return to the next day.”
The aim is to create welcoming micro-communities bound by common interests, professions, and gaming habits, said Microsoft’s Engineering Lead for Clubs Ashley Speicher. Everyone from “Porsche fans who play racing games” to “office colleagues looking to bond after work” can create clubs. That’s not to say all Clubs will engender the same spirit of generosity — “Will you have close-minded clubs? Yes,” Xbox chief Phil Spencer told the Wall Street Journal — but Microsoft points out that all Xbox Live members agree to abide by its Code of Conduct, which prohibits hate speech and other forms of bullying. And Xbox Live has tools in place to report abusive behavior to Microsoft community moderators, Spencer said.
Clubs will encourage socialization — they’ll let members chat persistently across Xbox One apps, for one. And they won’t be bound to Microsoft’s ecosystem of gaming hardware — the company will soon debut an app for iOS and Android that’ll let you manage Club settings and chat with members on the go. “We want to be on any device that a gamer has,” Microsoft’s Director of Program Management at Xbox Mike Ybarra told The Verge, “whether that’s a competing platform or our platform.”
In addition to Clubs, Microsoft’s introducing a new feature, Looking for Groups, that will allow Xbox Live members to find in-the-moment companions. If you’re having trouble completing a raid in Destiny or need team members for a quick Battlefield match, for instance, you’ll be able to post a call-out to the respective games’ hub pages for all to see.
Both Clubs and Looking for Groups will launch as part of the Xbox One’s October update.
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.