Get your fedora-shaped space suit helmets ready, because No Man’s Sky is adding archaeology with today’s Relics update. Relics is a brand-new update that lets players dig down — literally — into the history of their planets and unearth the skeletal remains of the creatures that lived there long ago.
Hello Games’ Tim Woodley said, “We wanted players to feel like true paleontologists. When new bones are discovered, Travellers can piece them together to their own design. They can even create their own museums, or share their collections with other players.” Woodley promises a “truly huge variety” of procedurally-generated bones to discover, excavate, and collect. It’s almost like a game within a game.
Players who want to finish their collections but can’t seem to dig up a specific bone can barter with a paleontological specialist aboard the Space Station. That said, it’s not all fun and games; digging up long-buried secrets can be dangerous, and we don’t just mean in the Indiana Jones way.
As Woodley puts it, “Some things have been buried for a reason.” While digging for fossils, players might disturb living creatures like Stone Ghosts and the Stone Golem, both formidable foes intent in protecting their secrets.
The Titan Worm also makes an appearance in a big way. The creature has been around since the Expeditions update, and players can harvest eggs, rope, and other resources from it — but now, you can assemble its bones to create a terrifying display in your own base. Let that serve as a warning to anyone who thinks you’re to be trifled with.
The team at Hello Games compares the Relics update to the more focused “fishing” update from last year. It’s a narrow, objective-oriented update rather than something that makes sweeping changes to gameplay. While Relics will introduce a few new elements, it’s mostly for fun and not something you’ll want to start a new playthrough for.
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.