Blizzard’s Overwatch may be a fast-paced, competitive shooter, but that doesn’t mean the game’s attention to detail suffers as a result. The designers put a lot of time into filling out the world with little touches and beautiful scenery that, as these 5K Overwatch screenshots demonstrate, looks sharp if you take the time to stop and check it out.
The gallery is viewable above, and make sure to click the captions to see the pictures in full 5,120 x 2,880 glory.
As the newest map in the game’s lineup, the Horizon Lunary Colony takes the fight off Earth and into space for the first time. There’s even a section outside with reduced gravity, something Blizzard began playing with first on the Oasis map with the launch pad. Horizon was also Winston’s home as a child, well before the events of the game, and this map is a closer look into his history. That’s about as close as Blizzard gets to real story in Overwatch, apart from the CGI shorts, the most recent of which was Sombra’s introduction.
Taking the screenshots was easy thanks to Overwatch’s built-in custom game and screenshot mode. We just booted up a custom game type with skirmish on the Horizon Lunary Colony. We changed over from the red or blue team to the spectator team. That allows you to fly freely around the map, without any weapons blocking the screen.
There are a few more steps to perfect 5K Overwatch screenshots, or even higher-resolution snaps. One of the advanced graphical options lets you set the screenshot resolution to three, five, seven, or nine times the rendered resolution. While that setting won’t affect the performance during average gameplay, anything above the render resolution will cause the system to hang for a moment when you actually hit print screen to snap a shot.
Finally, Alt + Z will temporarily hide the Overwatch HUD and UI, so it won’t get in the way of whatever it is you’re shooting. Pressing Alt + Z will also turn the screen elements back on, which can be a confusing moment as you hit Escape and no game menu appears.
For years, Call of Duty’s campaign mode has used big, scripted set pieces to tell the overarching story amid all the adrenaline-pumping action. The 2023 Modern Warfare 3 tried to shake up the established formula by introducing a handful of short open combat missions, and I genuinely liked the idea, but the game's overall negative reception seeped into how those missions were received.
I feared the next iteration might abandon the idea because of the backlash, but I am glad it didn't. MW4’s “Stranded” mission uses the same approach, but instead of fragmenting it across the campaign, it puts it all in a single large-scale open-world mission.
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.