It’s hard to believe that Overwatch has been around for a year already. With special events year-round, it always retains a big presence in the gaming community. Starting Tuesday, Blizzard is celebrating the anniversary with a special event full of new skins, emotes, and more.
Anytime from May 23 through June 12, players can fight in three new arena maps as they earn Anniversary Loot Boxes full of event-based goodies for their favorite characters. More than 100 different rewards include 11 skins, 24 dance emotes, 24 voice lines, 25 sprays, and 25 player icons. Anyone who logs in during this time will automatically earn a free Anniversary Loot Box.
As part of the event, three new Arena maps have been added to the Arcade. Arena maps are smaller maps designed to keep things intense for up to 3v3 elimination matches. The first, Necropolis, is an impromptu field base full of stone corridors, deep pits, and a tall vantage point atop the ruins. Castillo is an old fort full of winding stairs and multiple levels that provide plenty of coverage. The final addition, Black Forrest, offers many opportunities to flank opponents on the pathways between Eichenwalde Castle and the woods.
In addition to the event, Overwatch recieved an update with a number of patches and adjustments. New options have been added for Elimination mode in Custom Games and Game Browser. These include Hero Lockout, Limited Hero Pool, Tiebreakers, and Hero Reveal. In Custom Games, players now have the ability to disable secondary fire and secondary weapons. Also, players can now disable one Symmetra Ultimate while leaving the other active.
For typical play, many tweaks have been made to a number of characters. In general, recoil recovery aim compensations can now be disabled for Ana, McCree, and Widowmaker. Other adjustments have been made to Genji, Hanzo, Orisa, Reaper, Reinhardt, and Soldier 76.
In-depth details about Tuesday’s patch notes are available on the Overwatch website.
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.