Pokémon Go developer Niantic has lowered the spawn rates of some of the game’s most common creatures, making it less likely that players will encounter multiple Pokémon of the same species during each play session.
Niantic contextualizes the change as a recent discovery made by the in-game character Professor Willow, who notes Pidgeys, Rattatas, and Zubats will spawn much less frequently in locations where they were previously common.
Professor Willow additionally revealed that Pidgeys and Rattatas will no longer hatch from collected eggs, greatly reducing the number of duplicate Pokémon that players will collect on a daily basis. The Pokémon Eevee also undergoes a change as part of this week’s update, as the creature will now hatch from 5km eggs only.
Though Pokémon Go‘s popularity has cooled after its explosive debut earlier in 2016, the app still maintains an audience of millions of dedicated players worldwide. In recent months, some players have expressed disappointment at the game’s predetermined spawn rate, which distributes a small handful of collectible Pokémon within a given physical space in the real world.
While many players remain committed to collecting all of the game’s featured Pokémon, others gave up the journey after meeting with multiple Pidgeys and Rattatas during their daily crawls for creatures. This week’s update is intended to shake up the game’s creature distribution, and players who once exclusively encountered common Pokémon can now expect to see a better mix of critters in the months ahead.
Zubat similarly became the bane of players who played at night in search of rare nocturnal Pokémon. After this week’s update, nearby Zubats will go into hibernation in order to spur a more even distribution of nighttime creatures.
This week’s distribution shakeup arrives ahead of a forthcoming Pokémon Go update that will reward players with in-game bonuses for daily play. With it, Pokémon Go players will earn bonus experience for catching their first Pokémon of the day and by making daily visits to nearby PokéStops, speeding progression through the game’s ranks.
Pokémon Go is available as a free download from the App Store and Google Play.
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.