The long-anticipated Bethesda RPG Starfield has finally been released and the reviews from players are looking great so far. Featuring the publisher’s first new world in 25 years, Starfield is centered around endless space exploration — quite a different direction than Fallout’s postapocalyptic America or The Elder Scroll’s fantasy landscapes. While the game doesn’t necessarily allow you to get lost in space like most players initially were looking forward to, it does contain plenty of excellent sci-fi standbys like multiverse theories, a vast pool of spaceships to pilot through galaxies, and some far-out futuristic weaponry.
Starfield launched on the Xbox Series X and PC (and Xbox One, sort of), but hasn’t made its way to the PlayStation 5. While there are plenty of great games on PS5, some Sony gamers are still eagerly waiting for their chance to jump into the world of Starfield.
Unfortunately, Starfield will not be seeing a release any time soon on either PS5 or PS4. It’s also very unlikely to get a Sony launch down the road. This is because Bethesda Softworks is a studio under ZeniMax Media, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2021. While there was a lot and back and forth about future platform-exclusivity before the deal was official, once the ink dried, Microsoft announced that Bethesda titles would be exclusive to Xbox and PC going forward.
Of course, there was good reason for PS5 owners to keep hoping. Microsoft also spent $68.7 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard and the future of Call of Duty exclusivity was in question before it was announced that the warfare franchise would be staying on Sony platforms despite the new Xbox relationship. But it appears that that decision was made to keep the status quo for an ongoing series with a massive split player base.
New and future Bethesda titles, including The Elder Scrolls 6, will never get launched on Sony platforms.
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.