Tom Clancy’s The Division hit stores consoles and PC next week, which means its time a new broadly explanatory narrative trailer! Released by publisher Ubisoft Tuesday, the new trailer explains why a large number of generic commandos might run around shooting people in New York City.
In The Division, players control an operative from a super-secret covert cell within the U.S. government, called The Division, which is activated after mysterious “epidemic” turns the city into a quarantine zone and rapidly devolves into a Mad Max-esque social breakdown. The trailer mostly focuses on establishing how bad the odds are for players and their secret agent buddies, there are many more many bad guys than there are Division members.
The trailer mentions that Manhattan, where the game takes place, has been “cut off,” and that “Brooklyn is on the brink.” As Polygon pointed out, past trailers and an early gameplay demo have showed gameplay from Brooklyn neighborhoods, suggesting developer Massive Entertainment may add the borough as a downloadable expansion.
The game’s upcoming release follows a series of betas on PC and consoles, the most recent of which gathered more than six million players last month. While fans and pundits were generally bullish on the game, the beta also revealed a serious design flaw: Statistics and other critical information for the PC version of the game were being stored in the game client rather than on remote servers, which allowed players to cheat rampantly. The Division was already a source of controversy for PC gamers, who cried foul after a video citing an unnamed member of the development team said the PC version was held back to maintain parity with the console versions. Ubisoft said the report is “simply not true.”
“From the beginning, the PC version of The Division was developed from the ground up and we’re confident players will enjoy the game and the features this version has to offer,” Ubisoft told PC Gamer. “And the feedback from PC players who participated in the recent closed beta supports this.”
Tom Clancy’s The Division activates on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC March 8.
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.