Creative Assembly announced the next installment in its Total War series. The long-running strategy franchise is set to be transported to ancient China for Three Kingdoms — and fans won’t have to wait very long to join the fray.
Total War: Three Kingdoms will be set in 190 A.D., at a turbulent time for the Han dynasty. As the Yellow Turban Rebellion rages on, the nine-year-old Emperor Xian rules — although he’s a mere puppet for Dong Zhuo, a warlord who pulls the strings from behind the scenes.
“It is a brutal and oppressive regime, reads the description of the official trailer. “And as Zhuo’s power grows, the empire slips further into the cauldron of anarchy. But hope yet blossoms.”
Like the other historical games in the Total War series, Three Kingdoms will use real events as the basis for its grand-scale warfare. However, it will hone in on three heroic characters that will play a key role in shaping the future of the land as various different factions vie for supremacy.
Three Kingdoms is being billed as the next major historical installment of Total War, as publisher Sega continues to expand the enormously popular property. The A Total War Saga subseries, which was officially announced in July, is a spin-off that will focus on a more specific point in history than the mainline titles.
There’s plenty more going on in the Total War franchise, too. Buy Now has only been available for a matter of months, but we already know that it’s the second in a planned trilogy based on the beloved tabletop franchise. The free-to-play Total War: Arena was recently released worldwide, and a mobile spinoff entitled Total War Battles: Kingdom is set to drop in 2018.
This is the first official word that we’ve seen regarding Total War: Three Kingdoms outside of a tease from a Creative Assembly blog post that was published during the summer. It seems that the game must have been in development for some time, as it’s scheduled to release in fall 2018 — you can already add the game to your Steam wishlist by visiting its store page.
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.