Rob Pardo, lead designer of Blizzard’s massively popular PC MMORPG World of Warcraft, is heading up a new development studio dedicated to creating online multiplayer games, according to a New York Times report.
Pardo’s Bonfire Studios launched this week in Irvine, California, with a staff of industry veterans hailing from Nexon, Blizzard, and other online gaming giants.
Bonfire Studios’ launch follows up on Pardo’s 17-year career at Blizzard Entertainment, where he worked as lead designer on the original World of Warcraft and its expansion The Burning Crusade. While the studio’s current projects are not yet known, The New York Times reveals that Pardo plans to stick to the online multiplayer realm for the company’s forthcoming debut.
Pardo notes that Blizzard’s collectible card game Hearthstone served as the inspiration for Bonfire Studios, as the small size of the game’s creative team eliminated many of the managerial roadblocks normally associated with the development of online multiplayer projects.
“Everyone got to be completely involved in [Hearthstone‘s] game design,” Pardo recalled in a statement to The New York Times. “I feel like that team’s culture was one of the strongest.”
As CEO of Bonfire Studios, Pardo secured more than $25 million in funding from big-name investors like League of Legends developer Riot Games, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and former Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello.
Former Nexon executive Min Kim and Blizzard veterans Nick Carpenter, Josh Mosqueira, and Matthew Versluys join Pardo at Bonfire Studios, though the company has yet to announce whether its first project will target mobile devices or the PC gaming market.
“We don’t want to be constrained by genre,” Pardo told The New York Times. “We really want to create games that help us make those deeper connections with each other.”
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.