When Nintendo claimed that the new The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would give players “unprecedented freedom,” it wasn’t kidding.
In an interview with Polygon, famed producer Eiji Aonuma revealed that gamers can finish the game without completing the story.
E3 2016: 7 ways Breath of the Wild is reimagining The Legend of Zelda series
“Users may not actually get the full story depending on how they play this game and how they strategize and solve puzzles,” Aonuma said. “Users are able to go to the very end goal without revealing why Link woke up the way he did and where he did. Whether you want to reveal the storyline and find out why Link woke up, or you want to just go straight to the goal, that’s an option totally up to the user.”
This means that if gamers want to, they can go straight to the final boss right from the get-go. “Anybody who can go straight to the goal without doing anything else — there’s two possibilities,” said Aonuma. “Either they’re a really good gamer, or they could be somebody that’s a little bit crazy. But it’s not impossible. I created the game like that.”
While this might be ideal for speedrunning, it may not make for the best gaming experience. But Aonuma might be egging speedrunners on. “Maybe it might be fun for fans to compete in a challenge for who can clear it first,” he said.
Although Breath of the Wild was one of only two games Nintendo showed off during its E3 presentation, it’s clearly generating a lot of hype. Among all the games and announcements at E3, the latest Zelda is by far the most talked about online.
A release date has not been set for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it will land sometime in 2017 for both the Wii U and Nintendo’s next console, code-named the NX.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.