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The HP President’s Day Sale is now live with some great deals on Omen gaming laptops and prebuilt gaming PCs. This year’s sale is better than previous years thanks to a 20% off coupon code “DUO20” that works on select gaming laptop and PC configurations. HP is also one of the very few large-scale OEM PC manufacturers that is still offering an RTX 5090 system available for order. Check out the full list below.

President’s Day Gaming PC Deals (and New Releases)

President’s Day Gaming Laptop Deals

You can quickly browse through all of the listed products on sale above. See below for our favorite picks.

Preorder the HP Omen 45L RTX 5090 Prebuilt Gaming PC

Though Marvel Rivals is still a relatively new game, players are already dreaming of big additions. Recently, rumors have spread of a potential PvE boss fight, leading some to speculate that a PvE mode is right around the corner. Unfortunately, NetEase recently clarified that it doesn’t have plans for such a mode…yet.

We spoke to Marvel Rivals producer Weicong Wu at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas this week, and asked him about any plans for a PvE mode. This was his response:

“For now we don’t have any kind of a PvE plan, but our development team is continuously experimenting with new game play modes. So if we found that a new specific game mode is entertaining enough, fun enough, we would of course bring it to our audience.”

After he said this, Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo hopped in to ask if I wanted a PvE mode in Marvel Rivals, and I told him I did. Wu continued:

“Yeah, we believe there are some of our audience that would like the PvE mode. But also, you can see that if we come up with a hardcore PvE experience, that will be totally a different distinctive experience from what we have right now. So our development team has been continuously experimenting with different approaches to achieve that goal, maybe a lighter mode, in a lighter sense of that, and to see what would work best for our game.”

So for now, it sounds like there are no concrete plans for PvE, but Wu does seem to be suggesting that NetEase is playing around with ideas for a “lighter” game mode of some kind, perhaps like a one-off event or something similar. For now, NetEase isn’t saying much more.

Marvel Rivals is still being updated every month and a half with new characters, with the Human Torch and The Thing set to be the latest heroes joining the game on February 21. We also spoke to Wu and Koo about the possibility of a Nintendo Switch 2 release for Marvel Rivals, which you can read about here, and we also confronted them about whether or not they were trolling dataminers with fake hero “leaks” in the code.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Marvel Rivals dataminers think the developers are trolling them with lists of potential future characters hidden in the game’s code. But NetEase and Marvel say they have better things to do…like actually make the game.

Last month, dataminers began sharing names of potential future heroes hidden in the code of Marvel Rivals, a few of whom seemed to be confirmed pretty quickly as real when the Fantastic Four were officially announced. However, as the list of datamined heroes grew, a different rumor began to circulate in the community: some of the names were fake, planted there by developers to mislead dataminers.

Even now, there’s disagreement in the community as to which, if any of the datamined characters are really being seriously considered for the game.

We recently had the opportunity to directly ask Marvel Rivals producer Weicong Wu and Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo if they’re secretly performing an elaborate troll. And while it sounds like there are no pranks being pulled here, we should still take all the names being found in the code with a grain of salt. Here’s what Wu had to say:

“So firstly we want to say that we don’t recommend anybody to make adjustments to the files [of the game],” he began. “Also, you can see that for each character’s design actually we come through a very complicated process and we make a lot of concepts, trials, prototypes, development, et cetera. So there could be some information left in the code, and it might mean that we have tried those directions and they may appear or may not appear in our future plans. And whether or not they will appear in our future pipeline is highly depending on what kind of gameplay experience our players would expect in our game.”

Koo added, “If I could have a ten-year plan, it’d be great. But the team experimented with a lot of play styles, heroes. It was like there’s someone doing scratch paperwork and then just left a notebook there, and someone [a dataminer] decided to open it with no context.”

I pushed a little, asking them point-blank if they were deliberately trolling people. Koo replied, “No. We would rather spend our time developing the actual game.”

In the same conversation, we also discussed how a character gets chosen to be added into Marvel Rivals in the first place. The two told me that the team plans updates roughly a year in advance, and is committed to keeping its current pace of adding new characters every month and a half. For each update, NetEase first looks at what type of character and skillset is needed to balance out the rest of the game and add variety to the roster, and come up with a list of several different possible additions. Wu told me that part of NetEase’s strategy for achieving game balance is to focus less on aggressively tweaking existing characters to be perfectly fine-tuned, and more on adding new characters and experiences to keep things fresh, fill gaps, support characters that are a bit weak with new team abilities, or counter characters that might be a little too strong.

Once they have a list of possibilities, NetEase then takes these suggestions to Marvel Games, and begin working on initial designs. From there, they look at what the community is currently excited about, as well as what’s planned a year in advance in other Marvel divisions, such as if a big film or comic arc is coming that they can tie a character in with. That helps them come to a final decision on who’s going in. All this explains why there might be a lot of different heroes listed in the code – NetEase just has a lot of ideas it’s tossing around all the time.

Marvel Rivals was great at launch, and each new character only seems to make it more powerful, with the Human Torch and The Thing set to be the latest heroes joining the game on February 21. We also spoke to Wu and Koo about the possibility of a Nintendo Switch 2 release for Marvel Rivals, which you can read about here.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

The widely popular hero shooter Marvel Rivals is seeing massive success on PS5, Xbox Series, and PC. But its developer NetEase has been firm that it’s not coming to Nintendo Switch, leaving Nintendo players out of luck on joining in the fun. But what about the Nintendo Switch 2?

We had the opportunity to pose this question to Marvel Rivals producer Weicong Wu this past week at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas. And fortunately for Switch fans, it sounds like a Switch 2 release is a real possibility.

As Wu put it: “We’re already in contact with Nintendo and working on some development kits. And whenever we find that we could provide great performance for our game on Switch 2, we’re open to that. The reason why we didn’t launch it onto the Switch, it was the first generation of that device they cannot provide a great experience for our gameplay. So if it could achieve that goal, we’re open to that.”

The Nintendo Switch 2 was finally officially announced just last month. While we don’t have too many details on its capabilities just yet, it appears to be a bigger and more powerful Nintendo Switch system. Notably, it looks like the console will have some sort of mouse-like controller functionality that could potentially make playing shooters like Marvel Rivals a bit more PC-like, though it still remains to be seen exactly how this will work.

The Nintendo Switch 2 doesn’t have a release date currently, but a Nintendo Direct has been confirmed for April 2. Marvel Rivals, meanwhile, is out now on other platforms, and we like it a lot. In our 8/10 review, we said that it “may be following closely in the slipstream of the hero shooters that have come before it, but by doing so Marvel Rivals has firmly placed itself in a strong position to take the crown for itself.” The Human Torch and The Thing are set to be the latest heroes joining the game on February 21.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

As part of its Presidents’ Day Sale, Dell is offering this Alienware m16 R2 RTX 4060 gaming laptop for just $1,299.99 shipped after a $400 instant discount. This is already a great price for an Alienware laptop equipped with the RTX 4060 GPU, but this configuration also upgrades the processor to an Intel Core Ultra 9, which is uncommon at this price point. The m16 R2 is Alienware’s most popular gaming laptop, which isn’t surprising considering its excellent build quality, top-of-the-line gaming prowess, and reasonable price point. The “R2” is the second generation model that was released in 2024; it’s 14% lighter and more compact than its predecessor without compromising on performance.

$400 Off Alienware m16 R2 16″ Gaming Laptop