Technologies

This Keychron Keyboard Combines One of the Best Technologies in Gaming With a Gorgeous Premium Design

Keychron delivers yet another fantastic keyboard with the K4 HE, this time with a new gaming technology.

If you’ve paid any attention to gaming accessories the past few years you’ve likely heard something about the benefits of Hall Effect joysticks and triggers. Essentially, instead of using a physical connection to sense movement, Hall Effect sensors use magnets. The idea is to reduce wear and tear on components to give you more durability as well as improve the controller’s response time. Most gamers probably won’t notice the difference between a standard and Hall Effect controller, but for the hardcore gamers, where every millisecond counts, it can make a big difference.

Hall Effect controllers have exploded in popularity over the past few years, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before companies started using this same technology in keyboards. Behold the Keychron K4 HE: It’s a 96%-sized wireless keyboard from the world-renowned company. As you probably guessed from the intro, it uses uses Hall Effect switches instead of traditional mechanical switches. The result is a combination of superlatives like impressive, enjoyable, annoying and ridiculous overkill, all in one package.

What I like about the Keychron K4 HE

For starters, the build quality is exceptional, as I’ve come to expect from Keychron. The K4 HE has a good bit of weight to it, which gives it a premium feel, and the wood sides of the Special Edition version I reviewed add a touch of luxury as well. It’s available with either black or white keycaps with slightly different wood tones for each. There’s also a Standard version, which has Cherry-profile keycaps instead of OSA-profile and loses the wood side rails, knocking about $10 off the price.

The most important feature of the K4 HE, however, is the Hall Effect switches. The use of magnets enables a 0.2 to 3.8mm actuation range with a minimal 0.1 mm sensitivity. The Nebula Gateron switches that came with my K4 HE have a start and end actuation force of 40 gram-force and 60 gram-force, respectively, but you can get other Hall Effect switches with smaller or larger actuation forces. It’s worth noting that the K4 HE is only compatible with double-rail magnetic switches. So while you can hot-swap the switches, you cannot use traditional mechanical switches.

What’s really nuts is the insane levels of software customization available. You can set different actions for different actuation points within each keypress, meaning a shallow, 0.2mm keypress could trigger one action while a deeper, 3.8mm keypress could trigger a different action. There’s also Last Key Prioritization, which prioritizes the last key pressed, and Snap Click, where deeper keypresses take precedence when you press two keys at the same time. Basically, this allows you to trigger multiple actions in a game without having to lift your fingers for multiple keypresses. In games that require speed and fast reaction times, this can be huge.

The Rapid Trigger feature also gets a speed boost because each keypress is reset the moment the key travel reverses, meaning you can keep firing or moving literally as fast as your finger can move. Honestly, the most surprising thing to me is that you can have up to four distinct actions per key based on how hard you press it. As in, you can program up to four stages per key, which triggers a keypress at each stage.

This is my first experience with Hall Effect magnetic keyboard switches and the typing experience is… interesting. Fully aware of the irony, I immediately noticed how firm and tactile the typing experience felt when I first started using it. The design engineers at Keychron deserve a lot of credit for tuning the magnetic resistance so superbly. It feels amazing to type on.

The acoustics are also enjoyable. While they don’t quite have the crispiness of a traditional mechanical keyboard «thock,» they still sound great. I personally enjoy the noise of a mechanical keyboard and the K4 HE sounds nice to my ears. The only exceptions are the spacebar and other longer keys. It’s not unusual for these specific keys to sound different than the rest of the keyboard, but it’s still annoying when they do, at least for me.

HE not for everyone?

I never quite got used to the typing experience over my several weeks with it, so I never got back up to my normal typing speed and accuracy while using it. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to press on (sorry) and see if I fully adjust or go back to my standard mechanical switches. Part of my frustration lies with the compact layout. It’s literally one solid rectangle with no space between the main keyboard and the arrow keys, numpad, or function keys. I personally found it annoying and don’t know if I’ll get used to it.

Also, if you’re a big fan of RGB, I’d probably get the Standard edition over the Special Edition because the RGB is much harder to see with the keycaps from the Special Edition.

Overall, the Keychron K4 HE is an impressive keyboard. If you are a hard-core FPS player, there’s no doubt you can take full advantage of the customization options to up your gameplay, and the solid build quality and wood rails look great on any desk. If you don’t need a numpad, I’d probably recommend going for the K2, as the layout is likely closer to what you’re used to.

Either way, for $135 to $145, depending on if you want the OBS keycaps and wood rails, there’s not a lot wrong with the K4 HE. That’s a good price for a keyboard this good, and if it sounds interesting to you, you won’t be disappointed.

Technologies

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Endless Gaming Crossovers

In navigating my own love-hate relationship with this phenomenon, I talked to some of the devs behind them to get a better sense of how these crossovers work and why companies pursue them.

When my friends want to play Magic: The Gathering, I wade through my two-dozen or so decks built for Commander — the card game’s casual, multiplayer format. I might choose the deck built around Elenda, the Dusk Rose, a vampire saint who can create legions of vampires. Maybe I’ll take my Narset, Enlightened master deck, which lets me cast powerful spells for free when she attacks. Both Elenda and Narset are original characters from Magic: The Gathering.

Or maybe I’ll grab my Lightning, Army of One deck, constructed around the Final Fantasy 13 character, so I can attack people for absurdly high amounts of damage. Maybe my Godzilla deck will engage in glorious combat against my friends’ decks led by characters from Dracula or Warhammer 40K. Would Eowyn from Lord of the Rings be a better match-up against the forces of the Imperium?

It’s a double-edged sword, this impulse toward crossovers. And it’s happening in games far beyond Magic: The Gathering.

Overwatch featured skins from Persona 5 in September, Halo armor and weapons showed up in Helldivers 2, and edgy looter shooter Borderlands 4 is showing up in… golf game PGA Tour 2K25. The crossover crown lies eternally with Fortnite, thanks to its never-ending influx of skins from games, movies, comics and real-life celebrities — leading players using the Sabrina Carpenter skin to stop shooting each other and, say, hold impromptu concerts instead.

When the elements fit each other are handled with care, it’s a fun way for fans to engage with multiple interests simultaneously. But when it feels carelessly thrown-together or when the elements don’t mesh, it can feel like a cash grab that hollows out the original property. And what works for one player might feel egregious or immersion-breaking to another.

«Am I the problem?» I ask myself, as I work on a fourth Magic deck built around a Final Fantasy character, after spending hundreds of dollars on cards and accessories from the set.

I do realize that the money I spent on the release event and weekly drafts screamed to Hasbro, «It’s working!» At the same time, playing with cards from that Final Fantasy set was also the most fun I’ve had with Magic in several years.

Corporations betting big on brand crossovers feels like the unavoidable consequence of a world in which players look more and more for customization and ways to show off their personalities and interests, which dovetails with companies looking for lucrative ways to attract new players and increase revenue in ongoing games. Is other media filtering into popular games about the joy of including familiar faces, or does it turn characters into digital bumper stickers, starved of their identity from their original context?

The answer, like it or not, is both.

Money is a big part of the motivation, but expanding reach and offering customization also factor in

Blending different properties together generally requires an intense collaboration between the property owners and the game inviting the crossover. So what makes these gaming collaborations worth it for those parties?

There’s a financial incentive, to be certain, as Hasbro has made astonishingly clear. In its second-quarter 2025 earnings call, CEO Chris Cox noted that Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy set made $200 million in revenue in one day, while it took the Lord of the Rings set six months to hit that milestone. To put those two collaborations in the context of original Magic: The Gathering sets, the bestselling Magic set before Lord of the Rings was Modern Horizons, which made $200 million over two years.

Admittedly, $200 million in 24 hours is performance that Magic: The Gathering will likely struggle to replicate, even with the overabundance of outside properties coming next year: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Hobbit, Star Trek and Marvel. Still, Cox said the company feels good about the collaborations set to launch next year in terms of pleasing players and bringing in revenue. And Final Fantasy ultimately points to the financial power of a good gaming crossover, one where the properties are handled thoughtfully and intentionally (even if some of that intention is making the collaboration more collectible).

To better understand how and why these crossovers happen, I talked with some of the people powering these gaming collaborations.

There were «a lot of clues» both internally and externally that Magic could support these kinds of crossovers in the game, said Aaron Forsythe, Magic: The Gathering’s vice president of research and development.

Sets like Lord of the Rings and Final Fantasy can also help funnel new players into a game that has been around since 1993.

«With Final Fantasy, we have seen a marked increase in play participation, especially among players who haven’t previously participated in our Organized Play programs,» said Rebecca Shepard, the vice president of franchise for Magic: The Gathering. That participation also extends after the launch of sets based on the other properties, which Magic brands Universes Beyond.

She noted that Universes Beyond releases also lead to increased interest in older products, demonstrating the crossovers’ ability to drive interest in the game’s original creations.

Magic’s designers have spent decades creating multiple in-game worlds or «planes» with their own lore, characters and mechanics. To a certain degree, crossovers are baked into its premise.

But what about something with a considerably smaller scope, like the hero shooter Overwatch 2? The team-based game is set in nearish future Earth, where other Blizzard games like Diablo and Starcraft are minimal parts of the world as references and outfits. But aside from a small Lego crossover, other external properties were mostly only winked at… until the game introduced skins from the popular manga and anime One-Punch Man back in 2023.

The game’s collaborations started out as infrequent events, but now show up roughly every season.

The Overwatch team was nervous for its first collaboration and took a cautious approach, said Aimee Dennett, Overwatch’s associate director of product management. Devs wanted to ensure that heroes were still recognizably Overwatch characters while also maintaining the integrity of the game’s lore. The solution was described as «our characters are cosplaying,» meaning that the Overwatch heroes maintain the iconic parts of their visual identity, while incorporating elements that are recognizable as the characters from the crossover properties.

There are also internal motivations for these opportunities.

«We’ve found that it has such a positive effect on the team,» said Overwatch’s Art Director, Dion Rogers. People who work on the game are also fans of these properties, and the opportunity to design those crossovers can be a creative spark for the developers.

Fortnite didn’t start the party, but it did invite basically everyone

Fortnite is the de facto example of crossovers in gaming. It represents an astonishing evolution of a concept that kicked off decades ago.

Video game publishers were firmly protective of their properties to keep their games unique, but gaming website Giant Bomb asserts that crossovers started in earnest with 1992’s Battle Soccer, where Godzilla could take the pitch against giant mech Gundams and superheroes from Japanese TV. A few years later, Marvel’s X-Men faced off against Street Fighter characters in a move that would eventually spawn the Marvel vs. Capcom series of fighting games.

Crossovers ramped up in the 2000s with Sonic the Hedgehog and Solid Snake as the first two characters not owned by Nintendo to show up in Smash Bros. Brawl, a few years before horror movie villain Freddy Krueger first appeared in a Mortal Kombat game. Thematically, these all make some sense — but Fortnite took crossovers to another level.

The crossovers started with the Infinity Gauntlet limited-time mode, where players could transform into Thanos, the villain of the 2019 film Avengers: Infinity War. It was quickly followed by the first Marvel-themed skins for Black Widow and Star-Lord that any player could wear. That kicked off a wave of Fortnite crossovers that would grow beyond Marvel to also include DC Comics, Star Wars, celebrities and various other games.

More have followed in Fortnite’s wake. The jump to include characters from other media besides video games has proven popular, with games like Mortal Kombat bringing in the villainous superhuman Homelander from The Boys, and the asymmetrical PVP horror game Dead by Daylight leaning heavily into killers and survivors from various games and movies — and also Nicolas Cage as himself, delivering some truly amazing voice lines.

Still, when it comes to bringing in everything from everywhere, nothing tops Fortnite, where crossover events feel less like guest stars and more like the first stop for major franchise promotion. And the cumulative results are, for lack of a better word, bonkers. Now a squad of Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga and Sabrina Carpenter can face off against a squad made up of Darth Vader, the Joker, Thanos and Mortal Kombat’s Sub-Zero… and then perform *NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye dance on the villains’ corpses.

Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, declined to comment for this story.

Convenience and customization… at a cost

While crossovers with other properties help bring revenue and new players into games, they also risk alienating players whose primary interest is in their games’ original concepts and who may feel the crossovers move the game away from its identity.

«We listen and learn more than folks realize but at the same time, our goal of making Magic for everyone — because it is — can also frustrate our existing players,» said Shepard in response to a question about the feedback to Universes Beyond and the seemingly polarized responses online.

You can see that frustration in videos from prominent Magic creators, with titles like «The Problems With Universes Beyond — Even if You’re NOT a Hater» and «Half of Magic: The Gathering Will Not Be Magic: The Gathering.» The discussions in those videos touch on multiple elements, but center around the proportion of and execution of Universes Beyond sets and how those sets do or don’t gel with the rest of the game.

That tension exists with most gaming crossovers. I wasn’t initially a fan of Overwatch’s move into collaborations. For me, the image of Doomfist in a yellow suit and flowing cape cheapened a character who’s supposed to be a surly big bad in the Overwatch universe. To me, it felt tonally mismatched with his identity, and I feared Overwatch feeling less like Overwatch as a result.

But the response I saw was largely positive. A change being celebrated doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for the game, nor does outcry mean a change is bad. But there were clearly people who wanted the customization and expression of anime skins, highlighting the tension inherent in gaming collaborations like this.

Magic’s Aaron Forsythe acknowledged the competing interests, saying, «Players that have been with us for a while don’t feel the need for a change of this magnitude, and I appreciate how this hits them. But we’re doing this both because we want to grow the game — and we are — and because we think it’s another really fun way to enjoy it.»

For longstanding fans who have played the game for years, perhaps even decades, it may feel like the resources for the game’s original ideas are being diverted to fuel crossovers.

There are degrees, though. In the case of Magic: The Gathering, one-time Secret Lair drops like Sonic the Hedgehog that mostly show up in casual multiplayer formats may not seem as disruptive. But over the course of next year, Magic will release four more sets based on outside properties, bringing the total to seven such sets in two years. More than any individual card or set, that density of outside properties might feel particularly unwelcome, contributing to the feeling that it’s just Fortnite now.

Everyone is here (and here to stay)

I think a lot of the response to crossovers comes down to two things: how well the concept fits and how good the execution is. Fortnite itself has become a conglomeration of various game types — from Battle Royale to Lego to Ballistic, festivals and Creative modes — so the game featuring skins from all kinds of movies, games and celebrities sort of fits into that «everything for everyone» idea.

Something like Dead by Daylight is an example of using crossovers with a narrower focus, incorporating horror icons that fit its gameplay and lore. Resident Evil characters trying to escape from Halloween’s Michael Myers doesn’t make total sense, but there’s enough of an internal logic in the genres of slasher films and survival horror games for it to work.

And, despite my initial reservations about Overwatch’s collaborations, I was immediately enthralled when I saw Kiriko’s Suki skin from Avatar: The Last Airbender. In addition to giving me a new outlet for my favorite character from the show, it just fit the visual identity and the concept of the Overwatch hero, a protector in her own right.

The people behind the games acknowledge how much that matters. «If we don’t do this right,» Overwatch’s Rogers told me, «the fans will call us out.» Players have their own ideas of what fits and what doesn’t, and they aren’t shy about voicing those feelings. But Rogers said that getting it right instead helps maintain the identity of the game’s heroes.

Similarly, Magic’s Shepard said one step in the process of evaluating potential crossovers is feeling out whether it feels like «an authentic relationship» for the game and its players. The challenge, however, is that each player’s mileage will vary when it comes to that authenticity.

There’s no putting these crossovers back in the box, for better and worse. We’ll continue to have more options to play as our favorite characters across a variety of games. Right now, if I wanted to, I could fire up Street Fighter 6 and play a game as Chun-Li in the context of her original series. I could then swap over to Fortnite and run around sniping people as Chun-Li before logging into Overwatch and playing as Juno in her Chun-Li skin, healing people with a Martian mediblaster. And then over the weekend, I could play Magic: The Gathering with my friends and pull out a deck built around a Chun-Li character card.

For Chun-Li superfans, that’s great. At the same time, my Magic opponents may be sick of playing against characters from Stranger Things, Jurassic Park and Marvel, which might break the immersion of the game for them.

The demand is there and the complaints are valid. Companies will follow the money. But each game’s developers have to find their own way of squaring the crossover — justifying (or not) how another creative world collides with theirs.

For Overwatch’s Dennett, as the game grows and changes, so does the team’s philosophy about collaborations — because pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the hero shooter sparks the imaginations of its player base.

«It’s sort of a self-reinforcing cycle, where our players grow and change so much, and so do the types of collaborations, and the types of collaborations change, which grows and changes our players.»

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Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Friday, Nov. 21

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Nov. 21.

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