Author: Trafficblast

A new Overwatch event is now underway, as the latest update for the game has kicked off the Year of the Dog. This is the new iteration of the Lunar New Year event that was held last year, and it introduces a bunch of new content across all platforms: PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

As is often the case for many players, the most exciting addition will be new skins. There are a total of six new skins, including those for Genji, Mercy, Zarya, and Pharah. There are also more than 50 new seasonal items in all. You can see all the new Year of the Dog Legendary skins (and more) in our gallery. The event runs from now through March 5.

Also new is a map set in Thailand called Ayutthaya. This is the first Overwatch map made specifically for Capture the Flag, which has undergone some changes as part of its return in this update. Flags are now picked up immediately but are dropped when using certain abilities (such as Winston’s leap). Additionally, ties are no longer possible since matches will go to sudden death, if necessary. During this phase, teams flags are positioned closer to the center of the map so that flag carriers won’t have to run as far to score.

In addition to the standard CTF mode, a new competitive season centered around CTF is being launched. This will run for four weeks, and those who make it into the top 500 will receive a special spray and icon.

One other change of note in this update is a fan-requested feature. Before starting a match, you’ll now be able to easily change between any of the skins you own for a given character. This is done from the Assemble Your Team screen and can’t be accessed mid-match, but it’s still a welcome addition, particularly as players continue to amass increasingly large collections of skins.

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Fortnite, the stylized shooter from Gears of War creator Epic Games, has reached a new player milestone. Over the weekend, on Super Bowl Sunday, the game hit a new record of 3.4 million concurrent players, Epic announced in a blog post this week.

By comparison, that’s ahead of the 3 million peak concurrent players that PUBG reached in January. The big difference, however, is that Fortnite’s concurrent figure almost certainly covers all platforms–PS4, Xbox One, and PC–while PUBG’s was for PC alone.

Still, 3.4 million concurrent users is a huge number and it speaks to the ongoing popularity of Epic’s game. The developer did not provide a breakdown of how that figure is divided between the paid Fortnite base game and the free-to-play Battle Royale mode, but it can be safely assumed that Battle Royale has the bulk of the players.

Fortnite’s newest player milestone is all the more notable when you consider that the game ran into some serious and significant issues recently. In a frank blog post, Epic talked about how the “extreme” server load led to six different incidents on Saturday and Sunday, which in some instances included “total service disruptions” for the game.

Epic’s blog post offers a postmortem on the server issues that cropped up alongside the new player record. It goes deep into detail on the systems that power the game and what went wrong, along with a rundown of the steps Epic is taking to ensure server stability in the future. You can read that blog post here.

“Problems that affect service availability are our primary focus above all else right now,” Epic said. “We want you all to know we take these outages very seriously, conducting in-depth post-mortems on each incident to identify the root cause and decide on the best plan of action. The online team has been working diligently over the past month to keep up with the demand created by the rapid week-over-week growth of our user base.

“While we cannot promise there won’t be future outages as our services reach new peaks, we hope to live by this great quote from Futurama, ‘When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

Epic sometimes brings down Fortnite’s servers intentionally, as it did this week in advance of the game’s next big update, which is out now. Update 2.4.2’s biggest feature is a new weapon, the Crossbow. This was teased as a silent weapon recently in-game, and it’s not only stealthy, but it also has another perk: It fires arrows, which are a new type of ammo that are unlimited in supply. Crossbows can be found as ground loot or in chests, with Rare and Epic versions also available. You can see a Valentine’s-themed version of the weapon, as well as upcoming Valentine’s skins, our gallery of images here.

This week marked the release of Bluepoint’s Shadow of the Colossus remake, bringing Team Ico’s PS2 masterpiece to a whole new generation of players. Despite originally launching 13 years ago, the game remains one of the most stunning achievements the industry has ever seen due to its simple, affecting story, beautiful soundtrack, and hauntingly vast world, and it looks even more breathtaking on PS4 thanks to the care Bluepoint took in modernizing the title for the current-gen hardware.

Shadow of the Colossus places players in the role of Wander, a young man who journeys into the Forbidden Lands in search of a way to bring his beloved back to life. He’s instructed by an omnipresent being known as Dormin to travel across the sprawling, desolate landscape and hunt down the 16 colossi that make their home there. Each colossus is a towering puzzle unto itself, and players must figure out how to scale the monolithic beings and spot their weak points in order to bring the giants down.

Despite the vast scope of the game, Shadow of the Colossus is a fairly brief adventure, running from eight to 10 hours on your first playthrough. Fortunately, the title also features a New Game Plus mode for those who want to continue adventuring in the Forbidden Lands. We checked out New Game Plus in a recent livestream, which you can watch above. In the video, we surf atop our horse as it gallops across the vast expanse of the Forbidden Lands and hunt down some of our favorite colossi in the game.

Shadow of the Colossus is available exclusively for PS4. You can learn more about the game and how it holds up in our Shadow of the Colossus review. For more gameplay footage of Shadow of the Colossus, check out our video of the game’s first five colossi. We also took a look at all of the new filters you can use in Shadow of the Colossus and explain just why the game remains a masterpiece, even 13 years after it first released.