If you are in Asia this time of year, you can't avoid Lunar New Year festivities, not even if you try to escape into one of the most popular online games.

US gaming giant Blizzard Entertainment has released a special update for its newest game Overwatch in time for the festivities, and it's using China's most revered literary tale to keep players interested and boost sales.

Titled the 2017 Lunar New Year event, players can don cosmetic "skins" modelled after the four main characters from Journey to the West, a story most Chinese children grow up hearing, about a legendary pilgrimage of a Buddhist monk and his three disciples.

Special holiday items and a new game mode were also made available through special New Year Loot Boxes, each priced between $2 and $45 (£1.75 - £35).

The firm's other fantasy titles such as Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft and World of Warcraft (WoW) also received festive updates.

China is one of Blizzard's biggest markets. Although the firm has not provided official Chinese player numbers for Overwatch, gamers in the country have been estimated to make up about half of its five million players worldwide for the WoW franchise.

Released in May 2016, the first-person shooter game has reportedly gained a loyal following of over 20m registered players.

Each battle has two teams of six gamers, and players, represented in the game by a "hero" character, have to secure and defend various points on an online map before time runs out.

Cosmetic rewards like individual victory poses and the special Lunar New Year character skins are a popular feature of the game. However, they do not add any gameplay value.

Overwatch has also attracted a mammoth following in South Korea, overtaking League of Legends to become the country's most-popular online game.

Fireworks, pagodas, lion dancers and traditional cheongsam dresses are all part of a promotional trailer for the game, which drew close to 25,000 retweets and 40,000 likes.

"The Chinese elements in the new Overwatch skins look so beautiful," said Beijing gamer Ning in response to it on the popular Sina Weibo micro-blogging site. "Now we can bring the New Year spirit into our matches."

The special Lunar New Year series generated buzz and raised excitement among gamers on Reddit.

"It's awesome how they incorporated Journey to the West characters into the heroes and made them work really well," said Reddit user Azurezefer.

For other users like Chinese gamer Matt Wang, Winston the Monkey King was his favourite.

"It's definitely worth every penny. Really nice art work," he said.

But other Blizzard fans spotted a bizarre bug, with some noticing that character Mei's waist now looked "thinner" after installing the new update.

"Where did Mei's waist go? In her Chinese New Year suit, her bust and waist are totally slimmed down. We can have fat Roadhog and love him so why can't we have fat Mei," questioned Allie on an official fan forum.

"I get that cheongsum and qipaos are meant to be slimming but this is ridiculous," wrote Ariela Gadriel.

Blizzard responded, saying it was "unintentional".

"There's a bug with Mei's Luna and Chang'e skins right now that's causing her waist to appear much smaller than normal," it said in an official blog post.

It added that their studio was currently working on an update to fix it.

Source:
courtesy of BBC NEWS

by Heather Chen

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