Ready up the eggnog (bleh), dress up your tree, put on the awfully unfashionable yet very comfy sweater, and boot up your Windows, because there’s no escaping the Christmas spirit!
All across the virtual world Christmas have started. Winter has come, everything is frozen over, and jolly laughter can be vaguely heard in the distance. As you know, multiplayer games in particular tend to celebrate Christmas lavishly, with timed events, new textures and, often enough, free stuff. Blizzard, being the greatest purveyor of multiplayer games, and having a namesake to uphold, took the full dive.
Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone and Destiny 2 are all celebrating Christmas in their own special ways. For the most part this means new Holiday skins, with varying degree of accessibility. Which is to say, some of that you get for free, some of it has to be earned or bought.
Overwatch sees the next edition of Winter Wonderland with a host of new, fun skins and emotes and two time-limited game modes we’ve seen in the past. Yeti Hunt will see re-skinned Winston run and hide from Overwatch’s most powerful hero, Mei. And there’s 5 of them. She will also have her exclusive game mode where all Mei teams will throw snowballs at each other. Yes, that is a perfect way of balancing the game, just remove all heroes except Mei. Brilliant.
Meanwhile Destiny 2’s Dawning will give players doubled drop rates for Engrams, which should come in handy. You can also take part in a baking contest. By the means of, of course, fetch-quests to gather ingredients and then redistributing cookies to the hungry masses. After handing out the cookies, as a reward, you will receive a special jet-bike which leaves a literal money trail for other players to pick up. Supremely unsanitary way to be generous, but that’s how Destiny 2 does Christmas apparently.
The Winter Veil festival is starting in World of Warcraft and Hearthstone simultaneously and will have the usual assortment of events and goodies. And free packs for the Hearthstone players, which should come in handy, given that the new expansion is still rumbling jovially. On that note, I hope to see a Christmas truce on the Darkshore war-front. I know, the Light-worshipping colonizers are coming to the Aztec-themed land of the Trolls. Most Christmasy thing they could do would be not coming, but we can’t really have that, they have equipment to upgrade and quests to complete.
In other news, Grand Theft Auto V also has a Christmas celebration and so does Monster Hunter World. Everywhere you look there’s Christmas and there is no escape. On that note, check out our Christmas in video games article if that’s just not enough for you and you’re filled with more Christmas spirit than you know what to do with it.
Here’s an idea: share it. With friends, family, random people on the internet, everyone.