Being in quarantine is difficult but for gamers, it is a piece of cake. A lot of major events like GDC and E3 have been cancelled due to coronavirus but it doesn't mean that there's nothing to play for us and nothing good happened in gaming. There are some major highlights which we are going to share with you now.

1) Epic store free games
Watch Dogs and Stanley Parable are this week's free Epic Games Store games and they are available to download now. Epic Games is on fire. Before Watch Dogs and Stanley Parable, they gave 3 classic and indie titles for free. We praise them many times and they deserve it.


2) New PS Now games
Sony has added Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Wolfenstein 2 The New Colossus and Control to their PS Now library. All of these titles are amazing and one of them is Game of the Year 2019 nominee. 


3) Call of Duty Warzone, THE NEXT BIG THING
Call of Duty Warzone crossed 15 million users in just four days and that's a milestone. Even Fortnite and Apex Legends weren't able to gain this much player count in four days. Warzone hit 6 million players in first 24 hours on both PC and Consoles.


4) Resident Evil 3 Remake demo
Resident Evil 3 demo has dropped on PC and Consoles which is of approximately 15 minutes as it took me 15 minutes to complete but it depends on person to person, what their playstyle is and how much time are they spending to explore the game. Resident Evil Resistance (online multiplayer mode) will go in beta on 27th March.


5) Assassin's Creed Odyssey free
Assassin's Creed Odyssey is free to play from March 19 to 22 on PC and Consoles. Your save data will be carried on if you later decide to buy the game. It's pretty late for Ubisoft though to give a free weekend of this game as it's more than a year old but you can enjoy the game now for a few days if you haven't tried yet.


6) Twitch viewership increased
Twitch viewership is up because of global coronavirus lockdowns. It is up by 10% according to SteamElements which conducts regular surveys. Dr Disrespect is one of the examples whose views increased. People are getting entertained by sitting in quarantine as the number of people playing video games and watching movies has also increased according to a report. 


7) Twitch Streamer banned
Twitch Streamer Kaceytron has been suspended indefinitely over insensitive coronavirus comments. She was asked if she'd kiss someone who's suffering from COVID-19 and she said she will and try to spend the virus as much as possible. 


8) Xbox Series X can add HDR to backwards compatible games. 

Series X will be a real boon for backwards compatible titles also. Apart from bringing faster loading times, higher frame rate and 4k resolution, it'll add HDR to certain titles also which don't really support HDR. Halo 5 will be supporting this. Microsoft ATG principal software engineer Claude Marais said "It can be applied to all games theoretically, technically, I guess we’re still working through user experiences and things like that but this is a technical demo,” "So this (Halo 5) is 4 years old, right, so let’s go to the extreme and jump to a game that is 19, 20 years old right now and that is Fusion Frenzy. Back then there’s nothing known about HDR, no-one knew about HDR things. Games just used 8-bit back buffers.”



9)  PS5's SSD will greatly reduce patch install times

You must've noticed on PS4 that it takes a hell lot of time to copy and install patches especially with bigger files. Seems like it won't be a problem with PS5. Mark Cerny gave detailed info about the PS5 SSD and it won't be having such problems. Apart from that it'll eliminate load times, support faster in-game streaming and will set a new benchmark for speed. If we talk about just raw power. We all have seen that the Xbox series X clearly wins but as we've talked before you'll barely see a difference in games.