PCGamesN reports that the upcoming Overwatch event taking place in King's Row has been confirmed to have playable elements by Game Director Jeff Kaplan.
The core piece of information surrounding this upcoming event on King's Row is a video on the game's official Twitter which is stylized as a computer screen showing information about "File 00382 - King's Row Uprising". The background of the video is quite busy, and as one would expect the sleuths at the /r/Overwatch subreddit have been intensely digging through it frame by frame and gleaning whatever information they can. A portion of the current speculation is that this will be a new PvE game mode.
https://twitter.com/PlayOverwatch/status/848958308643885056
In Mr. Kaplan's mini-interview with PCGamesN, he states that the event is going to demonstrate that the Overwatch team has been listening to player's feedback and integrating those suggestions into the game. The event is going to be set in the in-game universe, almost assuredly set around the "King's Row Uprising" detailed in the tweet above. Considering the date listed on the tweet, some players have speculated that this particular event will be taking place in the past. Although Overwatch has an ongoing story, they've certainly featured throwbacks to past events in certain ways such as with hero skins where the characters are considerably younger than their current selves.
“We’ve been hearing a lot of desire for more story, people want to know more about the story of Overwatch, they want to know more about the past of Overwatch. I think they want to know more about what’s going on between omnics and humans in this world and how did we get there. I think a lot of that will be answered for them.” -Jeff KaplanIn addition, a new comic has released today showing a slice of life at Overwatch headquarters during the event. Some interesting details about the event are revealed - the uprising appears to be the work of Null Sector, an extremist Omnic Rights group. The in-game map of King's Row is set around detonating an EMP device to destroy Omnics hiding underground, but it was never specified who they were. The Omnic Monk Mondatta was stated to be among the hostages in the King's Row crisis, so the possibility exists that the team delivering an EMP may be using it to take out a group of extremists as opposed to innocent Omnic civilians.
Overwatch events tend to have skins associated with them and this comic has quite a lot of possibilities to be brought forth. The younger versions of Commander Morrison (Soldier 76), Ana, and Gabriel Reyes (Reaper) are already in the game. The end of the comic shows Mercy, Reinhardt, Tracer, and Torbjörn in blue combat armor. Throughout the course of the comic, we also see McCree in a darker-colored version of his typical uniform, Genji with some of his cybernetic elements exposed, and Tracer in the orange skin-tight uniform originally shown in this photo.
An old thread on the /r/Overwatch subreddit breaks down the picture of the Overwatch team and how it doesn't seem to make sense in the lore any longer. Curiously, everyone featured in the photo also happens to feature in the new comic. Whether the upcoming event will be an adjustment to fix the canonical inconsistencies in the photo or whether this is just a coincidence isn't known, but it's nonetheless a curious happenstance. The King's Row uprising event will begin on April 11.
What do you think the King's Row Uprising event will be all about? Do you think the characters featuring in both the old photo and comic is intentional or just happenstance? Assuming the skins in the comic end up in the game, which one are you most looking forward to? Let us know in the comments below!
