Overwatch Year of the Rooster Event is Now Live

Published: January 24, 2017 8:55 PM /

Today marks the first day of Overwatch's newest limited-time event, celebrating the Chinese New Year, and confirming what information we heard yesterday on it. Year of the Rooster features a new game mode along with a specially prepared Lijang Tower map, and players can find all new cosmetic items in the new Lunar New Year boxes. The temporary game mode to celebrate the event is "Capture the Rooster", a capture-the-flag game mode found in the Arcade. Teams of six battle to see who can capture the most flags (up to 3) within the time limit. Your first win in "Capture the Rooster" will get you one free Lunar New Year loot box. Blizzard announced, along with the game mode and accompanying map, there are over 100 cosmetics to collect, including 12 new skins. Lunar New Year cosmetics can also be purchased with currency until the event ends. The Year of the Rooster event will end on February 13th.

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Blizzard also enacted a new patch for Overwatch with the event's start, which included some substantial UI and balance changes. Users can now equip up to 4 emotes, sprays, and voice lines per character which they can access on the new communication wheel. Headshots and hero ability kills are now prominently displayed in the Kill Feed. As well, players can now join Team Chat from the Hero Select menu. The patch also implements several highly anticipated balance changes to D.Va, Ana, Roadhog, and Sombra. The patch also nerfed the crouch ability. Players can log in and enjoy the new patch and the event right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX2lJuk66xI

Quick Take

Blizzard has created a lot of excellent skins with this event, though people who don't play Mei are going to be disappointed to see her get not one, but two more premium skins, added to her already large collection. Meanwhile, heroes like Hanzo and Widowmaker remain neglected in this department (though all heroes who didn't get skins got emotes, poses, or highlights to compensate). The bigger disappointment though is their "Capture the Rooster" game mode. Capture the Flag is not a complex game mode by any means, we all played it as kids on the playground at some point, so it's bizarre how Blizzard could manage to make it so noncompetitive. It is far too easy to camp your own flag and send a tank, or a fast hero like Tracer, to gather up your opponents. In order to pick up the flag, you have to stand on the spot, uninterrupted, for a few seconds, which makes combating camping comps even more difficult. Most likely Blizzard won't do anything to fix this because it is only a temporary event, but it is likely to die off faster than the snowball mode from the Christmas event because of this.

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