Inaugural Overwatch event Summer Games returns this month with new Lucioball map set in Sydney, old and new skins
Overwatch gives you another chance to grab those first event skins - and some new ones, too.
Overwatch's first ever event, the Summer Games, will be back this month - to nobody's surprise, since Blizzard said it would repeat the first year's calendar of events and dataminers found out about it last month.
The event kicks off on August 9 and runs through August 29, so you'll have plenty of time to re-experience Overwatch's first event mode, Lucioball.
If you're a big fan of competitive Overwatch you'll be pleased to hear that this year's Summer Games introduces a competitive Lucioball playlist with placing and ranking.
As you'll hear in the video below, Blizzard has also made some changes to Lucioball. The ability to “boop” enemy players has been removed, and Lucio’s ultimate ability no longer pulls the ball toward the player, but instead increases Lúcio’s movement speed and reduces the cooldown on his “boop”.
Last year the Summer Games were held on a Rio map in honour of the Olympics, but this year a second map has been added to rotation, set in Sydney, Australia.
Blizzard didn't explain why it chose Sydney, so either I'm oblivious to some big sporting event (very probable) or we have reason to speculate on something Australian flavoured in Overwatch's immediate future. Junkrat and Roadhog lore dump? A new Aussie contender?
Anyway, back to things that are definitely real and not just part of my fevered imagining: the Overwatch Summer Games 2017 brings a stack of event loot crates featuring all new cosmetics as well as returning favourites from the 2016 event.
The old cosmetics will be cheaper than the new ones. Here's the breakdown:
- New 2017 Summer Games cosmetic items:
- Legendary Skins: 3,000 credits
- Epic Skins: 750 credits
- Rare tier: 225 credits
- Common tier: 75 credits
- 2016 Summer Games cosmetics
- Legendary Skins: 1,000 credits
- Epic Skins: 250 credits
- Rare tier: 75 credits
- Common tier: 25 credits
Overwatch fans were a bit disgruntled last year to learn that event skins would only be available for a limited time, and since the same skins are back again this year, they'll probably be further disgruntled that they frantically forked out to buy them before the 2016 deadline thinking it was that or miss out forever.
Or maybe they won't be. Maybe we've all just accepted cosmetic-filled, RNG-based loot crates you can buy with microtransactions as our lot now.