Earlier this week we learned about the next big seasonal event for Overwatch, The Year of the Rooster. Blizzard announced the Lunar New Year themed event with art of two new festive skins for Mei and D.va, and now, thanks in part to this video posted on Chinese social network Weibo, we have a better idea of what else we can expect from the event.
Though the video isn’t the best quality, it’s still pretty easy to make out new skins for characters like Symmetra, Mercy, and Tracer, and a quick look at what seems to be a new capture the flag game mode. The video also helps corroborate an image that had been circulating a couple days back from the Chinese ticketing service Gemara.
From this image, and the video, it looks like Reinhardt, Roadhog, Zenyatta, and Winston will all be getting legendary skins based on characters from Journey to the West, a classic Chinese novel based around Sun Wukong and several other animals of the zodiac.
Whether the teased “Capture the Flag” mode will be a new brawl, or a new quick play permutation will be interesting to see. Players have long wondered when Overwatch would finally add the shooter staple game mode, and hopefully the long wait has let Blizzard figure out just how to make a mode like CTF work with a cast as varied as Overwatch’s.
It’ll be interesting to see just how many non-western holidays Blizzard will end up supporting in Overwatch. Though it was nice to see a less denominational winter holiday event, it was still primarily focused around Christmas than any other celebration. With this event, it really feels like Blizzard is trying to cover more of the holidays that the characters of their game would, in theory, celebrate themselves, which is great to see from a game as big as Overwatch.
The Year of the Rooster event is set to start on January 24th, with no announced end-date.
