The good folks at Blizzard got a little overzealous in anticipation of their upcoming Overwatch patch. The team posted the details within their Lunar New Year update ahead of schedule yesterday. They took it down pretty quickly, but the information was already scattered.
The new Seasonal Event is, you guessed it, Lunar New Year 2018. Also known as the Year of the Dog, Jeff Kaplan had already teased this during a developer update video just a few days ago.
The date of the patch post is February 8th. The post itself states that the “new patch is now live on Windows PC.” And while we knew the update was set to rollout today, we didn’t know exactly what we had coming. Now we do.
There will be over 50 new seasonal items mixed in. Specifically mentioned are Red Phoenix (Zhu Que) Mercy, Black Tortoise (Xuan Wu) Zarya, White Tiger (Bai Hu) Genji, and Black Lily Widowmaker.
Blizzard also mentioned tweaks to the game’s Capture the Flag mode. Both competitive Capture the Flag as well as a Sudden Death mode will be implemented. As well as a brand new map to experience them in, Ayutthaya.
There are also a plethora of other quality of life changes too. Players will now be able to change their hero skins from the Hero Select screen before the start of each match. And Doomfist has seen his Hand Cannon damage reduced from 11 to 6 while his number of bullets fired has increased from 6 to 11.
There are a bunch of User Interface updates included with the upcoming patch. Most notably being Zenyatta’s Orb of Discord and Orb of Harmony now displaying their target’s name.
The patch notes haven’t officially been published yet, but they have been saved here. Checkout the link to see what else is being adjuster with the UI, as well as all the bug fixes that should be hitting PC versions of Overwatch later today.
