Michael Solseth recently made an article about the issues facing Overwatch. In the article, which you can find HERE, he purposely stayed away from talking about events, Winter Wonderland in particular. I am going to take this chance to talk about not just the Christmas event, but how Blizzard is dropping the ball with almost all their events.
Brawls
Let’s start with the thing people have been talking about most this year when it comes to the events. The brawls are all things we have seen before. In cases like Junkenstein’s Revenge this is fine because it’s a fun game mode to begin with. It doesn’t take much to add to that event and make it fun (although an extra level to play on would be great). Personally, I don’t care to see Lucioball every year during the summer games, but there are people who love it. Adding in a competitive mode for it was a very smart move.
Looking at Winter Wonderland though reminds me just how forgettable this event is. Returning in the event is Yeti Hunt and Mei’s Snowball Offensive. Easily two of the worst brawls Overwatch has. They try and switch things up with Mei in both modes, but largely these games are fun for about 30 seconds and then you look forward to playing literally anything else. They are truly not engaging, uninspiring, and boring.
Does anyone really care about this mode?
How does the Overwatch team fix the brawl issue? The solution I believe is to start making lore brawls throughout the year. Easily my favorite event every year is the lore event during March. Largely for the last two years this has been where we see the biggest reveals on the backstory of our characters. The first year we saw Tracer’s first Overwatch mission, and this year we saw Reaper starting to descend into betraying everyone. Lore has been at an almost standstill since the game released. This would be a great way to keep the lore fans like me interested and coming back for more.
The brawl doesn’t need to relate to the season to be fun. How fun and exciting would it have been to load Winter Wonderland up today and we play a mission with Sombra hacking her way into the Lumérico factory? What if we started the Lunar New Year event and as Winston and Hammond had to escape Horizon: Lunar Colony? You leave those missions as exclusive to the event it debuted on while bringing a new one each year and people can talk about the events with excitement again rather than just a means to get new skins. The PVE brawls have largely been the most popular in the past. Make more of these! Not to mention this brings a steady addition to the lore that fans have been crying out for a long time now.
Cosmetics
Don’t get me wrong, every time a new event is announced everyone loves seeing the new skins. However, it seems with every event we get now, all the good items are revealed in the week leading up to the event start. For Winter Wonderland, on social media in the past week we were shown skins for Zarya, Symmetra, Widowmaker, Lucio, Junkrat, Bastion, and Mercy. Want to know how many “surprise” skins we got? Two. Ashe and Bob in a white wintery skin and Reinhardt in gold armor. Both are epics.
The other cosmetic areas are not getting enough love from events as well though. I personally love emotes in the game. They are fun and help bring out that characters personality through their body language, not just voice lines. For Winter Wonderland in the past we have seen emotes with Zarya and Orisa opening presents. Zarya received a different gift for her to destroy every time. Orisa got a puppy to play with. These fit the characters and make us care about them more than we already do.
Emotes this holiday include Genji throwing paper in the air and cutting them into snowflakes and Torbjorn opening a present and three mini-turrets dance around him. These are awesome. They fit the characters and are fun to watch, but give us more than just one or two an event every year! Give me Soldier: 76 opening a gift and pulling out an ugly sweater, or Zenyatta getting a stress ball in a gift. Really allow your animation team to get creative. We love what they have given us so far. Producing more truly helps make events special again.
This goes for highlight intros as well, we receive one an event right now. Give us more to show off when we pull off those play of the games we all strive to obtain!
Final Thoughts
Overwatch is my favorite game to come out the last few years. Events use to feel special and I would look forward to them. However, aside from the lore event that happens for one section of the entire year, Blizzard has not given us a real reason to get excited for them anymore. Switching production up a bit for them and making more items for them could really benefit the game in the long run.
Those are my personal thoughts on Overwatch’s seasonal events. What do you think about Winter Wonderland? Am I crazy that I just plainly do not care about it? Let me know in the comments!
