Overwatch: Lunar New Year – Year of the Pig Update is Live

For those who didn’t catch the news, Overwatch’s latest update is now live. Celebrating the Lunar New Year, Blizzard has added a bunch of new content to their hit FPS.

As usual, the highlight of the event is the array of new skins focused primarily on Chinese and Korean culture. There are also new emotes for Ana and Soldier:76 as well as a highlight intro for Lucio. The primary theme of the skins is famous Asian people throughout history. I’ve listed the skins below in my personal opinion of worst through best.

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Torbjörn – Zhang Fei 

Hanzo – Huang Zhong

Reinhardt – Guan Yu

Brigitte – General

Orisa – Sanye

Zenyatta – Zhuge Liang

Tracer – Hong Gildong

Reaper – Lü Bu

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The update also introduces another arcade competitive mode. Competitive Capture the Flag is now live along with a brand new Capture the Flag variant of Busan. Busan was arguably already one of the game’s strongest maps so it’s no doubt an excellent choice for a CTF map too.

Competitive CTF is also another opportunity for you to get some potential competitive points on your account. Competitive points are used to unlock gold weapons for your favorite characters. The competitive points you can get are as follows based on your season-high rank:

• Bronze – 40 Competitive Points
• Silver – 75 Competitive Points
• Gold – 150 Competitive Points
• Platinum – 300 Competitive Points
• Diamond – 450 Competitive Points
• Master – 750 Competitive Points
• Grandmaster – 1000 Competitive Points

A gold weapon costs 3000 competitive points. These points currently do not serve any other purpose and based on Blizzard’s regret of introducing them, it’s unlikely this will change in the future.

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My overall opinion on the event is that it’s basically what the community expected. Events as of late haven’t been all that interesting outside of the skins. Blizzard generally does a decent job of supporting Overwatch but the pacing of major updates is disappointing with new heroes and maps simply not released often enough. The only promise of something better coming out is Jeff Kaplan saying: “We do have a few tricks up our sleeves for next year that I think will be pretty cool. When those moments happen, I think players will go, Oh, I get what you’ve been doing now.” Until then though, this update will have to do.

The Lunar New Year event will run on Overwatch from January 24th to February 18th.