LOS ANGELES, Feb 8 — Celebrating the Chinese New Year and starting today, team action game Overwatch will introduce a four-week Year of the Dog event with a new Capture the Flag map set in Thailand.
The new Overwatch map, Ayutthaya, is the first to have been designed with Capture the Flag play specifically in mind.
It’s to arrive today, when a four-week event starts to celebrate the Chinese New Year.
Game director Jeff Kaplan described the map as an “absolutely gorgeous” play space split into two halves.
One side “shows some temple that’s very, very gorgeous,” he said, “and the other side is bright and beautiful and very modern. We think you’ll enjoy it.”
A Capture the Flag game mode was introduced during 2017’s Year of the Rooster event and for 2018’s Year of the Dog celebration, the mode’s rules are being tweaked to provide a more fun and exciting experience.
Firstly, tied games will become a thing of the past with the addition of a sudden death overtime rule, in which the two teams’ flags are moved closer to one another should there be no winner at the end of a round.
Hero abilities have also been taken into account, meaning that a carried flag is dropped as soon as a player activates an invisibility or augmented mobility power.
The event in general is being altered to better accommodate the traditional aspects of celebrating Chinese New Year.
“Because a lot of people are travelling during lunar new year, they actually missed part of the event last year,” Kaplan explained, “so we wanted to extend it to give more people a chance who were travelling to experience the event,” hence this year’s Lunar New Year do lasting four weeks rather than three.
In common with previous special events, players can also expect to see some thematically appropriate hero costumes, sprays and introductory movies over the course of the event.
Six characters would be getting Legendary rarity costumes during the Overwatch Year of the Dog event, Kaplan stated, name-checking two of the game’s most popular, Mercy and Genji, while Widowmaker can be seen in the video’s thumbnail and D.Va appears during its outro screen.
“We had a ton of fun making this event, we hope you have as much fun as we did making it,” he concluded.
Overwatch launched in May 2016 for Windows PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. By October 2017, developer Blizzard Entertainment reported an individual player count of 35 million. — AFP-Relaxnews
