Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 Winter Wonderland skins have arrived to a somewhat frosty reception, as the free rewards on offer for the multiplayer game’s holiday event feel a little miserly compared to past offerings. The developers have bumped up the rewards available following criticism of the Overwatch 2 Halloween event, but many fans say they still feel left out in the cold by comparison to the generous rewards of the first game.
While the only free Overwatch 2 Halloween event skin came from Twitch drops, the new event does reward a new Brigitte Ice Queen skin just for playing some of the event modes, such as Mei’s Snowball Offensive, Yeti Hunt, and Freezethaw Elimination. You’ll also be able to get a victory pose and legendary D.Va skin from Twitch drops, though these are old rewards that some may already own. It’s a nice offering, but it still pales in comparison to what players got during past events in the original Overwatch.
For those of you who only started playing with Overwatch 2’s free-to-play transition, past Overwatch events traditionally handed out three free skins of epic or legendary rarity, which were earned by playing enough games in each of the three weeks that events run. This is in addition to the old loot box and credits system, of course, which allowed active players to fairly consistently unlock most of the new skins they wanted by playing rather than paying.
Fans responding to the announcement on Twitter call the event “very underwhelming” with no new game modes on offer and just a single epic skin to be earned for free in-game. A thread on the Overwatch Reddit, meanwhile, laments that the inability to grind more than a tiny sum of Overwatch Coins to buy some of the other skins “makes me not even want to play because it feels pointless.”
Even during the times where I wasn’t playing quite as much of the first Overwatch, I still reliably logged in for almost every seasonal event just to get a few games in for the free promo skins. While I’m still actively playing on the high of new Overwatch 2 hero Ramattra at the moment, I don’t know how tempted I’d be to log in otherwise based on these fairly limited rewards.
Overwatch 2 season 2 balance changes are on the way for some of its biggest current overperformers, with Doomfist and Roadhog among those in the sights as Blizzard says it’s now able to hotfix faster thanks to a recent update. Keep your eyes on our Overwatch 2 tier list to see how that changes, along with our guide to the best Overwatch 2 settings to maximise your framerate and performance.