Overwatch’s special events have, generally speaking, gone down a storm with the game’s community, with last summer’s Lucio Ball being a particular highlight. Sadly, if you fancy a quick match right now, you can’t have one. There’s a chance that might change, though.
What else is coming in the future? Here’s our crystal ball: our guide to what’s next for Overwatch.
Responding to an enquiry about the subject on the Overwatch forums, game director Jeff ‘Papa’ Kaplan says that putting the game’s current event, Uprising, into its custom game mode was actually a “stretch goal” for the team, but it presented too many technical challenges. Obviously, this indicates that the Uprising mode won’t remain after the event finished on May 1.
Kaplan adds that:
“We might someday make Seasonal Events available when the events are not running, but for now, it’s not a priority due to the technical challenge. We also do like keeping the events rare and special… (I know people hate when I say that…)”
Seems to me this last point is the stickiest – a scroll through the rest of the thread suggests the community is divided between those who’d love to play any of the events whenever they’d like, and those who think they should be kept rare.
Then there are some who want to pick and choose their events, with one user (who bravely chose the name ‘Crybaby’), suggesting that Uprising at least should stay permanently: “This isn’t seasonal. It isn’t related to a holiday, this is a lore-based event that should absolutely be permanent. We have been asking for PvE like this since the beginning.”
By the way, Kaplan does mention another stretch goal – enabling all heroes in Uprising. “It might not seem hard but there were a lot of edge case/bug fixes for us to handle.”