This past weekend BlizzCon took place at Anaheim, California, where Blizzard revealed massive changes to Overwatch, and the Overwatch World Cup finished. In case you were unable to tune in this weekend, we have compiled the information.
Every year Blizzard holds BlizzCon, a massive event that showcases the best that they have to offer. Every year, BlizzCon is THE moment to announce tons of releases to their games, and it was a big year for Overwatch. The first ever Overwatch World Cup took place, a new hero was finally announced, 2 new maps and a gamemode were shown, and a massive announcement for professional Overwatch on top of that. Let's summarize what happened.
Sombra
Finally, after a long ARG, Sombra has been revealed. She is an offensive hero with some crazy abilities including, but not limited to invisibility, teleporting, and hacking.
Her primary fire is a sub machine gun that has approximately the same spread as Tracers gun and a 60 round magazine giving her a decent damage output.
Sombra’s secondary fire is her Hack ability. This gives her the ability to shut down other heroes which is at the core of her kit. The hack takes a couple of seconds but will prevent a hero from using their ability as well as interrupting any abilities that are currently being used; great for shutting down an ulting Roadhog for example.
Her SHIFT ability is invisibility. As well as making her invisible it gives her a speed boost making her a constant threat to any team’s backline.
Her E ability is her Translocator which gives her insane mobility and makes her perfect for ambushing and falling back, similar to Tracer. This is an object that she throws out and at any moment in the next 15 seconds can teleport herself to.
For a more in depth look at Sombra read our article here
For her strengths and weaknesses check out our hands on article here
Overwatch World Cup
South Korea dominated at Blizzcon to take home the victory after beating countries such as Russia, Sweden and the United States on their path to glory. The Overwatch World Cup was a new event that we have not yet seen in eSports, where teams were formed to represent their country. This led to people playing against former teamates and also led to some countries having much better teams than others. All in all the tournament had fair final rounds, and produced some amazing gameplay such as the flying Deadeye from South Korea or Finland's Taimou cleaning house on the last point of Dorado as his infamous Mccree (without Deadeye). The tournament had great producition value, if you missed the action of either day, check out our recaps of them:
New Arcade Mode
Blizzard is replacing the Brawl mode with a whole new Arcade mode that will combine several new features and rulesets that have been featured already.
We are getting a 1v1 mode and a 3v3 mode among other things, which should appeal to a great number of players (McCree and Genji mains maybe?). This will become the home of every new Brawl mode as well as any future wonky gamemode that Blizzard might come up with.
For more information on the Arcade Mode read our article about it here
New Maps
Two new maps were announced, one for Arcade Mode and one for regular rotation.
Oasis is a high-tech city in the Arabian desert that will join regular map rotation in PTR sometime mid-December or early January. As of now, we don’t have a lot of information on the map, just that it is coming, is a Control map, and it will feature jump pads. It will be interesting to see how these change the gameplay and how the pros can utilize them.
We do have more information on the other new map, Ecopoint: Antarctica. This is Mei’s homebase and will be featured only in the Arcade Mode as a smaller map; as such you will not see this map in the competitive pool or in QM. There is not much known about these maps but for more on Ecopoint you can read about it here. It should hit PTR soon as well.
Overwatch League
Last, but certainly not least is the Overwatch League announcement, which was huge news to anyone who follows competitive Overwatch or is thinking about going pro. The league will revolve around teams with a set geographical location, much like other sports teams who have a city that they are based in.
This brings massive changes because it will allow for Free Agency, much like other sports leagues, but will also force teams such as REUNITED to consolidate their living situations to one place as opposed to living all across the world and coming together for LAN tournaments.
We are still awaiting further news as to how this will work; hopefully it brings the game to the forefront of eSports and sets a precedent for other eSports leagues.
For more information, check out our article here.
Other Coverage
Because we had dedicated crew on scene and at home, we could pay attention to all aspects of the event. Wilson 'Scr1be' Xu was able to get a number of interviews at the venue, which will be published over the coming days. The following interviews are already out:
A Behind the Scene Interview with Overwatch Observer, Seenkay
Interview with Rogue CEO Frank: "I think a lot of the larger organizations missed the boat"
Tempo Storm's Reynad at BlizzCon: "[Overwatch] is arguably the greatest game released in a decade"
Furthermore, we present a summary of the Overwatch Q&A and the Cosplay contest.
For more competitive Overwatch news, follow us @GosuOverwatch.
