The teased Overwatch anniversary event has descended onto Blizzard’s servers as promised. This update brings a whole selection of new skins (although sadly not every hero receives one), brand new emotes for all heroes including some hilarious dance emotes and a whole pile of common items that will remain in loot boxes after the anniversary event concludes. Also added were three brand new “arena maps” that will provide some much-needed variety to the elimination modes.
Here is a small sampling of some of my favorite new skins:
The following heroes received new time limited skins for the anniversary event:
- Pharah
- Soldier 76
- VA
- Tracer
- Mei
- Hanzo
- Zarya
- Bastion
- Genji
- Symmetra
- Lucio
Dance emotes have also been added for all 24 heroes and you can preview them all without logging into the game, just head over to the official Play Overwatch site to preview them.
If you’d rather hear about the update from the game’s director Jeff Kaplan, Blizzard released a nearly ten-minute developer update alongside the patch this morning. I can’t believe it has been a year since Overwatch was originally released. It was one of my most played titles last year and since I received the Mei Bee Keeper skin from my free loot box I’m free to grind boxes until I get that sweet Kaman Rider skin for Genji.
Overwatch Anniversary will become a seasonal event and the new dance emotes & three new elimination maps will remain available after the event ends on June 12th.