It’s that time of year once again, as a new developer log from Overwatch’s Jeff Kaplan just announced that the game’s annual Winter Wonderland event will be returning on December 12. As usual, the themed event will be host to a range of new skins, emotes, sprays, and even a special new way to play in the Arcade.
With last year’s introduction of Mei’s Snowball Offensive being labelled as a huge success, the popular mode will be making another appearance this Overwatch holiday event as players team up for a squad-based snowball fight. In addition to Ecopoint: Antarctica, Overwatch fans will have a new winter variant for the Black Forest map to fight it out on, which Game Director Jeff Kaplan states is “one of the most gorgeous jobs that our environmental artists have ever done.”
Knowing that fans will eagerly be awaiting the reveal of new holiday skins, Kaplan teased that characters such as Roadhog, Junkrat, and Hanzo will be among those getting legendary cosmetics this year. The Director put emphasis on the Hanzo skin in particular, claiming that the appearance has been featured in a past comic and is a long-awaited look for the bow-wielding hero.
In addition to Mei’s Snowball Offensive, a new Arcade event will be coming to the game that pits five Meis against one Yeti (Winston). In Mei’s Yeti Hunt, Overwatch fans can get their first look at an official boss fight mode where Winston must collect meat from all around the map without being defeated by the team of Mei hunters. Should he survive for long enough to gather all the meat, the Yeti can activate Primal Rage, at which point the Mei team learns what it feels like to be prey.
The new game variant sounds like it will be a lot of fun to play, and gamers can queue up for either team when entering the Arcade mode. In an effort to make the limited-time event more balanced for the slow moving Meis, the Chinese climatologists can make use of an exclusive new ability, placing down an ice trap for the unsuspecting Yeti to get stuck in.
As with last year’s Winter Wonderland event, the special holiday period will likely come to a conclusion on January 2, giving players around three weeks to earn all of the game’s new cosmetic items. After this point we will likely see the release of the upcoming Blizzard World map on the game’s live servers, as well as a range of new Overwatch League skins.
Overwatch is out now for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The Winter Wonderland event is set to begin December 12.
Source: PlayOverwatch – YouTube
