Overwatch Is Bringing Back Summer Games

Last year during the Olympics, which took place in Rio de Janeiro, Blizzard introduced the Overwatch Summer Games. The event featured fun-time, Olympic-inspired events and skins within the first-person shooter, and was quite popular. Well, Blizzard is bringing the event back this month, exclusively for Overwatch players.

The company sent out a press release detailing that things will get underway in the colorful hero-shooter starting next week, on Tuesday, August 8th. The Summer Games will run throughout the entire month and will conclude on August 29th.

The event will include an all new Lucioball map, and the return of the 2016 Summer Games skins for some of the characters. In addition to that, Blizzard will also make available some brand new Summer Games skins for the Overwatch cast.

In a developer video featuring game director Jeff Kaplan, he reveals that after taking feedback from the gaming community, Blizzard decided to make it where the Summer Games skins could be unlocked via the credit system. Both the old skins from 2016 and the new skins from 2017 will be unlockable via the credit system.

The press release indicates that skin unlocks from 2016 will be available at a reduced cost compared to the 2017 skins, so Legendary skins from 2017 will run you 3,000 credits while Legendary skins from 2016 will only cost you 1,000 credits. Skins from 2017 will be as cheap as 75 credits, while skins from 2016 will be as cheap as 25 credits.

Kaplan also revealed that Junkrat will be on the receiving end of a new Legendary skin. Mercy, Widowmaker and McCree will also be on the receiving end of some new skins as well.

The Lucioball event that Blizzard introduced into Overwatch last year will make a return, and the event will cycle between two different stadiums in Sydney and Rio. The developers also tweaked some of Lucio's abilities, so that you can no longer "boop" enemies while on the field and Lucio's ultimate ability no longer pulls the ball toward the player but his overall speed has been increased while the ultimate is active.

There's also going to be ranked Lucioball play, so that those who want to get competitive and actually move up in the ranks for their achievements and wins, will be able to do so with the new competitive mode.

Blizzard has been rolling out various events for the hero-shooter over the course of the year, so this is no real big surprise. The studio just came off the hot public release of the highly talked about Doomfist. It's crazy, but it's almost been a year since the hype surrounding that character actually took off. A lot of that hype was thanks to actor Terry Crews getting involved, as he lobbied, for a time, to play the role, but there was another actor that Blizzard had their sights on when putting together the character and the content. No worries, though, Crews will still make an appearance in Crackdown 3 later this year.

In the more immediate future, you can participate in the Overwatch 2017 Summer Games starting next week, on August 8th.