Fans unsure what to expect this year for Overwatch Lunar New Year

Overwatch’s Winter Wonderland event has just ended and fans are already discussing the game’s next event: Lunar New Year. 

For 2020, Lunar New Year will be the Year of the Rat. Players are already speculating new skins for Junkrat and Wrecking Ball, for obvious reasons. While these two heroes are safe bets for legendary skins, no information on the event have been revealed or leaked as of yet. 

2019’s Year of the Pig blessed Overwatch players with legendary skins for a handful of heroes, including Tracer, Orisa, Brigitte, Genji, and Torbjorn. While the new skins were plentiful last year, fans were not pleased. The first reason being that Roadhog was not given a skin, despite it being Year of the Pig.

But that wasn’t all. A minute-long YouTube video previewing the event was released, but all it seemed to have were skins and emotes. 

Fans were quick to take to the comments and ask where all the new events were, and to bemoan an event that seemed to contain only some new cosmetics.

Overwatch 2 to blame for lack of Overwatch content 

A lack of limited time game modes has been a consistent complaint over the past few years when it comes to Overwatch events. Last year, players were very vocal about the repetitiveness of the third annual Summer Games event. Outside of new skins, players didn’t see many changes to the game except for a few small tweaks to the arcade mode Lucio Ball. Recycling the same game for three years didn’t seem to sit well with the Overwatch community. 

After Overwatch 2 was revealed at BlizzCon last year, developer Jeff Kaplan admitted in a follow-up interview that it was difficult to provide as much content for Overwatch while developers also focused on creating the new title. 

In the past, Kaplan also blamed toxic players for the team’s lack of content updates, claiming in 2017 that a lot of resources and time was being spent “punishing people.” 

“The bad behavior is not just ruining the experience for one another but the bad behavior is actually making the game progress at a much slower rate,” Kaplan said.

Whatever the reason for Blizzard’s slowing in content development, fans are not expecting too many new gameplay features in the Lunar New Year this time around. In fact, many players are probably not expecting their favorite hero to get a new skin either after the Overwatch community realized that some heroes seemed to be getting special treatment during Winter Wonderland. And that may leave other heroes out in the cold.

No release date for Lunar New Year has been revealed, but late January is a realistic time frame based on past events. Chinese New Year falls on January 25.