Game director explains why Blizzard wants to limit opportunity to unlock seasonal items.
Overwatch’s game director Jeff Kaplan has appeared in a new developer video to explain the team’s thinking behind introducing limited-availability content such as that included with the Summer Games event.
Some in the community have expressed concern that individual items can’t be crafted with in-game Credits, which will likely leave them unable to complete their collection of cosmetic items. This is all working as intended, however, as Kaplan explains in the video which you can watch a little further down the page.
Here’s a quick summary of the contents if you’re pushed for time.
– The Summer Games event will come back again, likely next summer, allowing you to keep working towards unlocking more of the items you missed first time around.
– All Summer Games Loot Boxes are guaranteed to contain at least one Summer Games item – legendary skins, epic skins, highlight intros, cool new emotes, icons, voice lines and victory poses. You can get more than one of these seasonal items in any given box as well.
– The event will run for around three weeks and normal Loot Boxes won’t exist during that time. You’ll be able to purchase Summer Games Loot Boxes and unlock them through levelling during the event instead.
– The items should feel extra special and very rare. They don’t want everyone running around all the time in every item.
– Not all players will get all items, and he wants players to see these skins long down the road and get excited about the seasonal event coming around again so they can get a shot at unlocking them.
– It’s been confirmed that you won’t be able to buy the items individually for in-game Credits. This will make them feel extra special when you own one.
– The team would like feedback about this event so that they can apply it to making future seasonal content even better.
– The developers are currently focused on Season 2 of Competitive Play, but still continue to work on plenty of other content as well.
There you go! Let us know what you think about this sort of limited-offer event for Overwatch in the comments. Do you think it’s fair to “lock” content away like this, or do you think it’s worth the trade-off to ensure these items retain a sense of rarity and prestige? Are you going to go on a mad spending frenzy in the shop to bag as much of the content as you can before the window closes?
