Year of the Rooster Overwatch event is live and everyone is hyped

Blizzard, you have outdone yourself this time and we didn’t even know that was possible.

Overwatch‘s “Year of the Rooster” event, celebrating the Lunar New Year, is live and ready to be downloaded across every platform. As the event went live, Blizzard released this trailer for the event:

The trailer confirms that a whopping 13 new unlockable skins accompany this event, not to mention new sprays, emotes and highlight intros. According to Overwatch‘s official website, the event will last three weeks and feature “over 100 commemorative cosmetic items.”

The Overwatch community has wasted no time in finding and documenting each of the new skins. You can see stills of all of the skins here.

Another large part of the event is the new brawl mode, Capture the Rooster, which you can also glimpse in the trailer. Capture the Rooster will function largely as a capture-the-flag type game. To explain the nuances of Capture the Rooster, Overwatch released a developer update video where Jeff Kaplan explains how the brawl developed.

Kaplan reveals in the video that a capture-the-flag type game mode for Overwatch was in discussion even before the game was announced. However, developers had a tough time reconciling the mobility that comes innate with many of the Overwatch heroes and the objective of capture the flag. Kaplan says that capture-the-flag was abandoned because “what we didn’t want to do was add a bunch of rules that no longer made Overwatch heroes feel like Overwatch heroes.”

Kaplan then describes the process the team went through to get to the iteration of capture-the-flag as it is during this event. To make a long story short, the Overwatch team ended up allowing all heroes to function normally during Capture the Rooster. The only rules which have been added are that there is a pick-up time when attempting to secure the flag, which any damage will interrupt, and that your flag does not need to be at your own base before you attempt to capture the opposition’s flag.

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At the very least, this developer’s update shows us just how much consideration Blizzard and the Overwatch team gives to everything they push out to the players. Let’s take a moment to thank them for their continued amazing work on this game, and for how much they listen and respect the game’s community.

All right. Moment over. Time to grind those loot boxes.