Overwatch Summer Games 2018 Live With New Skins, Update

After being announced last week, Overwatch’s annual limited-time Summer Games event is now live. It features the return of Lucioball, which has a new venue in the Busan Stadium, South Korea as previously revealed, in addition to the existing ones in Sydney, Australia and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The more competitive Copa Lucioball is back for its second season as well.

Beyond that, there are over 50 new “seasonal items” to unlock, including new ‘legendary’ skins such as Waveracer D.Va, Fastball Zenyatta, and Cabana Ana. A game patch has been released alongside, which brings skin name changes, changes to hero abilities including those of Ana, Brigitte, Doomfist, Hanzo, Lucio, Mercy, Moira, Reinhardt, Sombra, Symmetra, Widowmaker, and Zarya, and several bug fixes.

In a post attached with the patch announcement, character artist supervisor John Gotch detailed their work on creating the skins:

“It starts with our concept artists sharing their ideas early, which helps hype us up as we start to think of all of the possibilities and details we can add to the models and textures for the final skins, such as making the propellers on the back of D.Va’s Waverunner mech spin faster when she uses her Boosters ability.”

“The 3D artists then choose which skins they want to create and are encouraged to voice their opinions and ideas during the development process so we can help them turn their vision into a reality. Once they have collaborated with us on the digital sculpture and the final in-game model, we then finalise the skins and give them an extra coat of polish in-house with our rigging and skinning, visual effects, audio, and quality assurance testing teams to make sure that they work in-game.”

Overwatch’s 2018 Summer Games event will run until August 30.

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