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The ongoing and huge success that is Overwatch is to receive a Game of the Year Edition to celebrate its first anniversary.
It will be released on consoles and PC on May 23rd and includes 10 bonus Loot Boxes, some original Hero skins (Heroes of the Storm Tracer, World of Warcraft Baby Winston Pet and Diablo III Mercy’s Wings) as well as a Hearthstone card back. The game’s Origins Edition skins will also be included.
Overwatch will also be free to play for everyone on the weekend of May 26th to May 29th.
May 23rd will also see the in-game Anniversary event kicking off, which will run until June 12th.
In other Overwatch news, director Jeff Kaplan has explained to Polygon why the company chose to ditch the planned Overwatch graphic novel, First Strike, which was scrapped very shortly before its planned digital release.
The art was beautiful and the writing was excellent and it was a really hard decision for us,” he said. The reason had less to do with the specific content in that novel and more to do with the way that it would have limited us. It was a very specific, contained story.
We sort of saw Overwatch really open up to the world, and listening to players and the stories they were telling and what they imagined the Omnic crisis to be really made us second guess what we were doing in First Strike. We thought, ‘Hey, if we go down this path, it really closes all these doors.’
Part of the magic is that everything is not tied off and explained to players. There’s a lot going on in Overwatch right now where I think that the story in players’ heads is often even cooler than what we can deliver to them.”
First Strike was to tell the origin story of the game’s original strike team, set amid the Omnic Crisis. It’s a plot point that has been touched on several times via the game’s many animated shorts and more recently its co-op Uprising mode.
