Wouldn’t it be cool to play Overwatch’s Uprising event or Lucioball in custom matches some day? The team at Blizzard thinks so, and it’s something they’ve looked into before.
On the game’s forums, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan replied to a thread asking for old seasonal events such as Lucioball and Junkenstein’s Revenge to be available full-time.
“For Uprising, we had two stretch goals,” said Kaplan. “One was to allow ‘All Heroes’ to play the event. It might not seem hard but there were a lot of edge case/bug fixes for us to handle. The other goal was to put Uprising into Custom Game during the event. There were enough challenges technically with doing this that we ended up not achieving this goal.”
Uprising features Overwatch’s second PvE event and is easily the best seasonal activity the team has released yet. The Summer Games event featured the soccer-like Lucioball, Halloween Terror featured the first PvE activity in Junkenstein’s Revenge, Winter Wonderland had Mei’s Snowball Offensive, and the Year of the Rooster brought the Capture the Flag game mode. Capture the Flag actually remains a playable game mode in the Arcade.
“We might someday make Seasonal Events available when the events are not running, but for now, it’s not a priority due to the technical challenge,” he said. “We also do like keeping the events rare and special.”
Hold out hope. It might not be soon, but we may be able to warm up for competitive play by killing some omnics on King’s Row some day down the line.
