"The mood all week" - After a year of Marvel Rivals taking its lunch, Blizzard is just happy you're playing Overwatch again

Overwatch is properly back in the limelight thanks to its biggest update ever, one that notably sacrificed the Overwatch 2 name to revive Overwatch and kicked off a multi-season narrative arc. With what I imagine is a huge sigh of relief, Blizzard Entertainment is now celebrating the game's resurgence after Marvel Rivals ate its lunch for over a year. (Literally, Winston's not had peanut butter in months.)

This week, Overwatch received a landmark five new heroes at the same time, with five more still to come sometime later in the year. All the hype led to Overwatch more than doubling its previous Steam peak, courting over 160,000 players at the same time.

Hero shooter fans were then very much Overwatch-coded. So, when the Marvel Rivals Twitter account decided to post about the game's Season 6.5 update, one fan cheekily told them to nip it in the bud. "Girl not rn. It's Overwatch week." Blizzard's own social media handle responded with a video of tank hero Ramattra's dance emote, which itself invokes rapper Kendrick Lamar's crip walk made famous amid his own slightly similar feud with Drake: "The mood all week."

Overwatch's humble brag comes after years of the hero shooter digging itself out of a hole that it actually dug itself into in the first place. A canceled PvE mode and controversial live service fluff definitely put a sour taste in the mouths of many a lapsed Overwatch player, and Marvel Rivals' aggressive first year certainly didn't help much, but it seems competition has only made both games better.

Personally speaking, the new heroes embody Overwatch's classic mix of chaos and elegance really nicely. Their movesets are clearly well-tuned and never overly complicated to use or fight against, but they're also all capable of causing a right big mess by, say, engaging in literal aerial catfights.

To Blizzard's credit, even when backlash did ignite against damage hero Anran's redesigned look, the company quickly yielded and promised that another rework would be coming sometime in Season 1.

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