Capture the Flag mode appears to have gone out of fashion in modern shooters and Overwatch is no exception. Fear not, it’s been added for the Chinese New Year event called Year of the Rooster.
The new patch 1.7 has been kicked live this evening, and to coincide with that, Jeff Kaplan is back specifically talking about capture the flag. Blizzard has steered clear of adding CTF to Overwatch due to the complexities of making it work with all the different heroes and abilities.
Blizzard had started working on CTF before the game launched but struggled with creating game modes with two objectives. Heroes were an issue when testing this due to speedy characters such as Tracer. This time they approached the mode differently by changing some abilities to drop the flag when these abilities were activated. This idea didn’t work so they reversed that and put the character abilities back.
To get around the hero issues, they added a pick-up timer when grabbing the flag which can be interrupted when damage is taken. They have also made is so that your flag does not need to be at the base when you capture the enemy flag which makes quite a difference to the overall  concept of CTF.
The Year of the Rooster update is live now and it’s worth taking the new CTF mode for a spin. The mode can be found in the Arcade and will not be part of the normal rotation. However, Jeff says that maybe one day it could be added.
Published: Jan 25, 2017 12:29 am