Overwatch Winter Event Starts This Week With New Update

Blizzard has announced a clarification for Overwatch's upcoming Patch 1.43. There's been speculation that the patch would release last week, but Blizzard has confirmed that it is, in fact, scheduled to launch this week. It'll arrive alongside the Winter Wonderland event that debuts on December 10 and brings with it new skins.

"We've been seeing quite a bit of misinformation being spread about our December patch (1.43)," Overwatch head Jeff Kaplan wrote in a blog post. "The patch is scheduled to go live next week. Short of some unforeseen circumstance causing a delay, we're expecting to go live with the patch next week."

Patch 1.43 will launch alongside Winter Wonderland, Overwatch's annual winter holiday-themed limited-time event. "I'm guessing everyone is as excited as we are for the changes to go live as soon as possible along with Winter Wonderland," Kaplan said.

Kaplan has admitted that players should come to expect fewer content updates for Overwatch as development on Overwatch 2 gets into full swing. Overwatch won't have any new Archive events, for example.

Overwatch is getting somewhat of a unique sequel in Overwatch 2, as a majority of the content included in the new game (at least at launch) will also release in the original Overwatch. The two games will get the same new characters and maps and both games will feature multiplayer cross-play with each other. The content exclusive to Overwatch 2 will be all of the new Story Mode content--which doesn't look like much at first but could possibly grow to a much more significant difference over time.

Currently, the only new playable character scheduled for Overwatch 2 is Sojourn, who's been hinted at in the original game's lore for quite a while now. Though they haven't been confirmed, four additional characters have already been teased.