Capture the Rooster Leaving Overwatch

Sorry guys, Capture the Rooster isn’t here to stay

Recently, Overwatch introduced a new game mode, Capture the Rooster. Essentially, it’s capture the flag, but with a few twists on it to fit it into Overwatch. For example, there is a delay to keep players from picking up the flag right away. This is to prevent incidents like Sombra picking it up and then teleporting away. It has taken Blizzard a long time to introduce this mode into the game, years in fact. They’ve been going through a lot of ideas to get to where they are now, and it still isn’t perfect. Because of this, Capture the Rooster will be leaving Overwatch once the Chinese New Year event is over.

The main difficulty that Blizzard has been struggling with is that they want to balance Capture the Rooster, but still have it feel like Overwatch. One of their initial plans was to have those who picked up the flag be unable to use their abilities. The result was that the gameplay became stale and uninteresting as a result. No doubt it would also lead to a heavy reliance on tank heroes. Blizzard has stated that they simply don’t consider it to be something that should stay in circulation.

This does not, however, mean that they have completely abandoned the game mode. They have suggested that it could potentially make a comeback. If a good bit of work was put into it, Capture the Rooster could potentially become a permanent mode, according to Blizzard. It is something that they, however, are not considering at the moment. So if you want to play a few more rounds of capture the flag in Overwatch, you need to move fast. It’ll be around until February 13, and after that it’ll be out of the game for the foreseeable future.