Love or hate the the Capture The Rooster mode in Overwatch‘s Lunar New Year celebrations, there’s simply no denying its popularity.
While playing the mode dictates a certain type of hero — and it’s not without its issues — turns out Overwatch fans are loving it.
Capture The Rooster is the most popular mode ever in Overwatch‘s Arcade section, even topping fan-favourites such as 3v3 elimination and Junkenstein’s Revenge from the Halloween seasonal event.
Game director, Jeff Kaplan, reached out to fans on the Battle.net forums in response to queries about the “Most Played” label being removed from the game’s menu.
“Currently, the most played mode is Capture the Rooster,” Kaplan said. “Capture the Rooster is also the highest volume Arcade mode we’ve ever had. Other popular modes were 3v3 Elimination and Winter Mystery Heroes.”
The success of the mode must be a surprise to Blizzard, especially considering Kaplan’s own skepticism about the mode’s appeal to the core Overwatch experience.
Upon the launch of the Year Of The Rooster event, Kaplan said that the mode was added to help “blow off steam”, and while there is a small likelihood of Capture The Flag being added as a permanent game mode, Blizzard isn’t even “remotely thinking about adding it”.
He explained that that reason for this is due to the diverse nature of the hero roster, and that they had actually been testing out the mode for a while, before development on the full game even began.
“Over the years, when we were iterating and testing various versions of capture the flag, we actually gave up on the mode for awhile,” Kaplan said. “We felt like what we didn’t want to do was add a bunch of rules that no longer made Overwatch heroes feel like Overwatch heroes.”
He explained that the rapid-fire movement of certain heroes made the mode untenable in the long term.
A quick bash through the mode as it’s live now shows that this is still a problem: a competent Tracer main can completely blitz the field.
If you do happen to jump in and give the mode a go — and you should at the very least give it a shot — then the recommended heroes to use are Symmetra, Winston, Torbjorn, Pharah, Tracer, and Lucio.
If you want to stock up on those awesome Lunar New Year skins and sprays, best you play Capture The Rooster to land some lucrative themed loot boxes.
If you do happen to jump into the mode and check it out, be sure to play as one of these six heroes so as to get the absolute best out of the mode, and ensure you help your team out in the best possible way.
The mode will be active in Year Of The Rooster for the duration of the event, lasting until February 13.
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