Overwatch officially kicked off its Season 1 comeback

Overwatch It recently saw its highest player count in over a year ahead of its big rebrand. Blizzard's hero shooter has been through its fair share of ups and downs over the past few years, but it seems to be breaking through some of the recent negativity with its latest pivot. Enough of the breaking news Overwatch Fans drive back to the game.

Blizzard shocked the fanbase when it was announced Overwatch 2 It was dropping the “2” from its name and will reset its approach to seasonal content. Perhaps more excitingly, the devs also confirmed that the first new season will bring 10 new heroes to the game, with five available on day one. The company is going all out to resurrect the franchise to its former glory, and just a week after the big announcement, that effort is already showing some impressive results.

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Overwatch has its biggest weekend player count in over a year

On the morning of February 10, the same day OverwatchDebuting Season 1, the game's official Twitter account shared that it recently wrapped up its biggest weekend in terms of player count in over a year. This is after the news OverwatchSteam player count increased by 63% following the news of its rebrand. This was enough to push ahead big competitors like Nayak Shooter Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7And Steam isn't even the game's most popular platform. Now it seems that the same trend is happening on consoles and Battle.net, with player counts increasing on all platforms. Blizzard didn't offer any specifics on what these totals are, but breaking a year-plus-long record before multiple new updates came out is an impressive feat by any metric.

Who is that character?

Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.

Who is that character?

Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.

Easy (7.5 seconds) Medium (5.0 seconds) Hard (2.5 seconds) Permadeath (2.5 seconds)

While Season 1 didn't fully begin until after the weekend, Blizzard gave fans a chance to play as Unran. That trial run likely played a role in getting people back into the game, but it could also be that players who hadn't touched the title in a while wanted to reacquaint themselves before the start of the new season. However, now there are five new ones Overwatch Heroes play on the road and in addition throughout the year, so the recent bump in activity may continue. Only time will tell how big the revival will be, but fans seemed very excited about the lead up to Season 1.

While this increase in player count is certainly welcome news for Blizzard, not everything has gone the way the devs would have liked recently. After announcing the refresh and new season, the company was hit with a wave of backlash for seeing Unran's character design as significantly different from previous iterations. The reaction grew so strong that OverwatchThe game director announced the redesign before the end of Anran's Hero Trials. It remains to be seen how this quick reaction will land among fans, as it's uncertain how popular the new heroes will be, but the controversy stands as a small caveat to an otherwise big weekend for the game.

Character design controversy aside, Overwatchcomes as a much needed breath of fresh air for the latest optic game. Overwatch 2023 became the platform's lowest rated game of all time. Since then, things have gotten even more muddled, with the game sitting at a “mostly negative” Steam rating at the time of writing, though recent reviews have been mixed. For now, the new heroes and seasonal structure seem to be a hit, or at least players seem to like the concept, so this could be a turning point for the shooter.