As you might have heard, Blizzard recently introduced new Loot Boxes to Overwatch in the form of the Summer Games, which are basically cosmetic items for the game that are based around the 2016 Rio Olympics. However it seems that there is a bit of controversy to these Loot Boxes which has prompted the game’s director Jeff Kaplan to respond (via Kotaku).For those unfamiliar with these Loot Boxes, basically they’re boxes that contain random items. The boxes can be bought using real money, but like we said, the contents are random meaning that you could spend a lot of money and not necessarily get the item that you want. Add that to the limited nature of the Summer Games (which will run until the 22nd of August), and you’ve got yourself an angry mob.
According to Kaplan, “The event has a ton of *ABSOLUTELY FREE* content available to all players for *FREE*. The idea is play the game and get free, cool, rare stuff for the next 3 weeks. Yes, you can buy loot boxes but you also earn them for free… just by playing. There is a ton of content here that literally no one knew existed until it went live.”
He also says that this is the first time they’re introducing such an event to Overwatch, so as expected there will be things that work and things that don’t. “We wanted to try something new with this event. As we mentioned in the Developer Update, we’re learning and experimenting with this event.”
Like we said in our previous report, the Loot Boxes can be bought using real money, or players can earn them by playing the game, which we guess would be slower but if you’d rather not spend real money, it is an alternative, but what do you guys think? Should Blizzard have made the Summer Games Loot Box contents more of a certainty given its limited time nature?