Overwatch has faced another round of criticism from the community recently, with players becoming increasingly fed up with the growing amount of region-exclusive content. Primarily, players have been upset that on numerous occasions, anticipated crossover collaborations, unique hero skin designs, and events have been locked to China specifically, leaving those around the world with no way to enjoy the crossover event and secure the skins for their favorite heroes.
Another wave of outrage has followed the recently revealed Chinese-exclusive event, ‘Defiled Anthem’, which features a series of gorgeous skins for Shion, Emre, Reaper, Kiriko, and D.Mon. Well, it’s far from the first time and probably far from the last, right? Eventually, this disappointment and frustration tends to fizzle out, but this time Overwatch fans are being kicked while they’re down – yet another Region-exclusive event has been revealed for Korea, this time featuring a new skin for Cassidy. Let’s take a look at this whole situation.
Korea Gets New Region-Exclusive Event & Cassidy Skin in Overwatch
Just when Overwatch fans were feeling fed up with region-exclusive cosmetics and events following the reveal of the Defiled Anthem event, yet another exclusive event has been uncovered. Trusted Overwatch news and leaks source, OWCavalry, took to socials to show off the new ‘The Tiger Descends’ event and some of the rewards involved below. This event is exclusive to Korea and features a unique “창귀 내금위” skin for Cassidy.
According to OWCavalry, Korean players will be able to earn this skin as well as themed goodies including a Player Title, icon, sprays, and Loot Boxes. But all it takes is one look at the comments, and it’s clear the worldwide Overwatch community has a bone to pick – both with developers for producing yet another region-locked event, and even with the page itself for sharing the news with an international audience, getting their hopes up time and time again.
There’s something rather interesting happening at the moment with these region exclusives. At the core of the issue, this isn’t even a case of players being unhappy that region exclusives exist. After all, they are a thing that happens from time to time in most games.
Where Overwatch is losing support is the fact that there seems to be more frequent in-game events for specific regions or countries than there is for the worldwide player population. That, and the undeniable fact that there appears to be a stellar quality difference between your average worldwide Overwatch Battle Pass and shop skin compared to the cosmetics tied to these region-exclusive opportunities.
And that’s ultimately what makes The Tiger Descends, Defiled Anthem, and all of the other exclusives so frustrating. The Cassidy skin isn’t even something I’d go out of my way to seek out, and yet even I feel a strange recurring disappointment here. The problem is that, for the vast majority of the game’s community, they’ll only be able to look at things the outside. For a live-service game where there’s never a thing such as ‘too much content’, the majority of the playerbase is growing tired of feeling like an afterthought.
Nobody is asking Blizzard to stop making content for individual regions. Players simply want that same level of creativity and effort to make its way into the worldwide game, too. With another exclusive event arriving while the community is already frustrated over Defiled Anthem, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss these complaints as another temporary bout of outrage. Things have changed big time, haven’t they? We don’t even get free-to-earn skins in most crossover collaboration events anymore – we’re just lucky if we get a couple of spray freebies these days. And that’s if all of us around the world are even looped into the event at all.
At some point, players are going to stop asking why they can’t have these skins and start asking why Blizzard isn’t making more skins and events of equal quality for everyone.
And c’mon, we know there’s people out there willing and waiting to spend, too. Remember when the revenue from a handful of quality Kiriko skins singlehandedly saved the game from bleeding out? Well… if things keep going the way they are now, let’s just say I hope there’s a second round of Kiriko skins stored away like the hero cosmetics version of a rainy day fund.
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