5. CAPTURE THE ROOSTER
This 6v6 capture the flag brawl accompanied the Year of the Rooster event from Jan 24 to Feb 15.
In celebration of the Lunar New Year, control map Lijiang Tower was redecorated around the year of the Rooster in 2017. The brawl had players attempt to capture an enemy team flag by standing on a point, and bring it back to their side of the map without dying on the way. The brawl has since become a permanent feature, with capture the flag still available for play through Overwatch’s arcade modes.
This brawl exposed a scenario where Overwatch’s extremely varied cast of characters came as a detriment to the gameplay. Since a huge part of capture the flag was actually defending your own flag, this caused players to auto-lock highly defensive characters like Symmetra, Bastion, and Torbjorn in order to fortify their side of the map to prevent the enemy team from even getting a glance of their flag.
Pushing with offensive characters, or sneaking in with a Sombra, Tracer, or Lucio is extremely difficult and frustrating to try and pull off. A majority of the time the brawl boils down to two teams focusing solely on a solid defense and then never really attempting to go after the enemy’s flag. Actually getting the flag requires at least half of the team to push forward and either wipe the enemy team or kill off those in their defensive zones, which is hard to pull off if you have three to four decisive characters on your own team.
When both teams didn’t focus so hard on setting up a fortress of turrets, the mode was actually very fun. Chasing after an enemy who captured your flag or in turn running away as fast as you can back to your base came with a huge adrenaline rush, but unfortunately that didn’t happen as often as it should while playing this brawl.
Perhaps it could have been improved upon if only certain characters were allowed to be chosen, or instead of two flags for the separate teams there was one flag in the center that caused everyone to clash head-to-head to grab it and head back to base.
In all, Capture the Rooster had its moments of fun, but overly defensive strategies caused frequent draws and gameplay that usually consisted of either camping the enemy team or attempting to push with one or two others only to never even get close to the enemy flag. You can still try out the capture the flag mode in the arcade, and tweak the options as you wish in your own custom game to make it entirely your own.
