Baptiste’s Reunion Challenge Begins Today with New Overwatch Patch

As promised by game director Jeff Kaplan in yesterday’s Developer Update, changes to Overwatch were right around the corner. Today’s patch brought two major highlights in addition to small (but meaningful) Hero and game mode changes.

The outfit Baptiste is sporting in the short story What You Left Behind is indeed the new epic skin players can earn by completing Baptiste’s Reunion Challenge. The event starts today (June 18) and runs through July 1.

By winning matches and watching specific Twitch streams you can earn a new Baptiste-related player icon, sprays, and the ultimate prize of the “Combat Medic” skin.

The other highlight of today’s patch, and the feature that Jeff Kaplan was most excited about, is “Replays”– a new way to watch and learn from your previous matches. “Replays allows you to watch your ten most recent matches from any vantage point,” the patch notes describe.

Replays gives you a chance to “hone your strategies by slowing down or speeding up the game to see exactly how a critical moment played out, get a better view of the action from above, or even turn off the UI completely.” You can even make your games look like Overwatch League Matches by using the very same overlay icons.

Jeff Kaplan described the Hero changes contained in today’s patch as “minor”, but a few of them you’ll definitely notice (especially if you play the affected Heroes a lot). The patch notes are available here in their entirety, and a couple of the highlights include:

• D.Va: Reduced length of Defense Matrix from 15 meters to 10 meters.
• Orisa: Barrier can be deployed without interrupting reload.
• Torbjörn: Secondary Fire damage per pellet reduced from 12.5 to 10.5 (105 dmg total per shot).

A great way to make sense of today’s Hero updates is with a visual representation. User “itsjieyang” has created a helpful video detailing the changes with side-by-side comparisons. Also included in the video are the changes made to the Assault (or 2CP) game mode, where both the time awarded for capturing point A and respawn times have been reduced.