Overwatch gets in the holiday spirit with festive Winter Wonderland event

Overwatch's latest seasonal event, Winter Wonderland, has begun, introducing holiday-themed loot boxes filled with new character skins, victory poses, profile icons, sprays, highlight intros and more.

The event runs from 13 December to 2 January and brings in over 100 new cosmetic items that players can unlock through the winter loot boxes that can be earned in-game or purchased with real money.

"Once you've unlocked an item, it will be yours forever, which means you can get into holly jolly hijinks all year-round," Blizzard wrote in a blog post.

The holiday-themed event also brings a new brawl to Overwatch dubbed "Mei's Snowball Offensive" — a 6v6, single-elimination where everyone is Mei but with a "few new tricks up her fur-lined sleeve."

"In this brawl, Mei's Endothermic Blaster no longer unleashes a stream of frost or shoots icicles," the developer explains. "Instead, it's been modified to fire a single, super-powered snowball. Taking down an enemy only takes one hit, but a miss can be costly.

"Once your weapon is empty, your enemies will have the advance as you search for the nearest snow pile to reload, so don't forget to cover your retreat with ice walls and cryo-freeze to block their attacks — and when the battle starts to heat up, you can activate Mei's Ultimate, which turns her blaster into a semi-automatic snowball launcher, allowing you to fire continuously as your enemies scatter."

The latest update also includes a series of hero balance updates and cosmetic changes to the hero-based shooter as well. The update has added a "Stay as Team" feature that allows players to stay grouped with their teammates after a match has ended.

The developer has included a new "Boop" unlockable voice line for the recently unveiled hacker hero Sombra in the new patch in addition to a few new abilities for Symmetra including a Photon Barrier and a Shield Generator. The patch includes a few bug fixes as well.

Overwatch is currently available for PS4, Xbox One and PC.