Overwatch 2 Celebrating Pride Month Starting Today, Offers Free Player Cards and Icons to Players

The Overwatch 2 team at Blizzard announced they will celebrate Pride Month starting today, June 1, 2023, with visual changes in the maps Midtown and Watchpoint: Gibraltar, plus free player cards and icons for all players.

The map updates are mostly visual changes, like Midtown will feature some rainbow confetti and other modifications to express that the area just concluded a Pride parade event just recently. Watchpoint: Gibraltar is a bit more subtle as those who visit the barracks can see a small photo of Tracer and her partner Emily.

As for the free player icons and name cards, there’s a handful that will be given away to represent Bisexual, Gay, Generfuid, Intersex, Lesbian, and more. There’s also a spray for the photo with Tracer and her partner. You can see all of it on Blizzard’s post here.

In the same post, the Overwatch team shared why they are celebrating Pride Month in this manner: 

"For those wondering "why now": we love our characters and their lore, and in expanding the OW2 experience to include the upcoming PvE lore, we realized how much more we can do in exploring our character identities and relationships. With our first Overwatch 2 Pride event, we knew that we wanted to celebrate the diversity that makes the world worth fighting for. This is just the beginning of Pride in Overwatch 2."

In the world of Overwatch 2, the sexual identities of Heroes like Tracer, Soldier: 76, and Lifeweaver have been confirmed to be LGBT+ characters told through the game’s storytelling and lore bits, and now with a new short story comic released this month, it is also confirmed that Baptiste is bisexual and Pharah is a lesbian.

---