Horizon Lunar Colony assault map is coming to Overwatch

Cal Jeffrey

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Blizzard just had a “play-for-free” event for Overwatch during the Memorial Day weekend to help celebrate the game’s first year online. To keep the party rolling the company has announced the latest major upgrade to the MOBA. The star of the update is a new assault map located at the Horizon Lunar Colony on the Moon.

The information came out yesterday in the form of a blog post on the Overwatch website teasing “new details” regarding the lost Horizon Lunar Colony. The remainder of the post consisted of screenshots of messages sent back and forth between HLC personnel including Winston. Lucheng Interstellar, the Chinese space exploration company, had grabbed those images from a data dump transmitted just before the base went offline.

Horizon Lunar Colony is the former home of the player character Winston. In the game’s lore, Winston, a gorilla, was a product of genetic experimentation on the Moon. Scientists and gorillas populated the colony before the apes revolted and killed all the humans. Winston fled to Earth to become a member of Overwatch and all contact with the Horizon colony was lost.

One of the messages also mentioned that a test subject named Hammond was missing from his cage. Hammond, and the fact that he is missing, could be a hint that a new player character is in the works, but we will just have to wait and see since there is no word on a new hero in the update, just the map.

Players can probably expect to find evidence of the battles as they explore the new map. Overwatch does not have a story mode so lore, such as Winston’s history, is told through descriptions and the environments themselves or through blog posts like the one previously mentioned. Periodically, lore is introduced through animated short films and comics uploaded to the PlayOverwatch website. The latest short, called “Recall,” was revealed in March. It featured Winston and was seemingly made in anticipation of the Horizon Lunar Colony update.

The update is currently playable on the public testing servers for PC. There is no word on a specific rollout, but it should be available on consoles and regular PC servers very soon. If you have not played Overwatch yet, check out our review to see if it might be for you.

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I was playing on this map and trying out the new Low Gravity game mode on the PTR last night. Both are really fun IMO. Look for Winston's room!
 
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