Overwatch Halloween Terror 2017 event is under way | Patch notes, skins, loot boxes, and trailer

Things are getting spooky in Overwatch: the Halloween Terror update for Blizzard's fantastic multiplayer shooter is now live. It is bringing along a host of new skins, a new game mode, and lots more cosmetics to scare you over the next couple of weeks, running until 1 November. There's even a brand new trailer, showing off some of the skins from the event last year, plus new ones for the Overwatch Halloween Terror 2017 event. 

The new legendary skins are for Mei, Zenyatta, Symmetra, McCree, Reaper, Ana, Torbjorn, and Zarya. There are 50 new cosmetics overall, with last year's offerings also available in the Halloween loot boxes. There are portraits, voice lines, emotes, and more all up for grabs in the new loot boxes.

Junkenstein's Revenge, a co-op survival mode,  is returning from last year's event too, in both its regular form and a new endless mode. With more heroes available (originally just Ana, Hanzo, McCree, and Soldier: 76 were available), you'll get a loot box for playing and completing 12 waves. In this mode, you can play as Ana, Genji, Hanzo, McCree, Soldier: 76, Torbjorn, Widowmaker, or Zenyatta in a team of four, on the original Eichenwalde map.

If you missed out on last year's skins, you've got another chance to get them too. They are discounted from their typical 3x credit price down to typical prices, so if you didn't get skins like Junkenstein last year, they are cheaper this time around. Legendary skins, for example, were 3000 credits last year, and 1000 credits this year. New skins, like Symmetra's Dragon skin, remain at typical 3x prices, 3000 credits for a new legendary skin. 

So, what do those new legendary skins look like? We've put together a gallery of all 8, including their unique gun and weapon skins.

Overwatch Halloween Terror 2017 Legendary Skins Gallery

If patch notes and balance changes are more what you're looking for this patch, here's what the Halloween Terror Patch Notes look like:

General

• Ultimate charge is now immediately expended when a hero's ultimate ability is activated, instead of depleting over a short period of time

D.Va

• Boosters

• An option to manually hold down D.Va’s boosters rather than toggling them has been added under Options > Controls > D.Va

Genji

• Dragonblade

• No longer interrupted when Genji is stunned or hacked

Orisa

• Supercharger

• Can now be interrupted when Orisa is stunned or hacked

Sombra

• Hack

• Now interrupts the following ultimate abilities: Ana's Nano Boost, Orisa's Supercharger, Mei's Blizzard, Reinhardt's Earthshatter, and D.Va's Call Mech

Assault Maps

• When capturing an objective, the progress bar is now broken into three segments that will fill in with the team’s color that is capturing it (as each segment fills, it will trigger an animation and audio cue)

• The number of defenders currently on the objective will now be displayed in addition to the number of attackers, just below the progress bar

Overwatch Where to Buy

One change to loot boxes is that the victory poses from last year's Halloween Terror event will no longer appear in Halloween loot boxes, bar the Reaper variant. Full context for this change is on the Overwatch forums, but the developers felt they typically didn't match the involved characters' themes, and so they're now only available for purchase with credits.

Context for those updates, plus more on bug fixes and the like, are on the official patch notes. All of the Halloween cosmetic items can be viewed on the official site for the Overwatch Halloween Terror event. Also alongside this update is a brand new Winston skin, for those who buy the BlizzCon virtual ticket: more on BlizzCon 2017 Winston can be found on the BlizzCon site.