[Update #2]: Overwatch's annual Winter Wonderland event has now been announced alongside the second part of the comic!

[Update]: Overwatch has released some ridiculously over-the-top Experimental balance changes alongside the late November update.

Due to the various sexual harassment accusations, and Blizzard's new policy to remove any and all references to employees from their games, Overwatch's Jesse McCree was recently renamed to Cole Cassidy. This name change would've been the perfect time to also add some more lore for Overwatch's best gunslinger, but unfortunately the update was about as barebones as it gets.

With Overwatch 2 (and Diablo 4) getting delayed yet again, I fully expected we'd have to wait for quite a while before we found out anything about Cassidy and his troubled past. Well, I'm happy to say that I was completely wrong with that assumption, because Blizzard has now suddenly released the first of five short comics detailing Cassidy's past, as well as an accompanying in-game collection event.

You can read the "New Blood" comic over at the Overwatch website, and if you're a fan of the lore, I'd highly recommend you do so. Even though this is only its first issue, it's already looking far more interesting than the previous Tracer-focused one!

As for the in-game event, I'm afraid this one is a bit disappointing as the rewards are just a bunch of sprays, a player icon, and a rather mediocre Epic quality skin. In order to collect all of the new rewards you'll need to gain 27 points by playing any of the official game modes. Losing a match will reward you one point while winning will grant you two, so regardless of how skilled (or lucky) you are you should still be able to complete the reward track before it all goes away on November 23rd.

Once the next big Overwatch update goes live I'll make sure to let you know. Until then, you can check out some of the rewards for the New Blood event over at the announcement blog post.