Have your Overwatch loot boxes been feeling a bit stale lately? If you've been playing since launch (like me) you may be discouraged by the rarity of legendary items and the frequency of duplicate drops. Blizzard has plans to address all that and more, starting off with a time-honored favorite: free stuff via an external partnership. Here's all the good loot box news coming to Overwatch right now or in the weeks ahead.
Free golden loot boxes with Twitch Prime
If you have Amazon Prime, you have a free extra-special loot box waiting to be redeemed. What's a golden loot box? It's like a regular loot box (with no event-exclusive stuff) but at least one of the items is guaranteed to be legendary in quality - AKA one of the extra special skins that adds an all-new look to its hero. Just visit this page and log in with your Amazon-linked Twitch account to grab your code
Don't have Amazon Prime? One of your friends might, and they can still follow the steps above and just give you the code (assuming they don't want it for themselves). Don't bother trying to apply multiple Twitch Prime loot box codes to a single Overwatch account, though, it's a one-time-only deal; yes, of course I tried. All's fair in love and loot boxes. Speaking of which, Overwatch players with Twitch Prime will be eligible for a free shipment of five standard loot boxes in August and another five in October.
Loot boxes will soon have fewer duplicates
Listen, I know there are worse emotional rollercoasters than getting all excited when you see a gold item fly out of a loot box and then it turns out to be that one goddamn Torbjorn skin for the fourth time. But how many of those rollercoasters also occur on a nightly basis? Blizzard is finally doing something about that by "drastically" reducing the number of duplicates you'll receive, game director Jeff Kaplan confirmed in a recent video. This simple change should help your rewards for leveling up and/or microtransactions actually feel rewarding again. The dupe-reduced system is live on the PC public test realm now if you want to give it a try.
… and duplicates will be worth more credits
If duplicates are so much more rare, how are you ever going to earn enough credits to buy the items that the random number generator never sees fit to grant you? Easy: individual dupes will be far more lucrative. Kaplan explained that "your credit intake will be at least the same, if not more, when all of this is done". Nice.
Catch up with this week's Overwatch news (including the brand new Horizon Lunar Colony map), or if you aren't playing yet, find out which Overwatch hero is right for you.
