Antarctic Peninsula is a new Control map for Overwatch 2 coming in season 3, which launches Feb. 7. The new OW2 map will include some Mei history and Overwatch Easter eggs.
Overwatch 2 season 3 kicks off Feb. 7, and will introduce an all-new map to Blizzard’s hero shooter: Antarctic Peninsula. The map should feel both new and familiar to Overwatch players; they’ve been fighting in a slice of that icy continent since 2016, when Blizzard added the Ecopoint: Antarctica arena map to the original Overwatch.
Antarctic Peninsula will expand on that tiny map, and on the game’s lore, by giving players a new battleground that offers hints about Mei’s past in the region, the fate of her former co-workers, and hints of things “even more exciting about the story to come” in Overwatch 2, Blizzard says.
Antarctic Peninsula is a Control-type map, the first new map of that type for Overwatch 2 and the first built expressly with the game’s 5v5 team structure in mind. Like other Control maps (e.g. Busan, Ilios, Nepal), Antarctic Peninsula is spread across three locations. There’s the lab, where Mei and her former team worked; an icebreaker ship, which was sent by the original Overwatch team to rescue Mei and her colleagues, but got stuck in the ice; and an underground tunnel system where the centerpiece is a massive drill that has bored a network of tunnels through the ice.
As players battle in and explore the lab area of Antarctic Peninsula, they’ll get to see what Mei and her colleagues were up to before most of them met a terrible fate. Players will also experience new levels of verticality and new control point layouts, both on the icebreaker and in the sub-level map components, according to Overwatch art director Dion Rogers.
“It’s just super rad to fight inside an abandoned ship as large as an icebreaker,” Rogers said in a group interview this week.
