Loyalty is a funny thing. Sometimes it’s earned, sometimes it’s bought, and sometimes it’s won over by cute kitty cats in jetpacks. The latter was on full display this week as Overwatch fans reversed momentum in the game’s latest event to unlock new skins in the latest event.
Overwatch’s current season has players siding with either titular peace-keeping group or the terrorist organization Talon over the course of the next six weeks. At first, Talon was pulling off a decisive victory against Overwatch, with fans defecting to the villainous group for laughs and lootboxes. Now that the second week is upon us, the rewards have refreshed, and players have been given the option to switch sides to win different prizes. Well, a lot of people did, and have sold out Talon for Overwatch so they can get a bunch of cute Jetpack Cat cosmetics.
Overwatch is currently winning out on the faction war with a pretty significant lead of 59.42 percent of players siding with Winston, Sojourn, and the rest of the good guys, while Vendetta’s new reign as Talon is only drawing 40.58 percent of the vote. I’m not judging these fickle allegiances too hard. Ideologies are ever changing and contain multitudes. What we believe in one week of February 2026 might be completely different the following week.
But you know what is forever? A profile picture of Jetpack Cat. This week’s rewards include two profile pictures, a voice line, and a profile banner all with the prettiest girl at Watchpoint: Gibraltar. It looks like that was enough to get people to stop doing terrorism on behalf of their Italian mommy.
This all comes alongside the latest Overwatch lore drop, which includes an audio drama of Brigitte recalling meeting Fika, the cat that would one day don a jetpack, and exploring design ideas to get her feline companion off the ground and in the air. Overwatch is restructuring its seasons to integrate narrative more heavily, and this week it looks like the story content we’re getting corresponds to the rewards players are getting. So if future seasons keep this Splatfest-esque battle going, we’ll probably get used to seeing people hopping back and forth between both sides to unlock cosmetics.
Will we get another lore drop next week as the rewards refresh? It’s unclear at the moment, as this is the first season Overwatch has been using the story-driven format to drive in-game events. The in-game Story menu has two locked story drops left for this season, which is running until April, so we likely won’t get new lore on a weekly basis. Whatever we do get, however, will factor into Overwatch’s remaining seasons in 2026.
