When I said Overwatch should just revert to a backup from 2019 already, I did not mean I wanted loot boxes on the battle pass.

With the return of 6v6 and Overwatch Classic in the Arcade featuring old metas — not to mention the removal of any hope that we’d ever see a true PVE mode as touted as the flagship feature of the sequel — we jokingly said around the office a few times that Blizzard should just go back to Overwatch already. Restore an old backup, we said. Monkey meta or GOATS, we laughed. And as we laughed, a finger on our monkey’s paw curled, because one feature of Old Overwatch is returning to Overwatch 2 in season 15: loot boxes.

No, I am not screwing with you.

Loot boxes are back in season 15.

The details at this point are sketchy, but the Overwatch Showcase let us know that these new/old loot boxes will be awarded for hitting certain account benchmarks, as well as being featured on the Battle Pass. But don’t fret — the old loot box, mostly a single-finger salute of sprays and voice lines, is solely on the free track of the Battle Pass. They do say that they’ll be listing what’s in the loot boxes to some degree so you “know what you’ll be getting,” but we’d like to remind you that doing so is required by law in many jurisdictions, and the legal crackdown on this particular monetization scheme may be a factor in why they were removed in the first place.

We’re not fans of the Battle Pass in general, so bringing a slightly less demoralizing old version of Overwatch‘s monetization back, only to place it back on the Battle Pass we’re already not jazzed about really twists the knife.