I
t’s not often that a multiplayer shooter decides
to reinvent itself six years into its life. In the age
of service games that never stop updating,
Blizzard is taking a chance by revamping large
parts of its competitive FPS and slapping a ‘2’
on the end of it. Overwatch 2 is not a sequel in the way
we understand them. What I’ve seen of the multiplayer
PvP beta so far feels more like an expansion.
Overwatch 2 will have more heroes, more maps and an
intriguing PvE story mode, but Blizzard is also taking
this opportunity to completely upend the meta it’s spent
six years building with one simple rule change –
Overwatch 2 is no longer a 6v6 game. One tank slot is
gone and it’s now 5v5.
Hearing lead hero designer Geoff Goodman explain
the change to a virtual room of press, I got the sense that
Blizzard wants Overwatch 2 to be a faster, more
immediately exciting competitive shooter.
“We had this big moment where we were gonna
make this other game, essentially, and so there’s really
no better time to try experimenting with really big
changes,” Goodman said. Goodman and the team
started by stripping back the entirety of Overwatch and
reconsidering its fundamentals. “What are the
engagement ranges? What are the team sizes, are we
happy with the way it is?” he said. “It was an exciting
time, in a way, because a lot of us were around back
when we started on [the first] Overwatch, and it was
kind of that atmosphere again. It’s like, ‘Well, man, if
everything’s up in the air, let’s treat this like anything
could go, whatever we can try.’”BACK 2 BASICS
The team didn’t start at 5v5. Early tests stayed within the
bounds of 6v6 and instead challenged the established
2-2-2 role format (two tanks, two DPS, two supports).
They tried out a 4-1-1 setup that included one tank, one
support and four DPS heroes. “That was maybe the worst
experiment we did,” Goodman said with a laugh. “You did
not want to be a healer in that composition.”
Eventually, though, the team started adding and
subtracting players from their experiments and hit on
something “really fun” with 5v5. Subtracting a tank, in
theory, solves a flow problem that Goodman and his team
had been thinking about for a long time. “One of the
complaints that we heard a lot and agreed with was that
Overwatch has the tendency to get bogged down with
these defensive abilities,” he said. “You know, you’re
playing against a double barrier comp like Orisa and
Reinhardt or something, and you’re just like, ‘I never even
get to shoot a player anymore.’”Role
Swap
Overwatch’s
format was very
different when it
launched in 2016.
At first, teams
could consist of
any combination
of heroes. You
could have
duplicate heroes
on a single team
for a little while.
A few years later,
Blizzard
switched to the
2-2-2 setup in
place now: two
tanks, two DPS,
and two
supports. With
one tank
removed in
Overwatch 2, it’s
now 1-2-2.BALANCING ACT
Blizzard hopes for big change by switching OVERWATCH from 6v6 to 5v
Read our further
hands-on impressions
from Tyler C on p24.PCG INVESTIGATESSpecial
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