While the team at Blizzard have detailed a lot of the added PvE elements that Overwatch 2 will bring to the table, they’ve been relatively quiet about the PvP side of the game. A new lengthy PvP-focused live stream brought to light a lot of new elements that Blizzard is working on for the competitive aspects of Overwatch 2. The biggest of these changes is a reduction in team composition, going from the current 6v6 down to 5v5. They also showed off a new New York map, and detailed some of the other changes and design thoughts that are dictating their dev process.
The change to 5v5 comes in an effort to reduce some of the sheer chaos and increase the ability to communicate information during a match. The new composition will focus on two DPS roles, two support players, and just one tank. Along with this change is a ton of changes to tanks to make them more aggressive overall, and give them additional options to weave between playing that tank role and dealing damage.
The Overwatch 2 team composition change was revealed by game director Aaron Keller, who stepped into the role recently following former director Jeff Kaplan leaving Blizzard. His goal is to make the PvP in the game as “compelling” as it can possibly be. There are a number of changes coming to specific roles, like a movement speed buff for DPS characters, intrinsic healing for support, and less knockback the larger your character is. There are also character specific changes on the way, including Mei’s blaster no longer freezing enemies; it now just slows them down and does more damage.
Additionally, the team also discussed the new character visuals, and when asked about the ability for additional customization for characters skins, they could only nervously laugh and say that it wasn’t something they were able to talk about yet. “An amazing question, but you’ll have to wait and see,” Art Director Dion Rogers said. “We have a lot of fun stuff in store.”
This is one of the promised additional dev updates on Overwatch 2 that Blizzard said it would have this year. Of course, the big information that everyone wants to know—the release date—wasn’t presented here. But this was still one of the deepest and lengthiest looks at the changes to the game’s PvP that we’ve seen yet. If you’re curious about the nitty gritty changes in store, it’s well worth watching the whole video above. After all, with quite a while until we actually get our hands on the game ourselves, you’ve got plenty of time.
Overwatch 2 won’t launch until at least 2022, but that’s not guarantee the game is even coming next year either. The game is currently announced for PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Switch, though with the lengthy development cycle, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it get a proper release on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
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