BALANCING ACT

Blizzard hopes for big change by switching OVERWATCH from 6v6 to 5v5

- Morgan Park

It’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.’”

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