Developer Blizzard Entertainment shared a new Director’s Take blog post for Overwatch 2, looking back and looking ahead, discussing changes to the game and how the team wants to further improve OW2 this year.
“We started last year with a set of changes targeted at moment-to-moment gameplay and our competitive systems. We made a set of broad changes to our core PVP gameplay by rebalancing our heroes’ health pools, changing projectile sizes and reworking passives. We also completely overhauled our competitive system. We think that the idea of a yearly refresh to the game was successful and are looking to have a major update to the way it plays every year. However, we want to go even bigger in 2025. Details to come in Spotlight as well as the next Director’s Take blog!”
The developers are happy with the new direction of Competitive play that allows OW2 to be more approachable for new players and easier than even to group up with friends and play competitive. This approach to doing a rank reset worked well and gave players—both new and seasoned—a new skill tier to reach. However, Champion has proven to be a little too difficult for our top players to achieve.
In Season 15, the team is looking to adjust how players rank into different skill tiers after the reset. The highest ranks will shift to include a larger percentage of the total player population, and we should see more players earn the right to call themselves Champions. Additionally, Blizzard is looking to introduce some new systems to competitive play.
In 2024, Overwatch 2 got three new heroes that have been some of the most mobile and 3-dimensional characters yet: Venture, Juno and Hazard.
“Looking ahead to 2025, we’re looking into how we can make all of our heroes more engaging and unique for players. This is something the team is wanting to change up and look forward to sharing more… soon.”
The team acknowledges the demand for 6v6 game mode, but is currently uncertain as to how large this demand is. There will be a mini-competitive season of 6v6 starting midseason 15 to help determine that:
“It’s still a little early to say what 6v6’s place is in Overwatch with a decent amount of people playing it, I think that it’s probably here to stay in some form, but so far, we’re not ready to swap the core format of the game.”
Starting Season 15, Clash maps are going to be removed out of Competitive Play while the team takes the time to look at these maps and work on finding ways to deliver the best Competitive experience for all of our players. The devs will update the players on the progress, but in the meantime, Clash will be kept in Overwatch 2 Quick play and other unranked game modes.