Big Overwatch 2 News You Might Have Missed Because Of The 5v5 Craze

What a day it was in Overwatch yesterday, eh? Leading with the announcement of the PvP portion of Overwatch 2 moving to 5v5 by cutting one tank out of role queue, the developers couldn’t have reasonably expected for us to be receptive towards all the other changes that they would announce, right? While the team size reduction was definitely the most impactful change that the team shared on stream, there were a bunch of other fundamental changes and introductions that deserve consideration. Let’s catch up on the things you might have missed because the timeline was too spicy to care for anything else.

Hero changes

Naturally, the development of a sequel gives an opportunity to introduce more drastic changes, and quite a few heroes were revealed to likely receive major updates to their kits. As the developers pointed out, caution is advised on the finality of those changes, with the game still being tinkered with constantly.

As such, Mei received a fairly huge change to her Endothermic Blaster’s left-click, still slowing and damaging opponents but no longer freezing them in place and getting rid of one of the most obnoxious CCs in the game. 

Everyone’s favourite scientist Winston received an expansion to his kit in the form of a right click ability that charges up an energy bolt, and fires at opponents at range for medium damage.

While you might be sceptical whether or not off-tanks will be able to fit into the solo tank role, the development team also talked about changes to those characters and giving them more capabilities to protect, such as giving D.Va more Matrix uptime or giving Zarya’s bubbles more protective power. 

For Mercy and Zenyatta but probably more heroes in the future, quality of life changes especially to the UI were also shown off, putting crucial information in more central places on the UI, and arguably providing greater information at a glance than they currently do for Zenyatta’s Orb on live servers.

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More, more Maps

In terms of new playgrounds to play with those changes on and adapting maps to the new team sizes, an entire swoosh of six different maps were shown off in New York (Hybrid), Toronto (Push), Rio (Hybrid), Rome (Push), and Monte Carlo (Escort). Many of the maps appeared to have several pathways for teams to engage through each choke, a design feature the developers mentioned to be intended to allow for quick pushes and disengagements into these chokes based on quick rotations. It appears that more verticality also found its way into the game, giving credence to the idea that Overwatch 2 PvP will be a lot more flank heavy than the current live game.

Most interestingly, the developers also revealed that they are even working on an entirely different game mode beyond the already announced map type Push. At BlizzcOnline, the Overwatch development team had already shared that they were looking to replace Assault (2CP) maps with Push. With the teaser of a new map type, another game mode could be leaving the game as well.

An entirely new feel to the game?

A large but incredibly significant change that, by the sound of it, is even highly controversial in the developer office is the introduction of movement acceleration into Overwatch. Currently, on live servers, characters start at maximum speed the instant they hit their movement key, allowing for potentially undesirable jiggle peeking and evasion the likes you will have witnessed when playing against a Lucio player that knows what they are doing. An introduction of movement acceleration would increase the wind-up time of hero movements, taking an undefined amount of time to reach full speed after a button press. Depending on the amount of movement acceleration, this might not sound like much, but usually makes a huge difference in the perception of how it feels to play a game. Fans of Overwatch are used to an arena shooter-esque feel of crisp feedback from the game while movement acceleration may make the game feel clunky.

Additionally, the development team talked about the possibility of decreasing the base movement speed which may also have large implications on the tempo the game is played and the mechanics required to hit targets.

Cosmetic updates 

Adding further to the cosmetic development and character of Overwatch 2 which the team had already shown off at BlizzcOnline, even more characters were shown in their new standard skins, with Torbjörn losing his welding helmet and upgrading to goggles (here’s hoping his beard is fireproof). Generally speaking, the updates which you may compare here are showing off the technological advancements between Overwatch 1 and 2, adding a bit more sophistication to each of the hero's armours. 

In conclusion, we may surmise that the 5v5 PvP change likely was the most impactful change announced during the developer live stream, but that the other changes sneakily introduced while we were losing our collective minds on Twitter have large implications for the future of the Overwatch franchise. 

Images via Blizzard Entertainment