Overwatch 2 Director’s Take: Feedback and Improvements

Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch 2 continues to evolve thanks to feedback from the game’s loyal audience. In a director’s update Friday, Aaron Keller explained what the development team is planning for the sequel, including some big upgrades and experiments.

Overwatch 2 Competitive System Overhauling

Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller recently revealed some major changes to the competitive system in Season 9 of the game. The rework is mainly designed to make the system more understandable for players.

Criticisms of the old competitive system included:

• Rare rank updates:
• Clarity: changes in rank unclear
• Skill divisions with too wide of a skill range

The new system seeks to resolve those problems. Now players will get:

• Rank changes after each match.
• Additional information explaining their rating changes

The skill divisions are also revamped, with a new “Champion” tier above Grandmaster.

Overwatch 2 Gameplay Updates

Season 9 will also make several significant updates to Overwatch 2’s core gameplay, in addition to the competitive system overhaul. These changes are designed to meet several common community requests, including:

• Making shooting feel more consistent.
• Reducing the effectiveness of burst damage and healing
• Giving damage heroes more agency in securing eliminations

The development team has adjusted several things to meet these goals:

• Boosted all hero health, alleviating the effects of burst damage and one-shot abilities.
• Slightly enlarged most projectiles to make them easier to hit.
• Added a new passive ability to the Damage role, decreasing the healing received by recently damaged enemies

Coming Improvements and Experiments

The Overwatch 2 team intends to keep improving the game’s systems and features following player feedback. Among the upcoming additions is the removal of grouping restrictions in Season 10 – meaning players can team up with friends in all game modes.

The developers have also been experimenting with the “Quick Play: Hacked “game mode, to help inform future updates to the core Overwatch 2 experience. Adhering to the initial “Quicker Play” event, the team will be making adjustments such as:

• Speeding up the Push bot
• Implementing spawn speed boosts
• Potentially reducing the overall match length

In the future, the team will use the Quick Play: Hacked mode in various ways to collect data and feedback.

Conclusion

The Overwatch 2 development team clearly intends to incorporate player feedback and make substantial updates to the systems and core mechanics of the game. The revamped competitive system, gameplay tweaks, and future experiments show a desire to make Overwatch more transparent, fun, and accessible for everyone.

As the team digests the end result of these tweaks and collects feedback, players can expect a steady supply of refinements and updates throughout the following seasons. The developers are clearly targeting a future for the franchise by continually addressing community concerns and working to make Overwatch 2 a great experience.