BALANCING ACT
Blizzard hopes for big change by switching OVERWATCH from 6v6 to 5v5
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.’”
BACK 2 BASICS
The team didn’t start at 5v5. Early tests stayed within the bounds of 6v6 and instead challenged the established 2-2-2 role format (two tanks, two DPS, two supports). They tried out a 4-1-1 setup that included one tank, one support and four DPS heroes. “That was maybe the worst experiment we did,” Goodman said with a laugh. “You did not want to be a healer in that composition.”
Eventually, though, the team started adding and subtracting players from their experiments and hit on something “really fun” with 5v5. Subtracting a tank, in theory, solves a flow problem that Goodman and his team had been thinking about for a long time. “One of the complaints that we heard a lot and agreed with was that Overwatch has the tendency to get bogged down with these defensive abilities,” he said. “You know, you’re playing against a double barrier comp like Orisa and Reinhardt or something, and you’re just like, ‘I never even get to shoot a player anymore.’”
I can attest to that. That annoying double barrier comp isn’t as common as it used to be, but it’s true that Overwatch fights often consist of two confusing blobs of colourful characters huddling behind a barrier and shooting at each other. Taking away a single character on both teams doesn’t sound like a monumental change (I was sceptical at first, too), but a single tank setup has some immediately noticeable effects. No option for a double shield comp is the most obvious. I’ve already noticed this encourages players to spread out more and use cover to avoid threats. There are also fewer large bodies on screen, so it’s easier to focus on a single target.
THINK TANK
Once Blizzard decided 5v5 was the direction for Overwatch 2, it began the process of tweaking and reworking heroes to make sense on a rebalanced team. Unsurprisingly, that meant changing a lot of the game’s eight tanks.
“We are definitely tweaking the tank role to be a bit more aggressive,” Goodman said. The goal is for every Tank to feel “brawlier” and more capable of doing the job that they’ve had all along – escorting the team through chokeholds, absorbing the brunt of incoming damage and putting pressure enemies with close-to-mid-range attacks.
Orisa has seen the most dramatic rework, with a complete kit overhaul that ditches her deployable shield for a javelin that can skewer enemies or briefly absorb attacks. Reinhardt, too, is now better equipped to charge toward enemies and lob ranged Firestrike attacks into groups. Doomfist, a melee-focused DPS hero, is switching
ENCOURAGES PLAYERS TO SPREAD OUT MORE AND USE NATURAL COVER
roles to a tank who specialises in disrupting the enemy backline. Basically, ‘hunker down’ tanks are out and ‘lets push forward’ tanks are in.
After hearing about the tendency for shields to bog down Overwatch, I posed a question to Goodman: is the game better without shields?
“To broadly answer the question, no, I don’t think [Overwatch] is better without shields,” he said. “But clearly it’s worse when there are too many shields.” Goodman believes it’s not a question of if there should be shields in the meta, but how they’re used. He explained that Reinhardt, for example, is an interesting addition to the Overwatch
meta because he creates a threatening one-directional area. He’s powerful, but “the second you’re able to flank the team or surround them in some way, the shield becomes a lot worse very quick”.
Whether or not Blizzard’s sweeping balancing changes will be well-received in the long run is yet to be seen, but after a few days in the beta, I’m having a good time. What makes me nervous is what’s getting left behind – abilities, maps, and team configurations that will disappear when Overwatch 2 overwrites Overwatch.
I’m sad I’ll never again get to do the Reinhardt/Zarya combo my friend and I have practiced hundreds of times, or play in iconic Overwatch locations like Temple of Anubis when the Assault game mode is swapped for Push. Overwatch is entering a new era, and not everything can come with it.
Morgan Park