Overwatch 2 gets new details, including location and character updates
Blizzard have announced the first few new details on Overwatch 2, via the developer livestream below, which you can watch, if you have a spare 2 hours, or you can check below for the summary version.
The biggest change for the series is that the player count in matches will no longer by 6v6, but instead by 5v5 and while that might not seem like a massive change, it will impact all players, who have spent years adjusting to the higher team count, specifically the reduction in the number of tanks each team can have.
At the heart of this change lies the change in mentality surrounding the role of Tank, previously discussed during BlizzConline, towards one more focused on brawler-style gameplay. This shift from focusing on the protection of your team to in-your-face battling is anticipated to have impacts to the flow and pacing of the PvP experience. During the livestream, we got a firsthand look a new secondary fire mode for Winston and changes to Reinhardt’s abilities.
That said, Tanks aren’t the only role undergoing adjustments to account for this shift to five-versus-five. The livestream gave us a live look at the new Role Passives, introduced during BlizzConline. In its current iteration, these new passive abilities will have Damage heroes moving slightly faster than other roles, Support heroes regenerating health automatically after staying out of combat for a short period, and Tanks taking reduced knockback and providing less ultimate charge to opponents who damage them (compared to other roles).
The team also spent time talking about new locations that players will get to explore, while locations like New York City and Rome were shown off previously, there was a new reveal in Monte Carlo
As introduced during BlizzConline, we also got to explore New York City (Hybrid) and Rome (Push)! Finally, we revealed the never-before-seen illustrious Monte Carlo (Escort)!
Finally the team showed off some updated looks at a few characters, like Winston and Reinhardt, but they also debuted the new look of Torbjörn.
There is no release date for the game yet, but it is planned to come to PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Switch, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
