The text below was published on the game’s official website.

Hello guys!

My name is Jared, I’m the new Executive Producer of Overwatch 2 and I’m really excited to work with this team and this community. The Overwatch team is doing a lot of amazing things right now, and I wanted to take a few minutes to bring you an update.

But first, I have a warning: sharing plans before they’re finalized is risky. Developing an ongoing game like Overwatch 2 requires balancing urgent player needs, long-term ambitions, and unresolved issues. It’s easier and safer to talk about the job when it’s almost done and ready for delivery. That said, I think sharing our ideas early is the right thing to do so the development team and the community can talk better.

Please don’t stop posting comments. We always read your comments, we inspire and use them in our projects. After all, we have to make sure we’re making a game you’ll want to keep playing for years to come.

Okay, let’s go.

REWARDS AND PROGRESSION

With the shift to a free-to-play model, Overwatch 2 welcomes new players from all over the world. And it’s wonderful! More people in the game means more people in matches, more players to befriend, and more allies to accompany in inexplicably awesome casual matches.

But we know that this change was significant and that it brought about a new business model and new systems for unlocking heroes and getting new skins.

I could say a lot here, but I think a good place to start is to say that we’re not that happy with the way things are going right now. We love a lot of things like doing various daily and weekly challenges or earning something new for your favorite hero or heroine. But we recognize that the current experience can improve, and that’s what we need to focus on.

We want you to feel more rewarded just for playing. We want you to have different goals in addition to Competitive Rank and Battle Pass tiers. We want you at the end of a session to feel satisfied with the time you spent playing, even if you end up with a dawning losing streak, having said that you would only stop. after winning.

We’ll have a lot to say about this over the next few months, but I’ll start with a few quick updates:

Short term

In Season 2, we’ve changed our rewards slightly so that each event has a playable skin in addition to the other cosmetic rewards we already offer. We’re also continuing our Twitch Drop programs, so you can earn skins and in-game goodies by supporting your favorite content creators. As we work on long-term plans, we want future seasons to be even more rewarding than the first.

Long term

Starting with Season 3, we plan to make several changes to the Battle Pass, bringing more interesting challenges and more fun, match-based progression systems for everyone to enjoy. We’ll talk about some of these changes soon, although some of them may take longer to arrive.

WAITING LINE

Contrary to what Moira’s damage on your team might say, Overwatch is a role-playing game. Therefore, queues are a constant and priority concern for the team.

With the move to 5v5, queues are longer than we’d like for tank and damage players, and while we don’t have a definitive fix for this, the team has a LOT of ideas, and we intend to try them in the coming seasons.

Many of these ideas focus on the support role and how we can make it more fun and rewarding. We discuss some specific support hero rework, game system updates, and even general role changes to improve support quality of life.

When we decide on a permanent change, we will tell you about it. For now, we’re making queue estimates more accurate in the UI (support queues last less than a minute in most cases) and will be testing Battle Pass XP rewards for players queuing for support and all functions.

COMPETITIVE

We know there are some aspects of the experience that need improvement. The team is full of members who live and breathe competition, so making this mode dynamic and fair is a priority.

We are making some changes to the matchmaking system and have implemented some changes that should help make the system more accurate when it comes to determining skill levels and player distribution. Although this change is already in the game, the effects will be more noticeable from Season 2 onwards.

But there’s more to the competitive system than just matchmaking, and we’ve heard comments about unexpected ranking changes, response rates, and more. This is a topic that deserves more than a paragraph or two, so expect to see a more detailed article about our projects soon.

HERO BALANCING

Several heroes have undergone balance changes and adjustments in this patch. Among the highlights, Genji and D.Va are less deadly, Zarya has less shield, and Sombra’s hack is less aggressive. We think the changes in this update are good for the current state of the game, but we are already planning more updates for the start of Season 2.

We’ll talk about the Season 2 changes soon (including some for the world’s most beloved cybernetically enhanced Canadian), but first we want to see the fruits of these mid-season updates.