What we learned from the Overwatch 2 Developer Livestream
Last Friday members of the Overwatch 2 dev team sat down with Overwatch League host Soe to chat about the development of the game and the upcoming Alpha and Beta tests. Here’s some of what we learned from that discussion.
The decision to separate the PVP and PVE elements of Overwatch was made to get new content to the PVP players
It’s no secret that the development process for Overwatch 2 hasn’t gone as planned. More than two years from the initial announcement of an Overwatch sequel with almost nothing to show for it. Game Director Aaron Keller explained that releasing the multiplayer side of Overwatch 2 would give the development team more time to work on the story elements without leaving the PVP scene with no new content.
What was implied but left unspoken was that without new content the player base of the game may well have withered away to nothing before the combined Overwatch 2 experience was ready for them. Pushing out the PVP side of the game out to players sooner rather than later is an attempt to keep players engaged with the game long enough for the devs to finish working on the rest of Overwatch 2.
It remains to be seen how this splitting of the two sides of the game will affect the pricing for Overwatch 2. Will we see a free update for the PVP side, followed by a full Triple-A cost for the story mode? Or perhaps each side will be a paid release at a lower price point.
Doomfist is being reworked as a tank hero
We haven’t seen an existing hero move to a new role since the Major Symmetra rework in June 2018, so this is going to be a major change. We’ll see whether after the changes to the hero he still feels like Doomfist. Lead Designer Geoff Goodman confirmed that, as a tank, Doomfist’s health will be higher, and damage output lower. So it looks likely that a lot of Doomfist’s one-shot kill potential is going away with Overwatch 2.
I believe the fact that Doomfist, even with a serious rework, could be considered a tank tells us a lot about what the tank role is going to be like in Overwatch 2. Thinking of tanks like a wall to stay behind and shoot is largely going to be a thing of the past. Overwatch 2 tanks are initiator heroes that create space through movement and aggression, the tip of the spear rather than the shield.
The new ping system is contextual and customisable
The biggest surprise of the developer update that preceded the Livestream, apart from the fact that Overwatch 2 was still a real thing, was the first official mention that a ping communication system was coming to Overwatch 2.
This is something that many players, myself included, have been calling for for a long time. Voice comms for solo queue players can be unreliable at best, and unsafe for many groups at worst. So a real alternative that allows players to coordinate without voice comms would be a huge benefit to a team-based game like Overwatch 2.
As part of the Livestream, we got some more details about how the ping system will work. Firstly, there will be a generic ‘ping’ command that will change based on what is selected. I took this to mean that targeting a hero would send a command like ‘focus on their Mercy’, whereas selecting a health pack might ping ‘use that health pack if you need to’. Other contexts might be that an enemy hero is low on health, or weakened by status effects.
Secondly, we learned that there will be a wheel of ping commands, similar to the existing communication wheel and that these will be customisable, much like the current voice wheel is. With the added HUD feedback of a ping system, hopefully, this new communication system will be more widely used (and followed) than the current comms wheel.
To see more of what was discussed, watch the recording of the developer Livestream here: