Blizzard on why Overwatch 2’s battle pass won’t break the game

If OverwatchBlizzard Entertainment, the developer of Blizzard Entertainment, planned to make new accounts more difficult. Overwatch 2 heroes — like the just-revealed support ninja Kiriko — behind the game’s battle pass system, they (rightfully) had strong concerns. Blocking all players from accessing all heroes seems to run counter to the original game’s design. The first Overwatch, players had unfettered access to the entire roster, enabling them to switch up a team’s lineup and counter-pick heroes on the fly.

Blizzard isn’t convinced that players should be charged for heroes or asked to earn them. Overwatch 2This does not necessarily make the game more difficult. Overwatch 2 will remain competitive and fair, in Blizzard’s opinion, if some players get access to new heroes later, and the studio also believes that there are important distinctions that separate the original, 6-year-old OverwatchFrom its free-to-play sequel.

“We do believe that Overwatch is a highly competitive game, and we think that that’s something that resonates with our players,” Overwatch game director Aaron Keller said in a Zoom call with media on Tuesday. “And even with this change, we think that it will continue to be a highly competitive game. We know that that’s really important for our players, and we have heard [that players]Concerned about differences in the access of heroes for each team, We think that there are a lot of changes to the game and a lot of details in this system, where we think that the game will still be highly competitive after we go live with this.”

Keller highlighted the 5-hero team structure in Overwatch 2Certain hero reworks and passive abilities that allow for certain roles to be flipped out will impact how characters are picked and switched between matches. Overwatch 2, he said, is less of a “rock, paper, scissors” game than the original that launched in 2016.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

“One of the big differences with 5v5 combat is that we’ve tuned a lot of the heroes in the game, and we’ve made changes to reduce the amount of hard counters that Overwatch has,” Keller said. “We want the game to be a little bit more organic. We want people to have more impact, but we also want them to have more freedom in what hero they’re choosing for any particular situation.

“If you think of some of the old matchups that we had in the game, if a Tracer player was harassing your back line, and going after your supports, somebody on your team could switch to Cassidy,” Keller continued. “Cassidy is a great counter for Tracer. If Cassidy was skilled enough, then the Tracer player would have to swap with another player. They didn’t really have a good answer for that. Going forward, what we’ve done is, we’re trying to take some of those really hard rock, paper, scissors interactions out of the game, and replacing them with more player choice. So for that particular interaction, we’ve buffed our support heroes to make them more survivable so that they now have the ability to resolve that situation with Tracer with a higher success rate on their own.”

Keller said, “Some of the rules that were applied to the original are not applicable.” Overwatch — which launched with 21 heroes — are no longer valid after six years’ worth of updates, roster additions, and balance adjustments.

“What was the time? we were originally making Overwatch, we had considered making it as a free-to play-game with a limited hero roster and limited hero pools available to players,” Keller said. “In that world, players would have had a very small choice of heroes available to them to play at any time, unless they put money into the game.

“We’re in a really different situation right now. When [Overwatch 2]When the game launches, 35 heroes will be available for you to choose from. If you’re a new player to the game, and season 1, without putting any money into the system, you will have 34 of those heroes available for you to pick from. If you are a regular player, you will unlock the 35th hero over the course of season 1. So it’s a completely different situation that we have right now.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard has player data that supports its decision — data indicating that many players only play and switch between a subset of the broader roster, according to Keller.

“The majority of our players play a relatively small number of heroes,” he said. “When they do switch heroes, we believe it’s because they’re switching to a hero that they’re familiar with, a hero that they’re effective with, and a hero that they are having fun with. The number of heroes the player can choose to play becomes smaller as they become better at it. We think that the higher level a player is, the more time they’ll be putting into the game. So the chances of them having either unlocked the hero on the free track of the battle pass, or just using coins that they’ve collected in previous seasons to upgrade to the premium battle pass, is pretty high. It is our goal that players catch up with all the heroes and unlock them. If you were to come to the game late a year down the line, we have a lot of avenues for you to play.”

Jon Spector, commercial leader and vice president for Overwatch, said that Blizzard has “put a ton of time and energy into discussing how to make this system fairer for players, how to make sure that we’re preserving the competitive integrity of our game.”

“That observation that Aaron made — about how hero swapping works in reality — was pretty eye-opening for me when we first started working on this,” Spector said. “What we actually see in the data is that a majority of players in OverwatchPlay time with two to three heroes is the majority. You can reach 99.9% play time for most of our players who have 12 heroes or less. Right now they have 30 heroes. [when] you look at how people are actually playing the game there, they’re using a couple of heroes for most of how they play. Sometimes they’ll swap and they’ll add in a couple more heroes.

“So when we say, ‘Is it actually going to impact the play experience if someone has 34 out of 35 heroes?’ when we look at the data, we feel really confident that it’s not going to.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Keller stated that Blizzard designed and rebalanced heros. Overwatch 2’s 5v5 team composition, it has strived to make the game “a little bit more organic and a little bit more fluid,” and to “decrease the reliance on hard counters.”

“There will still be some of those in the game,” Keller said, “and there will probably be times in the future where we develop a hero that might have a new mechanic on it. This could mean that it might take some time for us to understand how to deal with this hero. It is not difficult to do. […] we still think that team compositions, hero picking, and counter-picking is an important elements of the game; we just don’t want it to be the only correct answer.”

“Even with this change of putting heroes in the battle pass, we think that with all of the other systems that we have in place, and with the additional ways of unlocking heroes and some of the ways that Overwatch has changed over time and the way that we’re changing OverwatchPlease see the following: Overwatch 2 […] we will still have a highly competitive game, even though some of the systems and some of the decisions that we’ve made to get there are different than what we started with.”

Of course, there’s also the business reality facing Overwatch 2. It’s free-to-play, and Blizzard needs to generate revenue somewhere. It’s worth trying to get some revenue on content players are most interested in. Is this the hardest and most costly content to create?

“When we looked at making the transition to free-to-play, one of the great goals we had was to be able to give [original] Overwatch players what they wanted, which was just continuous delivery of content,” said Walter Kong, general manager for Overwatch. “We know [that] because players have been telling us that that’s what keeps them engaged over the long term. As part of the long-term franchise goals we want Overwatch’s reach to as many players and fans as possible. And in doing so, in being able to deliver that abundant content, we’ve made decisions to continue to grow our team.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

“Our core development team has roughly tripled in size since the launch of Overwatch, and we have many more folks working on the game on partner teams, and we want to be able to continually invest in this live-game service,” Kong said. “So from the perspective of the business, this isn’t free. This was something we knew for a while. We also spent time thinking about how to finance the ongoing development of the game so that all players would have fair and enjoyable gaming experiences, regardless of whether or not they pay. We believe that players who are paying will receive a great deal of value.

Added Kong, “Why put heroes into the battle pass? The heroes are one of the most interesting content in the game. We felt that this was a good fit for our model. There is this goal to be able to not just deliver a great experience on launch in October, but to be able to continuously deliver content and experiences for years and years to come.”

Overwatch 2The first season of, which will be available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 as well as Windows PC and Xbox One, goes live Oct. 4. In December, a second season is planned.