Blizzard Entertainment has begun openly discussing moving away from the 5v5 team-based format of Overwatch 2 and returning to the 6v6 team-based format that characterized the original game.
Writing in Director’s blog entryGame Director Aaron Keller delves into the broad debate over 6v6 vs. 5v5, the merits of the current format, and its difficulty, and announces that Blizzard will be running some playtests to see how it performs.
The main reason for the move to 5v5 was to break up the tank-centric meta. Now that there’s only one tank on one side, the team has to break through one defensive barrier (the dual shield was a gigantic deal), which makes the damage dealer seem more effective, healers can do more than just buff the frontline, and ultimates and combos are less integral to the game.
Other positive side effects included faster matchmaking times as the 1-2-2 format better matched the type of players players actually wanted to play, easier to read matches as you were tracking nine other players instead of eleven, and even a slight escalate in performance.
Despite all this, the game’s players have consistently been banging the drum for a return to 6v6. Two tanks allowed for stronger team compositions that could make up for the faint link, as well as heightened moments of chaos when the defense gives up. It’s a fun factor that vocal parts of the community want back.
However, Keller notes that “at the end of the day, we want to make a game that players want to play.” So if people want 6v6 again, Blizzard needs to think about it.
He continues, “since we operate as a service to our players, we are always open to re-evaluating our decisions based on your actions and feedback to ensure you have the best possible experience. Rather than making a disruptive, permanent change to the game, we would rather explore the space further and make changes based on that exploration.”
“With that in mind, we’re going to be running a series of events to try out different formats for the Overwatch 2 starting lineup.. The community has suggested testing once or twice. Why not put different forms of 6v6 in the game to evaluate the results? We agree, and based on your feedback, we are investigating how we can test different forms of 6v6 in the game to evaluate the results. However, it takes some time for reasons that may not be obvious.”
At this stage, Blizzard is still exploring what these tests will look like – they need to look at UI factors like healer vision, and as mentioned, they may need to find novel optimizations to keep performance at an appropriate level.
If the community still wants 6v6 after these tests, and the results align with all of Blizzard’s stats and analytics, then this change could become a indefinite option or novel solution.
Keller summarizes:
I’m going to jump on the soapbox for a moment. When you look at the changes to Overwatch since its inception, it’s clear that a lot of them have reduced the variety in the Overwatch match. We’ve been getting feedback from some players that Overwatch can feel “samey” in every game. While a lot of that is attributed to 5v5, we think there’s more to it than that. In addition to running experiments with 6v6, we’d like to run experiments that re-examine the ways we’ve tried to solve previous problems, specifically with the goal of restoring some freedom to the Overwatch match without the severity of the problems that came with it. For example, we think there may be other ways to build a team that aren’t as immovable as a set lineup, but aren’t as loose as Open Queue. In Season 13, we’ll be running at least one Quick Play: Hacked game based on that idea. There are some catches to this, but I hope that after reading 400 pages of this blog you can all see that many of the decisions you make in this game (and really any game) come with some sort of trade-off.
The announcement comes just before Overwatch 2 is set to face novel competition for the title of marksman hero, as Sony looks to release Concord as a premium title and upcoming free-to-play alternative Marvel Rivals is already available. Now more than ever, Blizzard needs to try and keep its community on board.
Source: Blizzard
