Blizzard Announce Overwatch 2 PvP Will Be 5v5
During a live stream on its official YouTube channel, Blizzard Entertainment and its Overwatch development team spearheaded by Aaron Keller, has announced that the PvP portion of Overwatch 2 will be 5v5 with the Tank role slimming down to just one player.
The writing of it has been on the wall since at least Blizzcon with the team showing only one tank in their in-game footage when presenting their current iteration of the new game at their annual con. The change is seen as a huge change to how the game plays, having wide-ranging implications from queue times to career security for tank players in the Overwatch League.
Overwatch 5v5 - How will it work?
At BlizzcOnline, the development team had revealed a new envisioned identity for tanks, giving the role more options in terms of their mobility and moving some of the power away from strictly tanking into dealing more damage in order to make the game more fun. As such, changes like Reinhardt receiving a second charge of Fire Strike, tanks having knockback reductions and giving less ultimate percentage when shot were announced. During the live stream, the team revealed a change to Winston in a similar vein, finally giving the scientist a right-click ability to add to his offensive capabilities. Curiously, Roadhog and Zarya appear to still be in the tank role, suggesting that they also received changes in order to fulfil their role duties.
The developers described that the game will likely be much more fluid, describing that in their game playtests, the hard battle lines in the sand were a lot less set, allowing for more dynamic gameplay. Moreover, several quality of life improvements were talked about with the developers showing new UI elements for heroes like Zenyatta. In order to improve issues players saw with undesired jiggle-peeking, a slight amount of movement acceleration was also said to have been introduced, likely noticeably changing the way the game feels for players at all levels.
Image via Blizzard Entertainment
