Blizzard Entertainment has started to openly discuss switching Overwatch 2 away from 5v5 team matches and back to the 6v6 team sizes that defined the original game.
Writing in a Director’s Take blog post, Game Director Aaron Keller digs into the broad debate between 6v6 and 5v5, the advantages that the current form has, its difficulties, and announcing that Blizzard will be holding some gameplay tests to look at how it holds up.
The key reason to switch to 5v5 was to break up a tank-heavy meta. Now, with just one tank per side, there’s just one defensive barrier for a team to break through (double shield was a big issue), making damage character feel more effective, allowing healers to do more than just buff the front line, and making ultimates and ultimate combos less of an integral play.
The other positive side effects were a reduction in matchmaking times as the 1-2-2 format better matches up to what people actually want to play as, easier to read matches as you’re tracking nine other players instead of eleven, and even marginally improved performance.
Despite all of this, players of the game have consistently banged the drum for a return to 6v6. Two tanks both allowed for stronger team compositions that could make up for a weak link, and for heightened moments of chaos when a defensive line does fold. It’s a fun factor that the vocal parts of the community want to have back.
However, Keller notes that, “At the end of the day, we want to make the game that players want to play.” So, if people want 6v6 again, Blizzard needs to look at that.
He continues, “because we operate as a service to our players, we always remain open-minded to re-evaluating our decisions based on your actions and feedback, to give you the best game experience we can. Rather than introduce a disruptive, permanent change to the game, we’d prefer to explore the space further and make changes based on that exploration.
“With that said, we’re looking at running a series of events to try out different core team composition formats in Overwatch 2. The community has, juuuust once or twice, suggested a test. Why not put various forms of 6v6 in the game in order to gauge the results? We agree, and based on your feedback, we’re exploring how we can test different forms of 6v6 in the game to gauge the results. This is taking some time, however, for reasons that may not be readily apparent.”
At this point, Blizzard is still just investigating how these tests will look – there’s UI factors like healer vision that need to be looked at, and as mentioned, they may have to find new optimisations to keep performance as it should be.
If the community still wants 6v6 after these tests, and they match up to all of Blizzard’s metrics and analytics, then it could become a permanent switch or a new option.
Keller wraps up:
I’m going to jump on a soap box for a moment. When you look at the changes to Overwatch since its inception, it’s clear that many of those have reduced some of the variety within an Overwatch match. We get feedback from some players that Overwatch can feel “the same” from game to game. While much of this gets attributed to 5v5, we feel that there is more at play here. Besides running experiments with 6v6, we’d like to run some that re-examine the ways we tried solving previous problems, specifically with the goal of bringing some of the freedom back to an Overwatch match without the severity of issues that accompanied it. For instance, we think there could be other ways of putting a team together that aren’t quite as rigid as a set composition, but not as loose as Open Queue. We’ll be running at least one Quick Play: Hacked based on this idea in Season 13. There are some gotchas to this direction, but after reading 400 pages of this blog, I hope you’re all able to see that there are trade-offs to many of the decisions that go into this game (and into any game, really).
The announcement comes just as Overwatch 2 is about to face fresh competition for its hero shooter crown, with Sony about to launch Concord as a premium title, and the upcoming Marvel Rivals free-to-play alternative. Now, more than ever, Blizzard needs to try and keep their community on board.
Source: Blizzard
