Overwatch Dev Tracker

UPDATED November 15: Due to a delay in launching our third wave of Twitch drops for Season One we have extended our window of time for these drops from ending on November 30 at 11:00 a.m. PST to end on November 30 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

It’s been nearly three weeks since Season One dropped, and we’ve welcomed over 20 million players to Overwatch 2 in the time between. This season has introduced new heroes, map, cosmetics, and we want to keep the fun going with Twitch drops throughout the rest of the season. We just completed our campaign for Kiriko drops, including a new legendary skin, and millions of drops have been given away to players worldwide. This response has been so huge that we are bringing in more drops for everyone to collect!

Starting tomorrow, October 25, 11:00 a.m. PST through to November 6, 11:00 a.m. PST, players will have the chance to collect the Werewolf spray and a legendary skin for Winston from the Halloween Terror co...

It’s time to reunite and stand with your fellow heroes as you fight for a better future—in style.

To celebrate Overwatch 2’s launch, we’ve added a slew of new character-themed goods to the gear store. Want to flex your Genji main pride? Feel like getting a bit foxy with some kitsune-themed swag? Are you keen to devour the latest character lore? With over ...

Overwatch’s latest Push map takes us on a journey to the beautiful city of Esperança, Portugal. 

Esperança is a sunny, coastal city that highlights the rich culture found across Portugal and the bright, hopeful future of Overwatch. Today, we’re joined by Sound Designer Felipe de Mello Pereira and Principal Environmental Artist, Helder Pinto to talk about how sights and sounds came together to bring the spirit of Portugal to Overwatch 2!

Our goal was to create another Push map for Overwatch 2’s launch alongside New Queen Street and Colosseo, so we started to uncover inspiration and map out the creative direction for a new map. That’s when Pinto stepped up to set our next destination in Portugal. “We felt confident we could understand the cultural and architectural languages of the country with me being Portuguese and growing up there,” Pinto explains.“By playing to our team’s strengths, we began putting something together quickly while also maintaining the highest...

Since the launch of Overwatch 2, we’ve welcomed millions of both new and returning heroes to the game. While most of our updates so far have been about our efforts to address game servers and stability, we also know players are eager to hear about what we are working on for gameplay and other topics. We’ve seen Sojourn, Junker Queen, and Kiriko completely rock the landscape of the game, blasting and slicing their way into many victories on the battlefield. Today, we want to look back at the first week of this brand-new chapter for Overwatch and share with you our team’s current thinking on hero balance and gameplay. 

Hero Balance

While some heroes are performing better than others, and there are differences across player skill levels, we have been happy to see that no hero’s overall power level is far out of line with our goals. Every hero on the roster has a win-rate between 45% and 55%, and we are not planning any immediate balance changes based on what we are ...

Hello, heroes! Since the launch of Overwatch 2, we’ve been blown away by your excitement, and incredibly moved by the sheer number of you experiencing our game. But we know we have run into some significant issues as well.

Launching Overwatch 2 as a live service comes with amazing opportunities and challenges, both anticipated and unexpected. We’ve largely stabilized the game overall, and we’ve made a lot of progress in fixing or improving issues some of you are facing. We're committed to consistently investigating issues as they arise, working quickly towards fixes, and being transparent with our community on the status of Overwatch 2.

The team continues to work to deploy further stability updates, with another patch planned for later this week, and we are monitoring the game closely for emergent issues and bugs. We’ve been keeping you all up to date on the forums with separate posts, but moving forward, our known issues will be track...

To celebrate the launch of Overwatch 2, we’ll be giving away a Legendary Sukajan Kiriko skin, a Razor Sharp spray for Kiriko, and a Donut Weapon Charm via Twitch Drops! As a reminder, with the introduction of cross-progression, unlocking these items means you’ll have them on your account on any platform you choose to play on.

Regardless of whether you play on console or PC, all players must re-link their Twitch and Battle.net accounts to be eligible for Overwatch 2 Twitch Drops, even if you’ve participated in Twitch Drops in the past.

Here’s how to get started:  

1. Log in to your Battle.net account
2. Go to your ...

Competitive play has been at the heart of the Overwatch community for years, and we have long-term plans to nurture this game mode far into the future. We're excited to share how we’re updating Competitive in Overwatch 2, starting with the goals that guided our decisions.

First, seasons should be exciting and tell their own, individual stories. Each one should take players on a new journey with new heroes, maps, game modes, or balance changes.

Second, we believe losing games shouldn’t be a purely negative experience. Competitive players should feel a sense of progression after games, and we want to provide players with the tools needed to improve and rank-up. 

Finally, we need an improved Competitive experience for returning players—for the benefit of both them and their teammates. 

Let’s dive deeper into what we’re doing to make Overwatch 2 Competitive feel fun and fair to play.

Unlocking Competitive 

Overwatch...

Overwatch 2 is almost here! There are a few things to know ahead of its official launch on October 4. We have a new SMS Protection requirement that’s important to understand in order to play, so please read thoroughly and take the steps listed to ready your account so you can jump in and play right away once the game is live!

Overwatch 2 is anticipated to be live worldwide
at approximately 12:00 p.m. PDT on October 4.

As a reminder, everyone who logs in during Season One will receive heroes Junker Queen and Sojourn automatically, whether they’re new players or returning. Players who own the original Overwatch will also receive Kiriko through their Founder’s Pack, which can be claimed by logging in at any point before the end of Season Two. If you currently have the “Founders” portrait in-game, you’ve already claimed your Founder’s Pack.

Update, October 5: We designed Overwatch 2 to be a live service, which enables us to be responsive to a variety of player feedback. We have made the decision to remove phone number requirements for a majority of existing Overwatch players. Any Overwatch player with a connected Battle.net account, which includes all players who have played since June 9, 2021, will not have to provide a phone number to play. We are working to make this change and expect it to go live on Friday, October 7. We will update players once it is in effect.

We remain committed to combating disruptive behavior in Overwatch 2—accounts that were not connected to Battle.net as well as new accounts will still have to meet SMS Protect requirements, which helps to ensure we’re protecting our community against cheating. If a player is caught engaging in disruptive behavior, their account may be banned whether they have a new account or not.

As a team, we will keep listening t...

October 4th is on the horizon and the team has been hard at work preparing for the launch of Overwatch 2. For today’s update, let’s take some time to talk about Hero Balance for launch day, and break down our philosophy and approach to balancing the game with our new seasonal model for Overwatch 2.

Balancing with Seasonal Releases

Overwatch 2 brings with it a new 9-week Season cadence that will consistently introduce new maps, heroes, game modes, and more for players to experience. For heroes more specifically, our plan is to typically release a new hero every other season, which combined with our ongoing additions of new maps and game modes and our regular balance updates, should reward different strategies and playstyles, keeping the game fresh and dynamic for years to come.

Importantly, each season will also see impactful hero balance changes as the season begins to support our goals of constantly balancing the game and keeping the live service feeli...

She's been on all our minds since we teased her in the June reveal event, and now, she’s here. Kiriko Kamori is staged to join the support roster as Overwatch’s 35th hero, and we’re excited to share more about her personality, toolkit, and gameplay! 

Drawing on her Miko and Kunoichi training, Kiriko supports her team through gentle healing, deadly precision, and fluid mobility. The early idea for her kit was to create a dual damage/support hero with strong mobility and a high skill ceiling. Kiriko can be rewarding for high-skill players while also being a great healing option for beginning players.

Overwatch 2 releases October 4th and will usher in a new era for the game. The changes we’re making will support our goals to deliver more content to the game, more regularly, all while helping more players than ever before experience the Overwatch universe. 

Moving to free-to-play for Overwatch 2, together with enabling cross-platform with cross-progression, means anyone can access the game and join their friends, for free, which we are incredibly excited about. At the same time, we know this is a big transition that involves many changes. 

One of our goals is to make sure our game provides plenty of entertainment, fun, and expression, no matter how much you spend—even if you choose to spend nothing at all. When Overwatch 2 launches, we’ll be delivering more in one drop than we’ve delivered since the original game launched in 2016. This includes three new heroes, which will all be available immediately to returning Overwatch players who log in during Season One or...

With the launch of cross-progression, players can merge multiple Overwatch accounts to carry progression and in-game cosmetics into Overwatch 2 on a single profile. Starting August 16, every player with a linked console account will be prompted at login to identify, select, and confirm the accounts you want to merge. Once you approve, we will prepare your accounts to be merged during the release of Overwatch 2.

All players will need a battle.net account to play Overwatch 2 regardless of platform. Progress from linked console accounts will be stored on your battle.net account, which will share in-game cosmetics and progress across the linked accounts.

There will be one opportunity to merge console accounts, so make sure you double-check which accounts you are merging before you confirm!

We’ve anticipated some of your questions, and we’re here to provide answers on the upcoming account merge in Overwatch 2.   

JOIN THE PARTY

Cheers to six years of worldwide payload-pushing, high-intensity battlefield brawls, and a fight for the future that’s just beginning. To celebrate the final installment of this three-part event series, we’re unlocking the skin vault and bringing back even more gear you might have missed out on–with an exclusive twist. Flex on your foes in style with limited looks like Tagged Tracer, Varsity D.Va, Genjiman Genji, and more.

LEVEL UP YOUR COLLECTION

Earn and purchase Anniversary Loot Boxes throughout the event! Each Loot Box has a chance to contain items from past Anniversary and seasonal events; don’t wait too long to snag those skins you’ve been eyeing for the past year, though–Loot Boxes will no longer be available for sale after the end of the Anniversary Remix Vol. 3 event on August 30. However, you will still be able to earn standard loot boxes after the en...

Heroes of Overwatch, welcome back!

The second Overwatch 2 beta has ended, and that means it’s time to talk data–again! In our previous beta statistics blog, we took you behind the scenes to learn more about Overwatch data and statistics like weighted usage rate, unmirrored win rate, and more. This data, along with healthy amounts of player feedback, user research, internal discussion, and lots and lots of gameplay are the cornerstones of the hero balance process. In this blog, we’ll be walking back down that same road to show how we used these metrics to inform decisions that were made during the second beta.

The highlight of the second beta was, of course, Junker Queen. The design team wanted to ensur...

To the heroes of Overwatch, 

A little over a week ago, the Overwatch 2 Beta came to a close, and we’ve been hard at work reviewing player feedback, internal data, and gameplay to help direct our next decisions. Next week, we plan to share more information about the data we’ve collected, but we wanted to share an update with our community in the meantime.  

Moira 

After taking community feedback into account, we’ve decided to revert the Moira beta changes, namely the new Necrotic Orb ability. We’ll dive deeper into this in an upcoming statistics blog, but the main reason for its removal is that the overall gameplay loop became too passive for many players. The power that Necrotic Orb brought to the table necessitated a long cooldown to make the effect impactful but not overly frustrating to play against. However, this meant many players would just hold the ability for the perfect moment, which had the side effect of decreasing the amount of “cool...

The Overwatch 2 Beta comes to an end—and with that, we’re one step closer to a new beginning on October 4.

Watching our players across different platforms take Junker Queen for a spin, run wild across Rio, and try out a slew of other new features for the first time was an awesome experience for the team. Each piece of feedback we received was incredibly valuable, and we were able to focus on both our technical and gameplay goals throughout the testing period! 

We’ll continue to balance heroes—based on our findings from the beta, and perhaps based on some additional considerations (like a certain unannounced fox-related hero who will be joining the support roster).

Over the next few weeks, the team will share more information about the data we've been collecting. We have new features and content that we look forward to sharing with you as well over the next couple of months. We’re one step closer to launch now, and we can’t wait to share more with you soon...

Overwatch stands for inclusion, open-mindedness, and a world where everyone belongs and is celebrated for who they are. We're incredibly proud to team up with Twitch Rivals to host the Overwatch 2 Pride Showdown in support of The Trevor Project, where we will be contributing $250,000 in support of this incredible LGBTQIA+ organization.  

The Trevor Project 

The Trevor Project is the world’s largest suicide prevention and mental health organization for LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning) young people. The organization works to save young lives by providing support through free and confidential suicide prevention and crisis intervention...

The first week of the Overwatch 2 Beta is behind us—time flies when you’re having fun! The team has been hard at work compiling player feedback, squashing bugs, and gearing up for the mid-cycle patch. As we mentioned on the Overwatch forums last week, we’re going to talk a little more about the Mercy and Symmetra changes, as well as initial thoughts on Junker Queen and queue times!  

Mercy  

Guardian Angel gives Mercy important mobility that is ...