He’s witty, kind, and always looking to lift those in need—sometimes literally.

Hailing from Thailand, Lifeweaver is characterized by his love and respect for nature as well as his advanced biolight technology. This groundbreaking technology is woven throughout his abilities, and it plays a pivotal role in the healing and utility aspects of his kit.

Lifeweaver has a unique playstyle that introduces a few new mechanics into the game, so let’s take a walk through his kit and how he was developed. His final look is the result of a culmination of many different teams, including various concept art, hero design, and narrative. One of these pieces features an older physician who drew healing energy into his hands and blasted it into his allies, a bit like Moira’s Coalescence.

We ideated further based on these concepts an...

For those unfamiliar, Calling All Heroes is our gender-inclusivity initiative aimed at supporting members of marginalized gender-identities. You can learn more about it at ...

Happy Friday everyone!

Overwatch 2 was released nearly 6 months ago. It's hard to believe that we're wrapping up Season 3, and about to jump into Season 4, and still have a lot of exciting moments ahead. Rather than talk about a specific topic this week, like matchmaking, I thought that we could look back over the past 6 months and talk about how we feel the game is doing and what we've learned over that time. For those that have been with us since day one, this may feel like it’s covering familiar territory.  I appreciate you sticking with me while we recap the last 6 months.

Speaking of talking… one of the biggest complaints we heard from players was that we were not doing a good job communicating about the game. We've been focused on turning this around and have put a lot of energy into giving players information about the game, both in terms of what's coming and what we're thinking. We plan to continue this for the foreseeable future,...

Everyone's favorite alien onion, Pachimari, is back with its own in-game event! Pachimari is the cute, cuddly, and collectible plush toy which first appeared in the Hanamura arcade's crane games. Login to Overwatch 2 now and complete event challenges to earn Pachi-themed cosmetics and play in an all-new arcade game mode featuring Pachimari itself!

It's time to CATCH-A-MARI!

To kick things off for PachiMarchi, we’re bringing an all-new 3v3 “elimination-confirmed” game mode to Overwatch 2, Catch-A-Mari. Like Team Deathmatch, teams will coordinate to stay alive and defeat their opponents, but each time an opponent is eliminated, a Pachimari toy will drop from their hero. The team who got the elimination needs to collect that Pachimari in order to score a point. If an opponent grabs it first, they prevent the other team from scoring!

You'll be in a Pachi-collecting frenzy as you compete on the arena maps of Blizzard World, Kanezaka, and Downtown Busa...

Two weeks ago, we talked about balance and matchmaking in our blog update. Matchmaking has continued to be a big topic in the community, and it's something we've been focused on internally. If it's important to you then it’s important for us to talk about, so I'd like to update you all on what we're seeing and doing.

One note before we begin - I think we're at risk of sounding like a broken record with our communication on matchmaking. "We're working on it and it's getting better" isn't the best message, especially when players are still experiencing bad matches. So, I w...

Blizzard and One-Punch Man are teaming up to bring the first major collaboration to Overwatch 2! Starting tomorrow, March 7, and going through April 6, you’ll be able to collect all-new skins celebrating One-Punch Man characters and take part in our One-Punch Man event challenges to nab cool rewards, including an exclusive FREE Legendary Mumen Rider-Soldier: 76 skin.

Heroes Celebrating Heroes

When bringing the universe of One-Punch Man to Overwatch 2, we wanted to do it in a way that shows our heroes celebrating Saitama and his friends. Looking at the hero roster, Doomfist was a perfect fit for donning the iconic yellow suit and white cape, capturing the signature trademark of Saitama’s ability to defeat any enemy in a single punch!

Genji also gets a whole new look, going from cybernetic ninja to the cybernetic brawler, Genos! And, when it came to bringing the powerful psychic, Terrible Tornado to life, we knew no other Overwatch 2 hero could match her pe...

It’s the month of March which means, its PachiMarchi time! We had a ton of fun planning this month to celebrate our favorite little alien onion and now want to invite YOU to compete in our Community Clash on March 21 and 22!

The Community Clash will be a 2-day single-elimination tournament for PC players featuring a $20,000 prize pool. We’ll be broadcasting the semifinals and finals on our PlayOverwatch Twitch Channel, along with a fun exhibition game featuring an all-new game mode.

Want to compete? Sign-ups are open to the entire community so gather your team and get registered here by March 16 (11:59 PM PDT): ...

Heroes around the world have put their names forth, and after careful consideration, we’re thrilled to announce the 2023 Overwatch® World Cup competition committees for the 36 invited teams.

Check back later in March for the results of World Cup Trials and committee announcements for the wild card teams!

Argentina

General Manager: Nacho “Desastreger” De Saeger

Head Coach: Gianluca “Xyan” Beer

Social Lead: Ivan “ReptiliaX” Tiviroli

Australia

General Manager: Sam “Face” Merewether

Head Coach: Max “Unter” Unterwurzacher

Social Lead: Jarrod “Frogger” Meredith

Belgium

General Manager: Kevin “Kevh” Hondijk

Head Coach: Neo “TheWeevil” Claes

Social Lead: Demis “Deemzies” Holvoet

Brazil

General Manager: Gabriel “Nitrao” Ribeiro

Head Coach: Mauricio “Honorato” Honorato

Social Lead: Alicia “Mirsthy” Grucci

...

A few weeks ago, we published the first in this series of updates on the game. It’s crazy how much has happened since then! We launched Season 3, announced a collab with One-Punch Man, and I’m now dating Genji! I feel so lucky…

I wanted to dive into two topics today. Season 3 balance and the matchmaker.

We feel that the start of Season 3 is in a much better state of balance than the start of Season 2. We hear from players that balance is the best it’s been since the launch of OW2, while the game feels fresh based on all the changes made. It’s been great watching that discussion, and to foster it, I’d like to give a bit more details and a bit less commentary.

Let’s look at the support role first. On the positive side, most supports are viable in nearly every skill tier. Brigitte has really popped this season and has the highest win rate for nearly all skill tiers except for Top 500, where Zen takes the lead, with both averaging out to a nearly 55% w...

With Season 3 in full swing, it’s time to celebrate your in-game victories and flaunt your tank main pride with a bit of extra flair. To commemorate Null Sector’s leader and the monumental mission he pursues, Ramattra has been rendered in 10-inch bust statue form and is now available for pre-order on the Blizzard Gear Store...

Love is in the air and Overwatch 2 is celebrating Valentine's Day with an all-new event—Ultimate Valentine! Take part in a new arcade brawl, earn new cosmetics through special event challenges, and take aim in a new dating sim adventure to become the perfect companion for Genji or Mercy!

Date Genji or Mercy in Loverwatch

For the first time ever, we’re bringing a new, interactive experience to the Overwatch universe with the introduction of Loverwatch – Love Never Dies! Loverwatch is a non-canonical, short-form dating simulator where you’ll follow Genji or Mercy to romantic locations based on some of your favorite Overwatch maps. Earn exclusive titles that show love for your date while discovering inside jokes, easter eggs, and even a secret ending depending on how you treat your companion!

Check out Loverwatch today and earn free in-game rewards including Hanzo’s Cupid’s Kiss highlight intro and cute titles, which will automatically be g...

Hello! We're back with another update. We've put out a loooooot of info in the past week, so I don't have as many concrete details to share today. We're going to talk about a few random topics, including values around collab development.

Let's start the update with a...non-update...related to Season 3 balance. While you're reading this on Friday, this piece was written on Wednesday for us to have the time to localize it globally. We don't have a pulse on the balance for Season 3 yet, as our changes have only been live for a few hours. Our aim is to get balance information out to you all on or before my next update and if it looks like there are big issues with balance our intention would be to fix them before the mid-season patch.

The team is also talking about the Arcade. We feel like there are a few issues with this area of the game. Some of the game modes can have very long queue times. This is exacerbated by the fact that we have challenges that requir...

Season three is just around the corner, and with it comes a variety of new in-game rewards that are up for grabs when you watch your favorite content creators on Twitch. Earning Twitch drops for Overwatch 2 is easy! Connect your Battle.net account with your Twitch account, then tune into any eligible channel in the Overwatch 2 category on Twitch. Remember, when you earn any drops, you must claim them at Twitch.tv/drops to receive them in Overwatch 2. Here are the rewards lined up for season 3:

Wave 1 Drops: February 7 to February 21

Show off your class and sophisticated sense of style with a sleek skin for Ashe! From February 7 to February 21, you can earn the Seven of Spades spray when you watch two hours of Overwatch ...

Season three begins on February 7 and brings with it a host of all-new content, including the new Antarctic Peninsula Control map, a new Asian Mythology theme and Battle Pass with a Mythic Kiriko skin, the Ultimate Valentine’s in-game event featuring a browser-based Overwatch Dating Simulator: Loverwatch, and an IP collaboration —a first-ever for Overwatch 2. What’s more, PachiMarchi returns in March!

Read on for a short summary of the matchmaking, competitive, and balance changes we’re making in season three, a preview of what to expect from our upcoming patches, and details on the return of the Overwatch World Cup! Season three also introduces Workshop mode with new auto-moderation tech along with several accessibility improvements. Let’s get to it!

New Antarctic Peninsula Control Map

Control gets its first new map in Overwatch 2 in the form of frosty Antarctica! We have already visited the main facility of Ecopoint: Antarctica, as seen in ...

Hi all! We’re back a little earlier than we had originally planned. Think of this as a bonus Dev Chat!

We’re going to mostly focus on maps and level design this go around.

Off we go!

Map Pools… You were right. We were wrong. Map Pools are going away starting in season 4. We aimed to provide a bit of freshness each season and concentrate the number of maps that people were playing, however player sentiment around map pools was pretty low, the map roster doesn’t have enough maps where we truly need them, and the impact they had on seasonal identity was fairly low. Additionally, the cadence for maps leaving and returning to the pool didn’t align with the time it took to make changes to the maps. Gibraltar was supposed to return in Season 4 but the playtesting and iteration we were doing for the map started calling that deadline into question. There’s the possibility that we bring map pools back in the far future when we have...

With the launch of Overwatch 2, we have welcomed over 40 million players, both returning and new, to the world of Overwatch! Since becoming free-to-play, we've continued to combat disruptive behaviors, including gameplay sabotage, abusive chat, and cheating. As explained in the introduction to our Defense Matrix initiative, we've already made strides to push toward a fairer gaming experience for all our players. Today, we have a few updates we'd like to share about how we’re continuing to ensure Overwatch 2 is a fun and safe game for everyone to enjoy.

The Overwatch team has been preparing to conclude Season 2 as we gear up to Season 3, and we’re incredibly thankful for all the player feedback we’ve seen over the past months. We’d like to take some time to reflect on this past season and give you a sense of where we’re going in the future.

Here’s more info about what we’re doing now and how we’re thinking about longer-term changes.

Ramattra stormed the hero lineup

We watched Ramattra closely when he first released, including community gameplay and conversations. We started asking ourselves some challenging questions about his kit’s performance based on your feedback—What was the community’s first impressions of his kit? Is his kit approachable? Which abilities and moments are resonating with our community? What are the sore spots?

The next set of questions focused more on his viability—How’s he performing as players learn how to play him? What compositions is he fitting into? Are there early dom...

Welcome back, heroes, for part 2 of our matchmaking series! In part 1, we talked about how matchmaking works: It’s an incredibly complex system that needs to consider many different inputs to make every single game as fair as possible. For part 2, we’re going to address some community concerns regarding the matchmaker from the perspective of the competitive game mode. Let’s get into it! 

TL/DR

• Your ranked games are formed based on your internal matchmaking rating (MMR), regardless of your displayed skill tier. MMR changes based on the result of each match, with the amount of MMR you ...

Hi everyone!

This piece is aimed at looking at some of the topics that have come up in the community over the course of Season 2. This won‘t be comprehensive enough to look at everything that players are talking about, but our intent is to do this every few weeks, so we will be able to start diving into smaller topics as we go. Also, the goal here is to keep you up to date on what we’re thinking and planning, but not necessarily to be the source for all the reasoning and detail behind those decisions.

So let’s get to it!

The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. There was confusion around players’ real rank and how that translated to their skill level, difficulty forming groups with friends, and a negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar). We will be implementing some changes in S3 and quite a few more in S4 all aimed at creating more clarit...

In 2023, the fifth Overwatch World Cup competition will crown the first World Cup champion since 2019. Reigning champion United States and three-time winner South Korea will try to build on their legacy with another gold medal, but the launch of Overwatch 2 brings new competitors to the scene! Will a new champion be crowned this year? It is time to meet your competing countries and regions.

World Cup Trials and Online Qualifier Competing Countries and Regions

The program will consist of three conferences, each with two separate groups of six countries and regions. These countries and regions have been selected based on Overwatch 2 player population data. In February, competition committee applications begin. Additionally, each participating country and region will host World Cup Trials over three weekends in February (Feb. 10–12, Feb. 17–19, and Feb. 24–26). Competition committees will be responsible for organizing additional team tryou...