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The upcoming Overwatch 2 Beta is upon us, and the team is incredibly excited to welcome players on Xbox and PlayStation and bring Junker Queen, Rio, and multiple balance changes to the game. Player feedback is the most integral part of the Beta process, illuminating areas we need to change and bringing us one step closer to Overwatch 2’s launch. Before our next beta begins, we’d like to share a few of our goals so you know what we’re focused on testing and to help everyone make the most of their experience.
Technical goals
This beta will be the first time Xbox and PlayStation players get their hands on Overwatch 2, and we’re looking to test game servers by significantly scaling up capacity. This helps us determine server load and performance as we mass test across platforms for the first time in Overwatch 2.
We are keeping a sharp eye out for bugs and performance issues so that we can polish the game and provide the best experience possible for our players during this beta, and later this year at launch. This part of development includes listening to feedback and using it to improve the quality of our work, so we’re excited to hear what players have to say as we work to finalize the build for Oct. 4.
Game design and balance goals
Between betas, we’ve made several changes that will have an impact on upcoming gameplay. For example, the Damage Passive speed boost has been removed and replaced with a new passive that allows Damage heroes to maintain up to 30% of their Ultimate charge when swapping to other Damage heroes. We’re looking closely at how people are playing across all roles, and we’re still paying particular attention to Support performance to address player feedback prior to launch.
The team is currently ideating, designing, and testing some new abilities we can give existing Support heroes, beginning with significant Moira changes coming in the balance patch during this beta.
Push has also been the subject of some changes over the past few weeks; after reviewing player feedback, we’ve decided to add two minutes to the timebank. This will extend the game from eight minutes to ten, giving both teams a little more time to push TS-1 to the end.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard many player requests for a competitive experience in the Beta. While we continue to focus our work on deploying a redesigned competitive experience for launch, we’ve decided to enable a partial competitive ruleset that will allow teams to play out the full maps while still having backfills if a player disconnects.
Continued communication with our players
Just like we did throughout the first beta, we plan to address balance changes and explain to our players what we are doing and why.
And make sure to keep an eye out for more details on additional topics as we close the gap on Overwatch 2’s upcoming Oct. 4 launch. Thanks for being a part of the ride, and we’ll see you during the second beta!