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...