Blizzard Director’s Take addresses calls for Overwatch 2 6v6's return

Well, sort of

Blizzard

Overwatch director Aaron Keller published a lengthy Director’s Take blog in response to continued clamoring for Overwatch 2 6v6 playstyles to return. It’s a lengthy post that outlines why the change to 5v5 happened anyway, though despite running on for nearly 10 pages, Keller didn’t actually have anything concrete to say about what the multiplayer game’s design team wants to do next.

The first several pages are a lengthy overview of why Blizzard switched to 5v5, and the gist of it is twofold. Queue times were dragging on, since most players want to play DPS heroes, and while implementing Role Queue solved that problem to an extent, many people complained that 6v6 matches with two tanks were simply not fun. It was too easy for skilled teams to create impenetrable shields and block opponents from making meaningful progress, Keller said.

Keller also mentioned frequent complaints from players who mained DPS heroes, where they said their role felt “undermined” by tanks and support units who could “undo their playmaking,” an odd complaint to take seriously when the goal of the game is to counter your opponents’ skills. Another vocal sector of fans was upset that support heroes had to heal too much, and both streams of feedback pushed Blizzard to make Overwatch 2 a game about dealing damage instead of learning roles.

Keller acknowledged that Overwatch 2 can feel “samey” at times as a result, which is a change of pace from a few months ago. I asked the design team during a roundtable panel about Illari in Season 6 how they'd respond to criticisms that Overwatch 2 homogenized gameplay, and the response was that they'd never heard those complaints.

Anyway, Keller said yet another common criticism during the Overwatch 1 era was that 6v6 matches also felt “samey,” so it seems like the Overwatch team is in a position where it’s not going to make anyone happy for long. These are the kinds of things you’d expect to hear before a game launches – not almost two years after the fact – so it’s a little unusual to see them laid out in such detail now. 

Keller ended the post by saying the design team isn’t ruling out limited-time 6v6 modes to see how they might even work. Whether these happen in Hacked events remains to be seen. He said he also wants to reassess how Blizzard solved the original Overwatch’s problems and experiment with other team compositions and gameplay styles that restore some of the freedom of play that people want back.

When any of this might happen is anyone’s guess. Keller’s goals seemed hypothetical sounded very much in the early planning stages, so it’s probably best not to expect anything in the near future