Overwatch 2As with most live service games, breaking changes are often implemented that don’t necessarily persist. An experimental model emerged in 2020, changing the original model OverwatchThe team consists of one tank, three damage heroes, and two supports, but that quickly recovers. Hero adjustments come and go.But recently Blizzard has made questionable decision After testing adjustments, this condition became permanent – and the latest tests are even more worrying. In an upcoming patch, the team will remove hero restrictions that restrict teams from using multiple of the same hero, even in character-locked mode, and to that I say: please don’t do this.
This news comes from the new director’s shoot A blog post from game director Aaron Keller, in which he talks about the upcoming balance changes and adjustments. As part of the mid-season patch, Blizzard is nerfing the new damaging hero passive skill, which reduces the healing effect of the hero by 20% when dealing damage. The purpose of this change was to allow these heroes to do more damage output than healing to get more kills, but after using it during the first half of Season 9, Blizzard adjusted it to give 15% less healing to support heroes in combat Opportunity.
The mid-season patch also saw some standard hero tweaks, such as giving Ana and Lifeweaver increased healing output and buffing Doomfist’s ultimate ability. As well as giving Mauga’s Heart Overdrive a 100 passive over-health buff to increase his survivability. “Wrecking Ball” will remain the same, but Keller said he will be doing a minor rework for season 10.
Near the end of the post, Keller talked about the next iteration of Quick Play: “Hacking,” a temporary mode that replaces standard Quick Play to test possible changes. The last time Blizzard did this, it increased the speed of almost everything in the game, from target acquisition to payload movement speed, and eventually implemented them into the main game. This time around, the team is trying to remove hero restrictions that prevent players from choosing the same character on a team.
original Overwatch Initially, players are allowed to choose whoever they want and fight with a team consisting entirely of one character. In 2016, just a few months after the game launched, Blizzard implemented hero restrictions, which had been the standard for most of the game’s lifespan, while also offering an unlimited mode in the arcade menu, allowing people to play whatever they wanted. People who play. Keller says this possible change is meant to give players more freedom, but if the game is balanced and designed around hero co-design, the changes could make for interesting chaos, but the whole thing sounds better suited to an arcade mode.
Considering the faster target capture changes were implemented after testing in a quick game, there’s good reason to believe that if Blizzard is testing this, it could end up becoming the new standard. But as someone who primarily plays Quick Play, I’m frustrated that the mode has become a dumping ground for experimentation, when it should serve as a simulation of a competitive experience without the pressure of ranking.
If removing hero restrictions is going to be the new norm, then I wonder what the point is of having various modes with different rulesets to cater for other playstyles. If No Limits already existed, would the goal be to provide a larger player pool for each mode by stripping away what makes those modes unique? perhaps.But now this sounds like a way to keep things interesting without putting much thought into why these modes are different in the first place – or why people like Overwatch first.