The state of Overwatch 2 in the three-ish years since its release could be mapped onto the “we’re so back, it’s so over” meme chart. Peaks and valleys, false starts and lost features, and waxing and waning player numbers have plagued Blizzard’s hero shooter sequel, which was promised as one thing and has since morphed into another entirely. The years-long identity crisis Overwatch 2 has faced since its 2022 launch has greatly affected its playerbase, and the launch of hero shooter Marvel Rivals last December seemed to take an even bigger chunk out of it.
Since the start of this year, Overwatch 2 has been moving to reinvent itself, leaning back into its competitive multiplayer core and away from the PvE focus it promised in 2019 and then only half-heartedly fulfilled. Though this new direction may alienate the players who look to Overwatch for lighthearted fare and beloved character stories, it depicts a self-assuredness that the series hasn’t shown in half a decade. After playing over 800 hours of the game, I feel like Overwatch 2 knows what it is now, and it’s doubling down.
Ahead of Season 18, I spoke to game director Aaron Keller and lead gameplay designer Alec Dawson. Although the interview was brief, Keller and Dawson were refreshingly transparent about the developmental hiccups and their plans for the future.
Since its 2022 launch (when it replaced the original game entirely), Overwatch 2’s focus has pinballed between PvE and PvP. Multiplayer remains a constant, yet dev support for half-baked modes like Hero Mastery Gauntlet disappeared a few seasons ago, and there hasn’t been a new release of extensive, $15 “story missions” (which were pitched as regular content drops) since the first batch released last summer.
When Overwatch 2 was announced at BlizzCon 2019, then-lead director Jeff Kaplan pitched the sequel as an extension of the original game, with a robust PvE mode as its major pillar. That mode, meant to attract players who weren’t into competitive multiplayer (as well as existing Overwatch fans who loved the characters and wanted more lore), would offer an in-depth narrative set in the Overwatch universe, and skill trees for each hero that would let players tailor them to their personal preference.
According to Jason Schreier, PvE was Kaplan’s focus for the sequel. After Kaplan left in 2021, a new team took over and shifted back to PvP, launching an Overwatch 2 that was nothing like the initial pitch and seemed caught between two vastly different ideologies. Schreier has also written that there was an aggressive push to expand Overwatch’s dev team to be more Call of Duty-like, with a larger team size (“hundreds more people”), a push led by former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. Kaplan reportedly resisted this push, hoping to maintain the more intimate team structure and dev process.
You can see that tug-of-war play out in Overwatch 2. It is now August 2025, nearly three years after Overwatch 2 launched. Jeff Kaplan is long gone, PvE is long dead, and the team is wholly focused on multiplayer.
Overwatch faced external challenges as well. Not long after the game’s official release out of early access in October 2023, Microsoft completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The company’s new ownership led to several rounds of layoffs, including ones in January and September 2024 that affected several members of the game’s narrative team. (Workers on Blizzard’s Story and Franchise Development team unionized this month, joining other unions that have sprung up in the wake of Microsoft’s repeated layoffs.)
Today, Overwatch 2 reviews sit at “mostly negative” on Steam, and reported player counts don’t come close to the game at its peak. Players have long felt Overwatch 2’s development process has been indecisive, as if Blizzard has been trying to relearn the ins and outs of its own game for the better part of three years. It’s hard to understand what could have caused such bizarre decisions as replacing Overwatch 1 with Overwatch 2 after promising the exact opposite would happen, switching to a free-to-play model (and gating the more sought-after skins behind expensive paywalls), and removing a player from every match.
When I use the term “indecisiveness” to describe the history of Overwatch 2’s development, Keller doesn’t balk. “I think that's a really fair criticism of the game, especially in previous years,” he says. “Players want to see a cohesive vision for what the game is supposed to be. And I think that’s a lot better this year…boy, I do not want to be the person to put words in players’ mouths, right? But I do feel like they respond a lot when you take big risks with a product, or put big, new pieces of content into a game… That’s something they like to see—as long as it works out right?” He laughs.
Those big risks were first introduced earlier this year, not long after an Overwatch 2 event where the team revealed a set of wild (and some might say game-breaking) changes. The biggest change came in the form of perks, which introduced a level of customization to Overwatch’s roster of heroes and their locked ability kits. Rather than pre-building your hero of choice before a match, playing through a game earns you minor and major perks, which you choose on the fly.
When coupled with Stadium, a best-of-seven game mode with an MMO-style armory system that lets players power up a select group of heroes with even more absurd perks, Overwatch 2 began tailoring its experience to players who like to show off their skills, whether that’s experimenting with hero builds, perfecting certain heroes (as swapping characters mid-match loses your progress towards unlocking a perk), or thinking on the fly.
Keller describes the team’s shift away from PvE modes as a “realignment process” based on feedback and internal monitoring of player behavior. When I ask if there’s a specific moment that incited this shift, Dawson points to Junkenstein’s Lab. The limited-time Halloween game mode, which introduced “mutations” that affected individual heroes or the entire team, is the precursor to perks.
“As we developed perks, there was some trepidation—we’re changing the core gameplay of Overwatch, that’s super scary, right?” Dawson says. “There’s a lot of weight there. But as we saw the game start to develop, we saw Junkenstein’s Lab and how the community responded to these wacky changes—it was one of our most successful events we’ve ever done—we thought ‘oh, maybe we should really lean into some of this.’”
Overwatch fans were, by and large, wholly unimpressed and immensely frustrated by the rollout of the sequel and its subsequent updates, and at a certain point, the team started listening to a specific group of fans above all else: competitive PvP players.
In the last six months, we’ve gotten an Overwatch unconcerned with lore codexes and horde-style story missions; one focused instead on sweaty grinders and semi-frustrated casuals who want to use perks to climb competitive ranks or experiment with well-known characters (though Keller and Dawson point out that Stadium is getting a more casual quick play mode to try to make it more approachable).
This also isn’t an Overwatch struggling to make every potential player happy with half-measures and wonky roll-outs.
“What is it that our active players are just not playing every day, and what is it that they’re asking for in the game?” Keller says. “We did have this moment where we had to shift the direction for a pretty large part of the team to be really about doubling down on this PvP, competitive hero shooter.”
When discussing changes to core gameplay and new content additions in the years since launch, Dawson says that the team was too conservative. Keller agrees.
“That’s a really valid critique you could leverage at Overwatch and the way we developed some of our features in the past,” he says. “And it’s something we’ve let go of. We are trying to take bigger swings, bigger risks, and bring more change to the game faster than we did in the past…that was one of our big takeaways going forward.”
I ask if there’s a proper way to do these kinds of games: free-to-play, live-service titles that need to somehow generate revenue over years (which usually requires a new product) and draw in new players without alienating a base. Keller won’t speak broadly, but will speak about his own live-service ethos.
“A lot of people play these types of games as their main hobby or a lifestyle, this isn’t just about ‘can I have fun tonight?’ It’s about giving them the confidence that the time they’re investing is going to pay off, not just over the course of the next month, but maybe the next year,” he says.
Keller and Dawson both tell me there’s more on the horizon: Not just the slew of new perks and a new support hero coming with Season 18 on August 26, but “bigger things” beyond that. Whether this relatively newfound commitment to competitive PvP gameplay will help recover Overwatch’s lapsed playerbase, or appeal to an entirely new crowd, remains to be seen. But despite the rocky journey to this point, Overwatch’s developers are feeling good.
“Overwatch is in the best place it’s ever been,” Keller says.
Correction, 8/25/25, 3:47pm--A previous version of this article incorrectly stated how many rounds are in Stadium mode.
