Overwatch 2 Director On Going Free-To-Play, Losing Loot Boxes, Creating A

When Blizzard announced that the sequel to Overwatch would include a PvE element and a story campaign, I started thinking that Overwatch 2 would be a significant change to the experience. In the time since that announcement, however, the team-based hero shooter has only undergone more and more departures from what fans might have expected from the sequel.

Not only has the PvE been decoupled from the PvP mode, but Overwatch 2 is now making the transition to free-to-play, becoming a live-service title that Blizzard hopes to support with a seasonal structure, a new business model, and a content roadmap the likes of which Overwatch never did.

GameSpot spoke to Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller about the big changes coming to the game. We discussed what the current state of the Overwatch development team is and how it has adjusted to meet the needs of the much more demanding seasonal and free-to-play model, as well as the rationale for removing loot boxes from the game. In our conversation, Keller also delved into the new hero, Junker Queen, who is one of three new heroes joining Overwatch 2 alongside Sojourn and a mysterious third support character at the game’s launch in October.

It’s been a bit of a challenge on numerous fronts to bring Overwatch 2 to where it is currently. What’s the mood of the team all these years into development and coming off the alpha?

Aaron Keller: This is a really exciting time for the team. Overwatch launched six years ago in 2016 and we’ve released updates to the game. But this October, when we release Overwatch 2, it will be the largest update we’ve ever released for Overwatch. There’ll be new heroes, new maps, new game modes, and a totally reworked PvP system. For us to have been working on this for so long, over the course of years, without really being able to show it to the public–this is a moment that the team is now able to focus on and get really, really excited about. So to have the game out in the public and to have an actual launch date for the game is really thrilling for us.

You described it as releasing an update to the game and there’s been a lot of discussions about Overwatch 2 being a meaningful update. How do you think of Overwatch 2 as it currently is, given that you’ve presented it in a way that is now different from the initial pitch?

We are doing things with Overwatch 2 that would be difficult to do without the context of it being a sequel. We are reworking the PvP experience for Overwatch; we’re shifting from a 6v6 team format to a 5v5 team format–it’s removing one of the tanks from the lineup. We’re also introducing role passives for every hero, reworking and modifying a lot of the heroes in the game, [and] removing crowd control abilities from the game.

I think that Overwatch has a certain magic to it when you play it–there’s this mojo. It just feels great to play it. And we’re able to keep all of that going forward, but at the same time, Overwatch 2 does feel like something fresh and something new. And I think it’s easier to do something like that in the context of a sequel.

On top of that, this is the largest update we’ve ever released for the game. There are a lot of new things coming out in October with new heroes and new maps. We have a new competitive system coming out and there’s so much more to come. So by going free-to-play with Overwatch we are not just giving people a different way of interacting with the game; the development team itself is thinking about the way we create and release content in a totally new way. The amount of content it takes to run a free-to-play live service game is orders of magnitude more than what it takes to run something that you put into a box and sell. So the whole Overwatch team [has] totally restructured and grown. It’s over three times the size it was when we launched the original game, and it’s structured in such a way that we can simultaneously work on things for the launch [for] the rest of this year, but next year as well.

I think this is also a shift in the way we think about releasing big pieces of the game. So rather than just developing things and holding them, and then combining them to put into a box, we’re now committed to releasing them when they’re ready and doing that for the long term. We’re still working on all of the PvE parts of Overwatch 2 that we’ve always envisioned for it, but now rather than releasing them in a box, we’re going to be releasing them as part of our seasonal cadence. I know that there’s a lot here, but really this is a demarcation point for Overwatch where the…