Skip to main content

Overwatch 2 limits include five players and one tank per team

Overwatch 2 aims to bring a great deal of changes, including a reduction to 5v5 gameplay instead of the six member team sizes found in the original game.

Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller explained on Blizzard’s What’s Next livestream that this change should make it easier for players to understand what’s happening in any given match.

Overwatch has changed over time,” Keller said during the livestream. “We’ve gone from having no hero limits at all in the game, to having a hero limit. We ended up introducing a role lock over the course of the game. And we feel like this is the next step in the way that Overwatch ought to be played.”

Keller went on to say that an Overwatch match often has “a lot going on,” and that it can sometimes be hard to track what 11 other players are doing. This change to 5v5 team sizes is an attempt to simplify the gameplay and will hopefully allow players to “make better choices,” as Keller explains.

The other major change is the reduction to one tank player per team. “Tanks can be problematic,” Keller said. “A [damage-per-second] hero is simple — they’re shooting. But a tank has abilities that can be noisy, or when stacked with other tanks can cause problems for other teams to try to overcome and counter.” Keller argued that when a team has two tanks, it can be very “aggressive” to the opposing team.

Race toward the Monte Carlo finish line in Overwatch 2.

Points of interest:
🏎️ Auto Pilot Cars
✨ Sparkles
🛥️ Flying Yachts pic.twitter.com/tlE6d8UJ8R

— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) May 20, 2021

The stream was filled with little details about Overwatch 2’s PvP mode, such as the reveal of the new Monte Carlo map, as well as the announcement that Blizzard is working on more maps for the upcoming Push game mode. Blizzard says it’s experimenting with new modes aside from Push as well. Many of the characters will undergo alterations as part of the sequel.

Overwatch 2 doesn’t have a release date yet, but fans shouldn’t expect it until at least 2022 at this point.

Editors' Recommendations

Joseph Yaden
Joseph Yaden is a freelance journalist who covers Nintendo, shooters, and horror games. He mostly covers game guides for…
Turn this Warzone 2.0 rifle into a powerhouse with one easy trick
Character holding Cronen Squall battle rifle in Warzone 2.0.

There are a handful of midrange to long-range meta weapons in Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0, with nearly all of them performing in a balanced way. Some, like the Kastov 762, hit like a truck, but are hard to control, while the ISO Hemlock deals less damage, but has virtually no recoil.

But the Cronen Squall, a battle rifle that launched during Season 3, is immensely overpowered, and has almost zero recoil. It has the ability to take down an opponent in three to six shots, making it grossly unbalanced, but the weapon does not perform this well by default.
Overpowered Cronen Squall build

Read more
BlizzCon is returning as an in-person event this November
blizzcon 2021 cancelled

After a long hiatus, BlizzCon will return to its in-person event format this year. The Blizzard gaming conference will take place on November 3 and 4 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA.

https://twitter.com/Blizzard_Ent/status/1658884052110434305

Read more
With PVE mode canceled, Overwatch 2 just isn’t the game for me
Two squads of heroes clash in an Overwatch 2 trailer.

When Overwatch 2 was first announced, I had good reason to be excited. I always enjoyed the series’ first installment, but I always wished there was more to it. As someone who’s not a skilled competitive player, I wanted more ways to interact with the shooter that didn’t just involve me going on big losing streaks. So I was elated when Blizzard announced it would bring a full PVE mode to the sequel. Finally, I’d have a way to get invested in the world and characters of Overwatch and progress through a solo campaign while doing it.

It turns out that dream was a fantasy. In a recent interview with Gamespot, game director Aaron Keller revealed that plans for the mode had been scrapped. Overwatch 2 would still get some story content bundled in with new seasons, but the grand vision for a Hero mode with its own skill trees was no more. Not only that, but plans had changed a year and a half ago -- something that was never communicated to fans when the game’s multiplayer component launched last October.

Read more