It has been so long since we’ve heard anything about Overwatch 2 combined with the endless scandals at Activision Blizzard and the buyout from Microsoft, it was easy to think that the game had quietly been taken out behind the shed and put out of its misery.
But apparently the game is still alive and kicking as its developer breaks radio silence to upload a short developer update video to YouTube.
With the beloved Jeff Kaplan long gone from the company, game director Aaron Keller gets us up to speed with what’s happening.
Keller starts right out of the gate by telling us that development on the game is going great, the public will be playing soon and they realise that being silent for so long wasn’t the best idea.
The game director also acknowledges a massive problem that basically killed the momentum of the entire Overwatch series: after the announcement of the sequel updates to the original game shrivelled up, which is a death knell for any live game.
While Keller makes no mention of undoing that decision or improving Overwatch 1 in any way, he does reveal that PvP testing on Overwatch 2 begins this week behind closed doors for employees working on the game and esports players.
The rest of us can look forward to a closed PvP public beta in “late April” that can be signed up for here.
That site reveals the following for the beta:
- 5v5 PvP
- New hero: Sojourn
- New mode: Push
- New ping system
- Hero reworks (Orisa, Doomfist, Bastion and Sombra)
- 4 new maps (Circuit Royal [Escort], Midtown [Hybrid], New Queen Street [Push] and Colosseo [Push])
After this more public betas will take place this year. Each one will be followed by more developer updates so that, hopefully, long stretches of no updates won’t happen again.
This all seems promising but the way the ball has been dropped with Overwatch and the floundering the series has been left to do won’t be soon forgotten.
It’s crazy to think that the first Overwatch was a titan of the videogame industry that was discussed daily and felt like the biggest fish in the pond. Now the announcement of the sequel’s beta is here and all we can think about is, hey, this game isn’t dead.
