Anyone who’s spent extended gameplay time in any team-based multiplayer game like Overwatch 2 knows just how frustrating it can be to play with teammates who won’t play together.
OW2 game director Aaron Keller addressed and admitted to this being an issue in a developer blog on Jan. 12, where he revealed that the game’s next season will make a big change by adding a “tuned-down” passive self-healing ability to both tanks and damage heroes.
“This should give non-support players more options in terms of sustaining themselves,” Keller said. “It should also take some of the pressure off support players to keep everyone alive since individual players now have more control of their own health pool.”
Everyone’s experienced both the good and bad of the team-based structure of a game like OW2, where things feel great when they’re working and awful when your team has a solo Hanzo who tried to push an entire team by themselves.
“Heroes, maps and game modes are all designed to require teams to work together in order to successfully win a match,” Keller said. “When a team works together—each player using their hero to their fullest potential while relying on each other to execute a strategy—the game feels magical. There’s really no other FPS like it. However, when this isn’t happening and players are all working on their own, the game is far from magical and can become frustrating. The reliance on teammates can simultaneously be one of the best and worst attributes of our game.”
Keller calls the addition of self-healing for the whole roster, and not just supports, a change that shifts the balance and “something that we are constantly evaluating.” He said Blizzard still wants OW2 “to be defined by team strategy and mechanics, but we feel this can be pulled back a bit now and possibly more in the future.”
Other potential additions to OW2 to help improve the experience include Party Frames such as the health indicators in PvE modes, backfill improvements, changes to the scoreboard, ways to mitigate spawn camping, Quick Play changes like this weekend’s “Quicker Play” variant, and an ally-only minimap.
“Some of these systems are under discussion and some are in development,” he said. “I don’t think a mini-map has a high likelihood of shipping, but I do think that Party Frames are likely.”
Keller said he does not imagine OW2 being the same game “a year or two out” and that it “should always evolve with new systems and features that serve our players,” such as a map voting system, changes to Competitive, or more drastic changes like the one to self-healing.
Overwatch 2’s season nine should begin sometime toward the end of February.
