Overwatch 2 opens the door to a return for 6v6

A couple of years into the Overwatch 2 experience, player angst has reached a point where the people making the game are considering bringing the old 12-person matches back. Today’s blog post from the developers at Blizzard says that, finally, “we’re exploring how we can test different forms of 6v6 in the game to gauge the results.”

Game director Aaron Keller also notes that issues like hero balancing, game performance, and what might happen to queue times if players have a choice between the two formats are questions the team needs to answer but is at least ready to start considering.

Other than making a full-priced game free to play and laying out promises about player-vs-environment content that weren’t exactly fulfilled, the shift to Overwatch 2 also removed one tank player from each team. Removing one of the largest characters who dealt and received the most punishment made things much simpler but also made it seem like the outcome of the game depended a little too much on that one role.

If your tank is getting countered or outplayed — there’s often not a lot left to do.

So, should they bring the old style back? It’s not really that simple. I’ve played the game in all roles throughout all of these iterations, and I see arguments on both sides of the issue. There’s no question that the new game has better queue times, which the post attributes to the fact that the actual number of players queueing for each role has always more closely fit a ratio of one tank per team.

But even in the old system, I agree that the games were chaotic, and now there’s a playerbase full of people who’ve never experienced it. Good luck explaining ultimate combos to someone who might have never heard most of the voice lines from tank teammates talking to each other.

While it’s unclear when the 6v6 playtests will happen, Keller says that at least one “Hacked” event this season will try out “other ways of putting a team together that aren’t quite as rigid as a set composition, but not as loose as Open Queue,” to see how the developers can address some issues.