Season 9 of Overwatch 2 is set to include major changes to the Competitive ecosystem but beyond that, you can expect other significant gameplay tweaks. Every hero, including damage and tank characters, will have a self-healing passive.
This will be a “tuned-down” version of the self-healing supports have, so supports won’t be entirely useless. The idea is to give DPS and tanks “more options in terms of sustaining themselves,” Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller wrote in his latest Director’s Take blog post. “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.”
This is one of several measures the developers are looking at to make the game feel better when players aren’t really gelling as a team. When Overwatch players find harmony and play well together, the results can be magical and it can feel pretty great. However, “the reliance on teammates can simultaneously be one of the best and worst attributes of our game,” as Keller rightly puts it.
“We want to improve this by looking at the game through the lens of teamwork, and make it easier for players to be part of the team while also lessening some of the pain when it’s not happening,” Keller added. “In fact, a lot of our goals for improving the core game stem from looking at Overwatch as a whole, improving the parts of the game that are working and finding fixes for the parts that negatively affect the experience.”
As with everything else in Overwatch 2, self-heal for DPS and supports will be a work in progress. The team will likely retune the efficacy of the passive over time, especially if it makes it seem as though supports are having less of an impact on their team.
Some of the ideas that the team is playing around with aren’t likely to make it to the full game, such as a teammate-only mini-map (which is unnecessary anyway, I reckon). However, Keller does note that one feature the devs are experimenting with is likely to come to the game, and it’s one I’ve been asking for for years.
It’s called Party Frames and it’s the on-screen player health indicator for allies used in PvE modes. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I’m mainly a support player (well, on the rare occasions I venture outside of Mystery Heroes) and being able to see at a glance which ally I should prioritize for healing would be massively helpful.
Extra brownie points to Blizzard if Party Frames makes it to PvP modes and it includes ally Ultimate charge and whether teammates have status effects applied to them, like sleep or hack. I really, really hope Blizzard implements Party Frames in PvP, especially with the option for players to turn the feature off to minimize complaints. For me and many others, these ally health indicators would vastly improve the game.
Elsewhere, Keller touched on a limited-time experiment the Overwatch team is running this weekend. Until January 14, those lining up for Quick Play will notice that games play out a lot faster. A lot of the rules have been modified to make matches quicker, including faster payloads and capture times, zippier respawns and shorter match lengths.
“This particular experiment is designed to look at how these changes affect player psychology,” Keller wrote. “For instance, if a player spends less time waiting to respawn, will getting eliminated by an opponent be less frustrating? If matches are shorter, will each loss have the same sting that it currently does?”
There might be some other benefits to shorter matches too, such as faster matchmaking and making it easier for folks to complete challenges to help them rack up XP. Keller points out that, depending on player feedback from this so-called Quicker Play event, the team might officially incorporate some of these tweaks on a more ongoing basis. “That’s what these Quickplay: Hacked events are designed to do – quicken the feedback loop and allow for swifter implementation of improvements into the game,” Keller wrote.
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