While Marvel Rivals has been incredibly successful for developer NetEase Games, many have been wondering how Blizzard feels about a new title seemingly stealing the thunder from Overwatch 2. Director Aaron Keller has revealed in an interview with GamesRadar that the team has to stop “playing it safe”.
For context, while Overwatch 2 has still maintained a healthy player base, more and more players have been opting to spend their time with Marvel Rivals instead. Even Overwatch 2‘s Twitch viewership dropped back in January, with Marvel Rivals getting more viewers since its release.
Keller spoke about the new sense of competition that Blizzard is feeling from Marvel Rivals, since the two games are quite similar in genre and gameplay styles. He refers to this competition as “kind of exciting”.
“We’re obviously in a new competitive landscape that I think, for Overwatch, we’ve never really been in before, to this extent where there’s another game that’s so similar to the one that we’ve created,” Keller said in the interview. “There’s actually something kind of exciting about this, for a few reasons.”
The Overwatch 2 director then pointed to the recently-announced Season 15 of the game as a good example of how the company is looking to shake things up in response to the popularity of Marvel Rivals. He refers to the team working on Overwatch 2 as feeling internal pressure, prompting themselves to make the best possible game that they can.
“There is pressure on the Overwatch team, and a lot of it is internal,” Keller said. “It’s [asking] how do we make the best possible game that we can? And we’ve been feeling it for a while.”
“We want to inject a bit of freshness into the game, but not just for variety’s sake. We want to increase the depth of play,” Keller continued. “So with perks, there’s some choices in there that we hope add depth to what it means to play any one of our heroes in the game, and we hope that it adds strategy over the course of a match, because now you’re able to pick things that either augment what your hero is doing – or maybe you’re going to use it to counter what somebody is doing on the other team.”
Season 15 of Overwatch 2, titled Honor & Glory, is slated for release on February 18. The update is going to bring quite a few new features to the game, including the addition of Perks as a new game mechanic. Divided into Minor and Major perks, the system allows players to refine their play style with any of the playable characters the deeper they get into a match. For example, a Torbjorn player will be able to pick between having a more powerful level 3 turret, or if they would prefer level 2 turrets that can be built along walls or ceilings instead.
Along with the gameplay and balance changes, Overwatch 2 will also be resetting player ranks. A new reward system is also being added to the game in the form of loot boxes that will allow players to earn more cosmetics.
