Today Blizzard published a lengthy Overwatch 2 Director’s Take addressing the Reinhardt-sized elephant in the room: whether or not the sequel should revert back to the original game’s 6v6 format. Written by game director Aaron Keller, the massive blog post traces back to Overwatch 1 and the major changes made throughout its lifetime and up through the shift to 5v5 for the sequel, explaining Blizzard’s thought process behind the franchise’s biggest adjustments. But by the end of the nearly 4,000-word blog post, it’s clear that the team is still struggling to define Overwatch 2, which once again leads us back to the question: Why does it exist in the first place?
Overwatch 2 was originally meant to exist alongside the original game, bringing new PvE elements and a shared multiplayer ecosystem across both titles. That changed rather drastically ahead of its October 2022 launch, so much so that Overwatch 1 was completely shut down and replaced by the sequel. The promised PvE modes were stripped down and turned into something far less interesting that we may never see more of anyway, but its biggest controversy was the switch to a 5v5 team composition rather than the 6v6 structure that defined the game for six years.
The Overwatch 2 problem
As Keller outlines in the blog post, Overwatch has undergone three major gameplay changes since its 2016 launch: Hero Limits, which only allowed one player to play as any individual hero, rather than being able to stack a team of six Genjis; Role Queue, which helped balance matches by forcing a 2-2-2 (two tanks, two DPS, two support) format and dropped queue times; and 5v5. All of those changes have led to where we are today, a spot that many feel is stagnant and unenjoyable.
Role Queue ensures you’re not playing competitive matches with no healers (which was incredibly frustrating in the original game), but Keller acknowledges that this consistency made Overwatch “start to feel samey.” I’ve played hundreds of hours of competitive Overwatch 2, and so many of my matches have blurred together into a streak of sameness. “Could there be an in-between version that softens the original problems without completely solving them and also isn’t quite as reactive as our current Role Queue system?” Keller wonders.
Unfortunately, the shift to 5v5 also somewhat flattened Overwatch 2’s gameplay. “The world of 6v6 could have really high, highs but reaaaaally low, lows,” Keller wrote. “One of the design goals of 5v5 was to try to raise that floor, even though it was at the expense of some of those high moments.” The 5v5 change removed the secondary tank role, which helps prevent matches from getting stunlocked and drastically reduces queue times, but also fundamentally alters the way every single role is played.
Support players, no longer tasked with keeping two massive tanks afloat, have to be more aggressive, adding their damage to an already high-damage pool thanks to the dual DPS characters. And the tank, rather than having a secondary, or off-tank, to support them, is now the biggest hero on the field and the most likely to bear the brunt of every enemy player’s damage and utilities. Tanks now play to exist, to stay alive, rather than playmake.
“Having two [tanks] allowed one to focus on protecting their backline while the other held ground or pushed into the enemy team,” Keller writes about 6v6. “The tank role had a lot of depth in understanding how to work with the other tank on the team.” And as Overwatch players have pointed out, so many of the tanks’ existing kits are tailored for 6v6 play, which too-often renders off-tank choices like Wrecking Ball completely unviable, especially in competitive matches.
The struggle to balance tanks for 5v5 play has persisted for nearly two years. In June, Blizzard admitted that tanks were miserable to play after a damage hero passive weakened healing and made them feel like they were made of glass, and a subsequent tank-focused patch wildly overcorrected, making them far too powerful.
“The past year and a half has shown us that there are issues with balancing tanks for 5v5, as well [as 6v6],” the blog post reads. No shit.
Five versus six
The crux of what many players believe is the issue with the 5v5 swap is that the majority of Overwatch 2’s characters, maps, and modes were built for 6v6 play. Some suggest that Blizzard, rather than making major changes like nerfing shields (which would render problematic Overwatch 1 metas like pirate ship useless), the team just pulled the second tank. Pulling that second tank removes freedom of choice for tank players and robs us of the variety of gameplay styles and approaches that comes from finding the perfect balance between two tanks.
It also puts more pressure on the supports to keep that singular tank afloat, while ensuring that DPS players have to choose specific heroes to counter the singular, beefed-up enemy tank. Not to mention the burden the singular tank player has to bear—if they can’t keep up with the enemy tank, matches are wildly unfun for them and their squad.
Warring team composition factions within the Overwatch community are nearly split right down the middle, as evidenced by a March poll from former OWL esports player Jake Lyon, in which 51.9% of players said they preferred 5v5 to the original 6v6 supporters’ 48.1%. That almost-even split tells me one thing: this is more about personal preference than what is objectively better, as there are downsides to both formats. As Keller writes in the blog, “Our players have different opinions and preferences about the ideal number of players in an Overwatch match, and so does our team.”
For more flexible, top-down players, 5v5 is a perfectly fine experience, as they can easily swap between any character in their role’s roster to ensure the match is a success. For people like myself, a former Moira one-trick who expanded her support roster to five or so solid picks, 5v5 can feel incredibly limiting—and therefore frustrating. As Keller and others have made clear, there are pros and cons to both versions of Overwatch’s core multiplayer mode. There’s no singular, simplistic solution to this problem that Blizzard has inadvertently created.
Now what?
Keller’s blog post is clear: Blizzard is “focused on making 5v5 the best experience that it can be.” But, the team is also “open-minded to re-evaluating our decisions based on your actions and feedback.” As we’ve seen in the last year or so, Blizzard has experimented with gameplay changes in its Quick Play: Hacked mode, including increasing the speed of objective captures and payload movement (a change it ultimately kept in the game). An upcoming Quick Play: Hacked will experiment with team comps in ways “that aren’t quite as rigid as set composition but not as loose as Open Queue.” But what about 6v6?
“We’re looking at running a series of events to try out different core team composition formats in Overwatch 2,” Keller promises. He doesn’t outline what those events will be or what they’ll entail, but I don’t envy the work Blizzard will have to do if it plans on implementing 6v6 in any form. As much as myself and other disgruntled Overwatch players would like to think it’s as simple as offering both 6v6 and 5v5 Quickplay and Competitive modes, there is a lot going on under the hood that could break.
Overwatch 2’s updated UI and improved graphics could creak and strain with the addition of two more heroes in each match, and changes made to hero’s kits could feel either perfectly balanced or wildly off depending on whether you’re in a 5v5 or 6v6 match. And Keller voices concerns with “opening Pandora’s box” when it comes to queue times, which will likely increase with the inclusion of an extra player on your squad. “The team was not able to solve this problem previously,” he admits. But would 6v6 loyalists even care that they have to wait longer to get their preferred game mode back?
This latest Director’s Take promises that “this isn’t the last time [Blizzard will] be getting into 5v5 or 6v6,” so I’m sure the debate will continue on for many more months. I just want to get out of gold in support, please.
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