Is Overwatch 2 Improving? — Season 10 Changes

So, there are only a few days left before season 9 of Overwatch 2 ends and a new one begins. After my previous article about the state of the game and the differences from the original, the game was subject to a lot of change — and honestly — for the better.

To start with, a much more transparent competitive system was introduced back in season nine, one that is frankly even better than the system that was used in the original Overwatch: now, you can see how close you are to ranking up or down with percentage, and there are little widgets showing you why you gained as much as you did. That same season also balanced the game further by introducing more role passives and giving tanks more health to try and compensate for there only being one in a team, although playing any off-tank like D.Va still feels terrible.

Now, although the esports scene in Overwatch isn’t very popular or active, they have improved it a lot from the old Overwatch League. The new Champions Series is more professional and similar to other esports tournaments such as the Counter-Strike Majors: teams are no longer weird look-alikes of real-world sports teams, the tournament structure is a lot fairer and has regional qualifiers, and an open, well-known esports registration platform is now used.

Season 10, however, might be the best thing that’s happened to Overwatch 2. There aren’t any huge gameplay changes (unfortunately, 6v6 isn’t coming back…), but the upcoming changes are still very exciting and will definitely make me play the game a lot more:

Hero Releases — Newly released heroes will no longer need to be unlocked through the battle pass and will instead be automatically available to all players who have completed the first-time user experience. This is a change addressing the biggest complaint I and many others had about Overwatch 2.

Monetisation — You can now earn Overwatch Coins through the free battle pass, instead of having to complete weekly challenges for only 60 coins a week. Mythic Skins are also getting an entirely new shop for them, allowing you to only partially unlock one and unlock past ones. These changes, paired with the huge improvement in how new hero releases are handled, show a really positive trend of fairer and more consumer-friendly monetisation in Overwatch 2.

New Additions — A lot of new content and systems are being introduced this season, making it a lot better and much more fun to play. A whole new hero is being added — Venture — the first non-binary character in any AAA game I’ve ever played! They’re also super fun to play. Wide Groups are now a thing, allowing you to play with friends whose rank differs from yours by a lot, at the cost of being put only against people who also queued that way. The Avoid as Teammate feature now allows up to 10 people to be avoided, allowing you to make sure you don’t play again with the really toxic people you might get sometimes. Surveys will start being a thing that you might randomly get after finishing a match, allowing the developers to better understand the community requests (it’s loot boxes, please bring back loot boxes). These will obviously be optional, so if you don’t want to answer them, you don’t have to.

That’s not to say season 10 is going to make the game perfect — there are still a lot of issues not addressed, mostly about the game’s monetisation. Firstly, as I keep saying, loot boxes should come back. They were so perfectly implemented in the original Overwatch that any other system would be worse, and I’m still salty about these being gone. Another huge problem that isn’t being resolved is how most tanks are designed with 6v6 in mind and not 5v5. D.Va, Zarya, Wrecking Ball, etc. were all created with kits that don’t fit being the main tank in a match, and it’s honestly just not fun to play them in 5v5.

Overall, though, Overwatch 2 is improving a lot, and that might be thanks to the not-that-recent-anymore Microsoft acquisition of Blizzard. While I am not a big fan of monopolies, and Microsoft purchasing basically every successful gaming company they can is bad for the industry, I can’t really complain about the direction of the game after this acquisition, and considering that all of these big changes are coming right after Bobby Kotick left, it’s very easy to come to the conclusion Microsoft is finally allowing the passionate people working on the game to change it into what it always should have been.