Blizzard has explained in detail how theOverwatch 2battle pass and associated monetisation will work.
The information comes from a briefing document and roundtable group interview I attended last night.
There are no loot boxes in Overwatch 2, in case you didn’t know.
New heroes will be unlockable at tier 55, of around 80 total tiers.
The new hero in Season One is Kiriko, the support character who leaked recently.
It’s only completely new players who need to unlock them.
Here are the two battle pass offerings side by side for Season One.
But as it stands, there are no plans to sell them there at all.
“That’s not to say that we wouldn’t, somewhere down the line.
But we don’t have any specific plans to do that in the near future.”
These weren’t discussed in detail but are presumably relatively insignificant.
There are also name cards, which sound like titles to unlock.
There are special name cards offered for going about the battle pass tier-cap of 80 and into prestige tiers.
New heroes will not enter Competitive Play immediately.
I do not know how much they’ll cost.
Additionally, Season One will see the return of the popular event, Wrath of the Bride of Junkenstein.
The plan is to bring back other time-limited events from Overwatch’s history too.
And there are new ones coming.
That’s it, broadly.
Here are some chopped excerpts from the Q&A.
I’ve picked out a couple of highlights in bold.
How long is it going to take to unlock a new hero, in play terms?
“A question about ‘how long does it take to get all the heroes?’
Why new seasons every 9 weeks?
Aaron Keller, game director:“There’s probably a few ways to answer a question like this.
One lens that you could look at it through is that of the player.
And if you go much shorter, actually sometimes it can be a little bit disruptive.
“We are intentionally making a hero every other season.
Every time we introduce a hero to the game, it has a really big splash.
Like I said, players want more content for Overwatch.
We love building things for this universe.
We spendsomuch time building our assets.
We pour so much love, dedication, passion and energy into all of these things.
For instance, we’ve been playtesting our Season Eight hero for months now.
We’re working on maps that I think are releasing in Season Thirteen.
We have a lot of ambitions and a lot of strategies around this.
What kind of new heroes are they working on?
“And on top of that, there’s other things that we look to add with new heroes.
A lot of times it can be a gameplay style.
If you think of a healer like Mercy, [that style] appeals to specific player types.
AndI think that there’s room in the hero roster to make another healer in a similar vein.
So there’s three roles in Overwatch: there’s tank, DPS, and support.
