Off the back of Marvel Rivals' mammoth launch, Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller is welcoming the competition since the storied hero shooter has "never really" been confronted with "another game that's so similar to the one that we've created" - meaning the Blizzard team is no longer "playing it safe."
Overwatch 2 has been the genre lynch pin for well over a decade at this point, with competitors like Concord and Battleborn falling off a cliff, but that all changed when NetEase, err, borrowed some of Blizzard's best ideas and licensed Marvel's ever-popular superheroes. The Overwatch team have never really been on their back foot this whole time, so how are they feeling now?
"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 an interview with GamesRadar+. "There's actually something kind of exciting about this, for a few reasons." Keller explained it's "really great" to see Marvel Rivals take some familiar ideas in a "different direction," but the competitor's success is also a "forcing function to our team - this is no longer about playing it safe."
Keller then points to the massive changes coming up in Overwatch 2's next few seasons. Upgradeable perks. A massive third-person Stadium mode. The return of loot boxes. 6v6 competitive queues. Map voting and hero ban features. All new heroes. Some of the adjustments are drastic and it's happening because that "forcing function to execute, for a team of super passionate craftspeople, [is] like music to their ears."
"There is pressure on the Overwatch team, and a lot of it is internal," he continued. "It's [asking] how do we make the best possible game that we can? And we've been feeling it for a while." Despite the added pressure, Keller said the upcoming Season 15 and Season 16 shake up have been in the works well before Marvel Rivals became what it is because the team has been thinking about how to dust off the monotony that can build up when you've been playing a shooter like Overwatch for years on end. "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."
"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," Keller explained of the new, upgradeable abilities.
