Overwatch 2 devs finally break silence on 6v6 controversy
The Overwatch 2 community has been conflicted since the game’s release, with the Overwatch 1 faithful claiming that the move away from 6v6 was the wrong one. After a long silence on the topic, the OW2 dev team is finally willing to talk about it.
The Tank role was a big talking point in the first Overwatch game, negatively affecting queue times for other roles. The lack of tanks made finding matches in roles like DPS extremely difficult.
So, when Overwatch 2 was being developed, teams changed to 5v5 with a single tank per team. This fixed queue times but also completely changed the balance for Overwatch without addressing many reasons players didn’t like queuing for Tank in the first place.
The team’s Tanks often got blamed for everything and forced into degenerate metas like Double Shields in Overwatch 1, and Overwatch 2 isn’t much different with counter-swapping’s prevalence.
A tweet thread from March 2024 caused a big stir amongst Overwatch creators at the time, with Samito claiming 5v5 would never top 6v6 and prominent tank player Flats discussing the issue for hours on stream.
Similar discussions have occurred before and since, with the only standout factor being the dev team’s deafening silence on the topic—until now, that is.
Aaron Keller announced in a dev blog that the team would focus on buffing up tanks through Seasons 11 and 12, with a focus on keeping them alive longer through individual buffs to each Hero who’s struggling in the role.
However, Keller focusing on tanks with this dev blog raised questions about whether or not he’s considering that two tanks per team could fix the issue. In other words, a return to 6v6.
The Overwatch 2 director revealed that the team has been talking about it internally, and that he’ll be addressing the issue head-on in an upcoming Director’s Take or Dev Update.
As Keller said at the end of the Director’s Take that sparked this Overwatch 2 6v6 discussion in the first place, his next Director’s Take will be coming up a few weeks after June 28, 2024.
“We should have another Director’s Take out in a few weeks’ time,” he claimed. This is likely when we’ll get a more fleshed-out look at what the team is considering and whether or not a return to 6v6 is on the horizon.