Overwatch 2 director outlines upcoming Colosseo & Numbani map overhauls

Overwatch 2’s director has outlined some of the changes coming to the Colosseo and Numbani maps that are set to roll out over the next few seasons. 

Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller elaborated on upcoming changes to those two maps specifically in an interview with Dexerto last week.

This information coincides with the announcement that the game will be reworking multiple maps in upcoming seasons. In a developer update hosted by Keller, it was revealed that in a season sometime after Season 12, several problematic maps will be seeing changes and overhauls.

Aaron Keller tells us about Colosseo changes in Season 11

Before that though Colosseo will be getting adjustments in Season 11. We asked Keller specifically what the problem areas for the map were and what was changing. He said, “There are a few places [on Colosseo] that have some pain points.”

“The first one is really the Colosseum part of it. It’s a pretty long area and you’re hemmed in as both teams with these glass walls that are in the middle. It just doesn’t give you a lot of options as a player so a lot of the time, what teams do is they need to stay really far back in order to engage there.”

“So, the first thing we are doing is removing those glass walls. It’s playing a lot better with those gone. There’s just a lot more freedom of movement in that space.”

Keller went on to explain that’s not the only area that is seeing work done on it. The others pertain to the bridges which have long had frustrations attached to them. He continued: “We’ve also looked a lot at the, we call it the loop-de-loop, where you pass under the bridge and then come back up on top of the bridge. We did a lot of experiments with getting rid of that and none of them really panned out.”

“So what we did was we started adding additional buffer areas to the sides of it. Now there’s more space for the attackers and defenders to move. There’s an additional mega-health pack in the back for people to be going after too. We think that that’s opened up the space a little bit. We’re hoping that that relieves some of the tension that we had there.”

Numbani’s start is likely getting shorter

Keller also spoke about Numbani changes coming sometime after Season 12 in our interview. In the developer update, he revealed that several map will be seeing changes in a season dedicated to revamping those maps. In the update, he mentioned Circuit Royale, Dorado, and Havana alongside Numbani, but for now, he only hinted at what might be changing on the metropolitan map. He explained: “One of the maps that we’ve heard a lot of feedback from from our players is Numbani.”

“If you look at that first section of Numabi, that attacker spawn room is a decent amount further away from the first control point than it is in most of our other maps. Just having that additional run time is one of those things that can cause an attack to stall out as you’re waiting for additional players on your team.” 

“To actually fix something like that, it’s kinda like a larger change to a map where you’re having to move really big pieces of geometry around in order to do something like that.” 

Off that, it appears like that initial walk-up may be getting some work in the future. This makes a lot of sense. It’s a long walk to the objective. There are a lot of buildings and areas that are rarely ever used right outside of the spawn doors. There are even health packs in the opening buildings as if it was expected for teams to hold close to the attacking team’s spawn. However, in my time playing Overwatch, I’ve never seen that. 

Still, removing a lot of those buildings will be a lot of work. Especially with how it all still needs to fit together seamlessly again.

This trend of fixing older maps points is a really good direction for the Overwatch team. These sorts of changes have notoriously taken quite a while in the past. However, with recent changes to Junkertown too, it seems this is an avenue Team 4 is really interested in exploring.

Keller said to us, “As the developer of the game, we don’t want there to be those moments where you’re playing, that can really bump you out of the of the game. We’d like to remove as many of those rough edges as possible. When players load into a map they think can be really frustrating, we think that that’s one of those moments.” Every player has that one map they loathe. Trying to iron that out seems like time well spent by the devs.