Since the release of NetEase Games’ online hero shooter Marvel Rivals in February this year, many comparisons have been made to Blizzard’s own competitive multiplayer game, Overwatch 2, owing to their similar gameplay systems and live service models. Despite the strong competition, Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller has welcomed the challenge, stating that Marvel Rivals’ success has led to a change in attitude within the team as they look towards the future.
During an interview with GamesRadar, Keller discussed how the massive success of Marvel Rivals – which has garnered an all-time peak of 642,333 players on Steam alone at the time of writing – will affect Overwatch 2 moving forward. “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,” he said.
Despite this, Keller states that the situation was also “exciting”, and that it was “really great to see a game take a different direction” to the well-established competitive online hero shooter genre. To this end, he also admits that this has “[forced] function to the team” and that Blizzard will no longer “play it safe” for the game’s upcoming seasons.
Being faced with such stiff competition, Blizzard has announced substantial updates to come for Overwatch 2 in 2025, with Season 15, released on 18 February, introducing hero perks, bonuses that come into play throughout a match via a new level system. Each hero will now have access to a choice between two perks, minor and major, which upgrade a hero in a certain way, with major perks able to rework a hero mid-match to turn the tide.
Another major addition will come during Season 16, which is currently planned for April, bringing the new Stadium game mode. This mode pits teams of five players against each other across seven rounds, gaining and spending currency between rounds to acquire stat-boosting modifications or bigger hero-shifting traits. Stadium will also introduce a third-person mode, with players having the option to swap between the two perspectives.
Two more heroes are also heading to the game, including the crossbow-wielding bounty hunter Freja and water-bender Aqua, alongside the return of 6v6 game modes and updates to Overwatch Classic. Most notable, however, will be the return of the game’s infamous loot boxes, although thankfully, these will now be purchasable only via free means such as weekly rewards of the free track of its battle pass.
With all this new content in store, it remains to be seen if Overwatch 2 can reignite its player base to compete with Marvel Rivals. Currently, the game sits at an all-time peak player count of 75,608 on Steam, although its reviews on the platform remain at a “mostly negative” score, with only 22% positive reviews among 328,640 users.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
