Overwatch 2: Blizzard discusses monetisation, locking new heroes behind Battle Pass
The Overwatch 2 team is adamant that placing heroes on the Battle Pass is the way forward.
Overwatch 2 is out soon, and one of the core changes of the game leaked online earlier this month — new heroes would not be unlocked automatically, but instead locked behind progress in a Battle Pass.
This understandably upset a lot of players — a core identity of Overwatch 1 was that players had the freedom to swap between any hero, even mid-match, promoting a “pick and counter-pick” style of play. By locking new heroes behind a Battle Pass, even a free one, you put players at risk of being unable to play properly due to a hero or three being locked off from them.
Blizzard invited us to a media scrum to discuss this as well as the upcoming hero Kiriko.
Note: The questions and answers have been edited for clarity.
To start, Overwatch 2’s Battle Pass will have 80+ total levels. Veteran Overwatch players will get Kiriko immediately, but new players will either have to progress through 55 levels of the free Battle Pass, or pay for the Premium Battle Pass to unlock her. It’s not immediately clear if the “veteran” status will carry forward for future heroes beyond Kiriko, but the Overwatch 2 team is adamant that placing heroes on the Battle Pass is the way forward.
When asked about the future of Overwatch 2 in relation to the new monetisation plans, game director Aaron Keller had this to say: “We believe that even with this change that Overwatch remains a highly competitive game. Internally, we have talked about this topic over the past year as much as, if not more than, any other topic that’s involved with the game — and we think it’s fair and still allows Overwatch to retain its competitive nature.”
“At the start of every season, the new hero will be locked from the ranked system, and we’re doing that for a few reasons. The first one is it gives us more time to balance the hero — so if a hero comes out, and we feel like it’s really overpowered, or even really under-tuned, we’re able to make some changes. This also gives players the ability to earn the hero on the battle pass free track before it gets unlocked in the competitive mode. This, I believe, evens the playing field at the start of a season.”
The dev team mentioned that if players fail to obtain a specific hero via the free battle pass or by purchasing the premium pass, they will still be able to purchase the hero later by completing hero challenges and earning Overwatch coins. The Season One battle pass will have a time limit of nine weeks to complete.
Battle Passes, owing to their seasonal nature and time-limited availability, create a sense of FOMO, or fear of missing out. Many players, when they hear about Battle Passes, instantly lose interest because it creates a demand for the player to log in and complete daily or weekly tasks — which is in stark contrast to Overwatch 1, which did also have dailies, but was not tied to any sort of Seasonal progression system.
When asked about their plans, if any, to assuage players that don’t care for Battle Pass systems, due to FOMO, Keller stated: “Players have sent a fairly consistent message over the last few years — they want more Overwatch content. We took that to heart, and unfortunately the strategy of releasing Overwatch this October is not the same strategy that we started with years ago when we announced it in 2019.”
“We changed strategies because we wanted to give players what they were asking for, and the only way to do that is to be able to fund the team — a team that is so much bigger than it was before. To be able to bring that revenue in is to be able to provide enough content for people to engage with on a consistent basis. That is the driving vision behind this — to give players as much as we can of what they are asking for, and so that we can continue developing this game well into the future.”
Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.
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