Live service games face an interesting conundrum, I think: how do you keep offering the core experience of a game while also periodically reinventing it, and varying it, in such a way that will make it feel new? Overwatch is a game facing such a conundrum, and Blizzard has tried all kinds of different things to mix it up: switching to five-person teams from six, developing a PvE mode that never materialised, and for the past year or so, offering a MOBA-like mode called Stadium. But now Stadium has been earmarked for the scrapheap.
Stadium isn’t a MOBA – don’t be fooled by that. There are no lanes or PvE enemies or anything of the kind. The MOBA link relates to abilities and equipment you buy for your character between rounds in order to power them up. That’s especially notable because you don’t do this anywhere else in Overwatch; you modify a couple of abilities in regular game modes but in Stadium, you create entire builds. It sort of breaks the game that you’re used to, but it’s exhilarating because of it.
Indeed, when I returned to Overwatch earlier this year, like so many other people – in the wake of the game re-launching with a new ‘expansion’ and ditching the “2” from its title – Stadium was one of the modes that most excited me. I enjoyed how different it made Overwatch feel, because as you pile abilities on, characters become bent out of shape – in a good way. Healers become damage dealers, double-jumps become triple-jumps, survivability is greatly improved – there’s huge scope for change. But apparently no one is playing it.
Game director Aaron Keller, in a lengthy post on the Overwatch website, explained that only three percent of the game’s audience is actively playing Stadium, boo hiss. Compare that to the bread-and-better 5v5 modes – unranked 5v5 with 54 percent of and ranked 5v5 with 37 percent – and it’s a figure that barely registers on a bar-chart comparison. Evidently I have horrendous taste; the other mode I love, mystery heroes, only attracts four percent of the audience as well.
Because people aren’t playing Stadium – Keller politely referred to the three percent as a “dedicated, smaller audience” – Blizzard is ending active development for it. Not killing it – it’ll still be there in the game, and still get balance updates and tweaks – but “we’re not not planning on expanding Stadium with new Heroes or maps”, Keller said. I think that means it’s being hung out to dry, which is a shame. “Instead, we’re taking what lessons we’ve gleaned from building it and applying those lessons (and those talented devs) to our future plans.”
Future plans! Those sound exciting. But the reality is a little more mundane. In the short-term (we don’t know about the long-term) Blizzard is addressing the game’s tank ‘problem’ by experimenting with 6v6 role queues. “You’ve told us the tank role often plays too big of a factor in determining the outcome of a standard 5v5 match,” Keller said.
“Single tanks feel that responsibility and can stress or counter swap on respawn, causing mismatches in team compositions. Tanks can also be fairly overpowered in 1v1 situations with other roles and that can be difficult for us to balance. With the potential of two active tanks per team, we see an opportunity to test different balance tuning that might soften these rough points.”
The prospective solution is new flex and dynamic role queues. Flex introduces a flexible 1-3-2 role-queue format, which ensures there’ll always be at least one tank, with three flex damage dealers and two supports. Those three flex damage dealers are the interesting bit: they have the ability to swap to tanks if need be – they can step over the role-limiting barrier, in other words. You can’t have more than two active tanks at one time, however. The dynamic queue, meanwhile, blends the standard role queue and the flex role queue together.
“Discussions around [game] format on social media often focus on specific team sizes or past versions of Overwatch,” Keller said. “But the question we’re asking ourselves is broader than that: What if there was another way?” That’s the thinking behind this.
The new modes will be tested over the coming weeks, and for now, remain only as experiments. “There’s a very important caveat here,” Keller stressed. “The result or success of these experiments doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to be changing the main format of the game. These findings could inspire us to tweak existing core modes or create new Arcade modes. Like with any good experiment, we won’t know the results until we complete all the steps.”
Overwatch – formerly Overwatch 2 – was rejuvenated earlier this year when Blizzard unveiled, and launched, a new yearly expansion-like plan for the game that began with a mega-drop of five new heroes and a promise to add five more over the course of the year. That wasn’t all that changed, however, with the story pulled much more closely into the game and many quality of life and user interface changes wrapped around it. The result was a spike in Overwatch player numbers, although activity seems to have dropped off again.
It’s also unclear how, if at all, the Overwatch team at Blizzard – Team 4 – has been affected by the sweeping cuts to the Xbox division it belongs to. Blizzard president Johanna Faries emailed staff when the cuts were announced to say “you can expect to hear more details regarding the day’s events and what they mean for Blizzard in further communications”, but I haven’t seen any more information than that. Blizzard is a large company so I wouldn’t expect it to be spared by this restructuring; I wonder whether the Overwatch team’s decision to end support for Stadium has anything to do with having fewer resources to spare.
