Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller told fans today, Nov. 16, that the team is looking into making changes to the game in an effort to improve fan experience, and among the first ideas he mentioned was “drastically” reducing spawn timers in season eight.
Season eight is set to begin in December, and with it, Keller suggested that the game’s spawn timers will drop a noticeable amount. While he didn’t give a specific number, the current respawn timer is 10 seconds by default, with overtime increasing that timer by a few seconds. In non-competitive game modes, a mechanic called “group respawn” makes players that die within five seconds of one another respawn as a team.
Keller noted that these changes will be one of many “experiments aimed at making the game more enjoyable to play.” In the case of reduced respawn timers, it will likely make ending games a little bit more difficult, but at the same time, it will reduce the amount of time players have to sit around between lives.
While the game’s devs didn’t give any more examples of upcoming experiments, they did give a number of other updates in the semi-regular developer blog post. Along with sharing that the leaver rate of quick play games has reduced by nearly 20 percent since the start of season seven, Keller told players about some hero balance changes that the game’s new hero Mauga will undergo before he’s officially released in season eight.
“We’re also working on the way we backfill matches so players no longer enter a game with a few seconds left,” Keller said. “Additionally, we’re continually making improvements to our matchmaker, anti-toxicity, and anti-cheat efforts.”
Keller’s post today was his first developer blog post since BlizzCon, which included the unveiling of Overwatch 2’s newest tank hero, as well as teasers for heroes coming in 2024 and changes coming to the game’s competitive ranked system and rewards set for next year.
