One of Overwatch‘s more credible development news sources, streamer/leaker Metro, claims that Overwatch 2 is “mostly done.” But the reason the game’s release might be pushed back to 2023, according to his sources, is partly due to the development team not yet considering any reworks to current heroes.
On Aug. 7, Metro posted on Twitter that “multiple people” close to his Overwatch 2 source say that the development of the game is taking longer than expected and that “a release in 2022 does not seem likely anymore.” While a 2022 release hadn’t been confirmed yet, many Overwatch fans have been hoping and expecting a release during the next calendar year, especially after Blizzard began showing full gameplay in 2021.
With the new game, Blizzard promised to add new maps, new heroes, a single-player campaign, and significant reworks to the current heroes in regard to the traditional PvP modes. During a stream the same day as his earlier tweet, Metro said most of those are done—but not all of them.
“From what I’ve gathered the [new] heroes are done mostly,” he said. “They have a basic single-player campaign completely done, basically. They also have the [new] maps done for multiplayer. The thing they have not done is they did not consider anything in terms of reworking heroes.”
Metro added that the developers have apparently only recently realized they need to consider hero reworks, specifically citing McCree’s overpowered stun ability that still appears in the latest Overwatch 2 sneak peeks. The developers themselves confirmed that heroes would need to be rebalanced to reflect the changes made to the PvP format, specifically the change from six-vs-six to five-vs-five.
There are likely other things that still need to be worked on regarding Overwatch 2 since it’s hard to imagine a “mostly done” game needing over an entire year just to focus on hero balancing. If the 2023 release window is true, that would be four years since the rumors of an Overwatch sequel being developed first surfaced.
In an Activision Blizzard earnings call at the beginning of August, in which leadership addressed the recent gender discrimination and harassment lawsuit, it was relayed that Overwatch 2 had “passed an important internal milestone in recent weeks.”
