Judging from its complete absence from BlizzConline’s opening keynote, you’d never guess Overwatch 2 was part of the Blizzard family of games, much less in the works. Thankfully, watching the “Behind the Scenes of Overwatch 2” panel put to rest any fears that the game might’ve been forgotten. Led by lead designer Jeff Kaplan, the 39-minute panel didn’t reveal anything particularly juicy — nope, no release timeline — but still offered a glimpse of what players can expect when Overwatch 2 is finally released from the bowels of development hell.
Here’s a quick overview of findings:
- New maps: Rome and New York
- Dynamic weather events like blizzards and sandstorms
- PvE objective-based scenarios called Hero Missions
- Class passives that grant skills to players depending on their role. For example: DPS heroes have increased movement speed and support heroes have a slight health regen.
- Character-specific enhancements like adding more steering to Reinhardt’s charge ability
- Talent trees that allow players to customise heroes
- New hero looks
- New story content focusing on repelling the rogue robot faction Null Sector
Though stuffed with information, the panel didn’t really reveal anything that wasn’t already teased before. But! My big takeaway: Sojourn. No, Blizzard didn’t officially reveal Overwatch’s 33rd and first Black woman playable character, but it did tease the shit outta her in a way that feels almost mean. She was present throughout the panel’s cinematic and gameplay clips. She was even referenced by the devs as being one of their favourite characters because of her railgun. But despite all that, no official reveal. Nada.
If you missed it, you can watch the panel here:
As a Black woman who loves this game, this feels like starving for years and being told to be patient, pizza’s coming. Then, the pizza arrives but you’re not allowed to eat it. It’s there, sitting in front of you, tantalising you with its stringy cheese and pools of grease but nope, can’t eat it. It’s BlizzCon for fuck’s sake: If there was ever a time to announce the newest character for your game it’d be now. And, to be fair, there’s still another day of conventioning left in which Blizzard could finally feed the legion of Black female fans who’ve been begging for a crumb of representation for a while now. At the very least, it was nice to see her in action — that railgun was pretty sweet.
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