Overwatch is out now, but it had to abandon its competitive mode to make it to its May 23 launch. However, the game's director has advised gamers to expect ranked matches to roll out at some point in June.
With Gearbox's Battleborn failing to take command of the revitalized market for arena shooters, many gamers held out hope for Blizzard's own colorful team-based shooter. But leading up to Overwatch's launch, Blizzard announced that the game's competitive mode would be tardy.
The absence of ranked rounds might have significantly hurt the game if it trailed launch by months, but Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan has indicated that competitive mode is, by his best estimate, less than a month away from release.
"Competitive mode is the current focus of the Overwatch team and it's the most important thing for us to add to the game right now," Kaplan said in a launch day interview that was posted on Facebook.
Blizzard was just testing competitive mode internally this past weekend, and the team has started to get a feel for the latest version of it, according to Kaplan. But the latest changes to competitive mode won't benefit from new fan feedback.
The studio offered a version of competitive mode during Overwatch's closed beta, but Blizzard was forced to rethink its formula after the feedback started rolling in.
"The feedback that we were seeing was a little bit critical of some of the decisions we made and we really took that to heart," said Kaplan. "We said, we're making this for the players, and if it's not exactly what the players want, we need to rethink what we're doing."
While players won't get a chance to chime in this time around, Blizzard is acting on what the community told it the first time around. One of those chances is an increase in the length of seasons.
When competitive mode returns, seasons will be expanded from one month to roughly three. They'll likely play out for about a month or so, take a few weeks off to build the drama and then conclude over the ensuing weeks.
Blizzard is also revisiting formats such as Sudden Death. The studio wants Sudden Death to happen less frequently. The team hopes that when it kicks in, matches can be resolved through the rules laid out in whatever game mode Sudden Death occurs in instead of having to add even more wrinkles to bring contests to conclusions.
Overwatch's competitive mode will arrive by late June and Blizzard will share more news as it nears release. It'll be the game's "first big content update."
