Blizzard is putting almost as much work into the overhauled Overwatch competitive mode as it poured into the original, game manager Jeff Kaplan revealed on June 15.
Overwatch hasn't been out for a full month yet, but the players keep coming by the millions and so Blizzard has been working to keep up awareness about ranked play's return to the game. Seven million players enlisted in the first week and another 3 million a few weeks later.
Competitive Play kept pace with the core game up until beta testing, during which fans indicated that they hoped the mode would go "a different direction," according to Kaplan.
"So Competitive Play is quite a big effort for us this time around — almost as much work as the first version," Kaplan wrote in a forum post. "But it's really far along. We're playtesting it multiple times a day."
The studio has been playtesting the Competitive Mode several times daily, but is considering opening playtests up to the same people who told Blizzard to scrape the first iteration of the game mode. Those people would be the men, women and children of the 10-million-strong Overwatch community.
A Public Test Realm is on the table, though only being debated right now, would be a feature that's handy to have beyond aiding Blizzard in finally putting competitive play into the release version of the game.
"We're working very hard to make it awesome at release, but there are some things you need to see and feel along with a large population before you can properly sign off on the feature," Kaplan added.
Kaplan anticipates that ranked play will require several iterations across several of the game's first few season and the studio has content patch planned for the rest of the year, spilling over into 2017.
During the update on competitive play's progress, Kaplan also confirmed that Blizzard is working on new Overwatch heroes and maps. Kaplan didn't want to estimate a release window for the new content, though he said some heroes are "very far along" and one particular map is "officially" in the pipeline.
Whenever a new character arrives, players can expect the content to come at no additional cost. Kaplan has previously stated that the studio wants to patch new heroes into the game instead of packaging them as DLC.
