Yesterday saw the Overwatch 2 team come together in a developer broadcast to call attention to the various features scheduled to arrive in the August 10th Invasion update, including progression updates, mission highlights, and its new PvP mode.
The stream first talks about the PvE story missions, confirming the general timeline of when the story takes place, talking about designing mission maps, and promising these missions will “move the story of Overwatch forward.” Event missions were also discussed, with the devs explaining that they’ll be the primary form of replayable PvE content, featuring similar enemies found in story missions but fought in new ways while providing a different experience each time.
The stream then goes into the hero mastery mode, which is built as a solo experience that helps players learn techniques for characters, experience heroes they don’t normally play, or complete challenges. A total of five heroes in this new mode will unlock during different weeks in Season 6, as will a scoring leaderboard for players to try and climb for bragging rights.
The topic of character progression updates was next, which will now grant XP for individual actions on a per-hero basis, whether they’re character-specific ones like damage mitigated or healing done or general things like melee eliminations, damage dealt, and time played. Leveling each category will have no XP cap, and rewards will come in the form of cosmetic name cards for players to display.
Finally, Blizzard discussed the Flashpoint PvP mode. A lot of attention was called to the unique maps for the mode, which are larger than normal maps and feature parallel paths that opposing teams take from point to point. This means that there are some potential strategic opportunities to consider, such as starting a team fight early, taking a defensive posture, or funneling an enemy team down a certain path. The broadcast further takes a closer look at the two Flashpoint maps and talks about how the mode came to life.
