Director’s Take: Opening up the conversation on 5V5 and 6V6

Lesinsolitestranger | Director’s Take: Opening up the conversation on 5V5 and 6V6 | Hey everyone! There’s been a lot of talk about 6v6 lately, and it’s only intensified in recent weeks since we posted our latest Director’s Take and made a Twitter post with a promise to talk about it in the future. Well, now is the future, and this is that next piece! So, let’s get into it! Wait. Let’s not get into it quite yet…

This is a pretty complex and nuanced topic, and it gets to the beating heart of what makes this game tick. Our players have different opinions and preferences about the ideal number of players in an Overwatch match, and so does our team. We’re a microcosm of the broader community and discuss this internally. I’m hoping that this piece will serve as an introduction to our own discussions and a jumping off point to engage with all of you!

We’d also like to set a few expectations and ground rules. First, it’s pretty long (creators are going to lose their voices reading this one aloud) so we will provide a TLDR. Check out our blog for context, rationale and thoughts on 6v6. Secondly, we’re not here to tell you what you ought to like, or even what’s empirically better. This is a game, and your preference for fun is relative to your own tastes, ability and experience. Lastly, there are years of decisions that affect such a fundamental piece of Overwatch. Some of you might be intimately aware of these, while others might not.

What’s Next

Where do we go from here? At the end of the day, we want to make the game that players want to play.

Because of the challenges mentioned here, we are focused on making 5v5 the best experience that it can be. However, because we operate as a service to our players, we always remain open-minded to re-evaluating our decisions based on your actions and feedback, to give you the best game experience we can.  Rather than introduce a disruptive, permanent change to the game, we’d prefer to explore the space further and make changes based on that exploration.

With that said, we’re looking at running a series of events to try out different core team composition formats in Overwatch 2. The community has, juuuust once or twice, suggested a test. Why not put various forms of 6v6 in the game in order to gauge the results? We agree, and based on your feedback, we’re exploring how we can test different forms of 6v6 in the game to gauge the results. This is taking some time, however, for reasons that may not be readily apparent.

The first, and honestly largest, reason is the need to do this in a way that allows the game to have optimized technical performance (I’m referring to framerate and memory constraints) with 12 players in a match. There have been quite a few upgrades and additions to Overwatch 2 that have an impact on the performance of the game. These range from new features like allied outlines and enabling healer vision by default, the addition of more technically demanding hero kits, as well as visual upgrades to UI, heroes and maps. In a 6v6 setting, these upgrades can have significant impacts for our players, causing the game to underperform on older systems. Overwatch is a fast-paced game, and maintaining a game that runs smoothly across all our platforms is important for the player’s experience. While a limited time test could arrive sooner, the team is still investigating exactly how long it would take to permanently increase performance across the game. This would be a large effort that would most likely take at least several seasons to accomplish.

Another issue, and one that still gives me anxiety about opening this Pandora’s Box, is what to do with queue times if enough players prefer 6v6 to keep some form of it around. The team was not able to solve this issue previously. While we have some ideas now, there’s no guarantee that they will work. Is there a world where people are willing to live with long queue times to play this format? Maybe, but that’s a pretty risky move to make. We also have tens of millions of new players that have only played 5v5. We want to be openly mindful not to frustrate those who like the game as it is today.

The outcome of these tests would give us a lot of valuable information to consider moving forward. We’d run the test for a few weeks and gauge interest from the community. Then we’d measure the impact it had on the other experiences in Overwatch 2, like 5v5, Arcade, etc. We’d take the lessons from this playtest to see what we can learn about the mode within the current game ecosystem and for the future of Overwatch. We would reflect carefully on the learnings from whatever test we run and explore how to best give players what’s being asked for. Whether that’s a world of 5v5, 6v6 or even both, is for future us to figure out.

I’m going to jump on a soap box for a moment. When you look at the changes to Overwatch since its inception, it’s clear that many of those have reduced some of the variety within an Overwatch match. We get feedback from some players that Overwatch can feel “the same” from game to game. While much of this gets attributed to 5v5, we feel that there is more at play here. Besides running experiments with 6v6, we’d like to run some that re-examine the ways we tried solving previous problems, specifically with the goal of bringing some of the freedom back to an Overwatch match without the severity of issues that accompanied it. For instance, we think there could be other ways of putting a team together that aren’t quite as rigid as a set composition, but not as loose as Open Queue. We’ll be running at least one Quick Play: Hacked based on this idea in Season 13. There are some gotchas to this direction, but after reading 400 pages of this blog, I hope you’re all able to see that there are trade-offs to many of the decisions that go into this game (and into any game, really).

To Wrap It Up… For Now

Your feedback has driven both our inspiration and commitment to testing new ideas in-game. We want to be super thoughtful about how we implement new ideas into the live game because there are millions of players who jump into Overwatch each season, and we want anything we put in-game to benefit the community as a whole.

Ultimately, the Overwatch team wants to continue building the game that you want to play season after season.

This blog (or thesis, rather) is just the start of this conversation. This isn’t the last time we’re going to be getting into 5v5 or 6v6, and we can’t wait to share more about our plans in the future.

In closing, we appreciate you so much, and we love seeing your passion and dedication to the game, Team 4, and the Overwatch community.

The team hears you, we see you, and we’re incredibly thankful to be on this ride with all of you. Can’t wait to share more in the upcoming months, and let’s make a great game, together.

– Aaron Keller