According to Overwatch’s game director, Aaron Keller, he revealed during a livestream that Overwatch 2 will be switching things up and that instead of 6v6 matches, they will be changing it to 5v5. According to Keller, this is because they feel that tanks in the game can get too “noisy” and that Blizzard wants to make the game’s combat easy to read and understand, so having a reduced player count will help with that.
According to Keller, “Sometimes it’s just hard to track what 11 other players are doing on the battlefield. Removing two of those simplifies everything and it allows players to understand everything that’s happening around them and make better choices because of it.”
In addition to reducing player count, Blizzard will also be making changes to tank characters to give them more damage dealing abilities since they might need to take on additional roles now.
Lead hero designer Geoff Goodman was quoted as saying, “We’re not taking every tank and just making them super aggro. In some cases we’re pushing some of the more aggro tanks and making them a little tankier. In a lot of cases they have more health … D.Va has a lot more Matrix juice in the can. We didn’t just give her more missiles and let her go kill everybody, she can actually protect her team a little more.”
Overwatch 2 still does not have a release date, but Blizzard did previously state that it will most likely not arrive in 2021.