Blizzard teased Monitoring 2 The return of 6v6 in a recent developer blogand director Aaron Keller said it will finally happen in season 14 of multiplayer game. For a little while, as a test, so don’t get too attached.

Keller said in a new director’s blog that the first test, which will launch a week after Overwatch 2 Season 14 goes live in December 2024, is a variation of open queue “not only to judge our players’ appetite for larger teams, but also to allow us to explore different ways we could implement change without running into the same problems we had before. It follows a “Min 1, Max 3” rule, where each team must have at least one of each role and cannot have more than three heroes in any given role. Keller said this first test will also help the team see how Overwatch 2 heroes perform in a 6v6 match.

Blizzard will hold the second 6v6 test in the middle of Season 14, a standard 2-2-2 setup where both teams have two heroes from each role. Keller said it would mostly look like the original Overwatch, but with some Overwatch 2 features, such as crowd control and hero reworks.

Overwatch 2 6v6 is its own mode and will not replace others, nor will it be available to play in ranked matches.

Overwatch started as a 6v6 game, where each team had two tanks, two damage dealers and two healers, but Blizzard removed the extra tank when Overwatch 2 launched. The idea was that removing the second tank would help matches to move more quickly and would prevent them from getting bogged down when both teams’ tanks and their dedicated healers caused a stalemate. The change wasn’t popular at the time, and Blizzard didn’t do much to convince players that it was improving Overwatch.

Even Keller acknowledged in the post that first teased Overwatch 2’s 6v6 that players were unhappy with how most roles were geared toward dealing damage instead of completing their tasks. Kiriko and Illari, for example, are built equally for damage and healing, while older heroes such as Lucio are built primarily for support.