As it has been leaked in the run-up to this year's BlizzCon, Blizzard Entertainment unveiled Overwatch 2, the new era of its well-known team shooter. In Overwatch 2, players slip into the roles of the world's heroes and fight together with other players in cooperative missions, climbing levels, fighting numerous threats around the world. The game tells the next chapter of the epic storyline and offers players an entirely new co-op experience, where they can upgrade and customize their favourite heroes - and expand everything they love about Overwatch at the same time.

Players will be able to experience the dawn of a new era for Overwatch, as Winston, Tracer, and other well-known members join forces with a new generation of heroes. In the action-packed, cooperative story missions, players will be actively involved in the Overwatch saga as a new worldwide crisis breaks out in a series of stirring and highly dangerous missions for up to four players. Throughout the storyline, players slip into the roles of various heroes and join forces to defend the world from the Omnic forces of Null Sector, uncover the backgrounds of the robot attacks, and confront new threats across the planet.

Hero missions

The battle continues with hero missions, in which the Overwatch team is pushed to its limits on missions around the world, defending cities against robot attacks, eliminating Talon's elite agents, and fighting the evil forces that threaten the world. This mode offers high replayability as players can upgrade their favourite heroes and unlock powerful customization options that enhance their abilities in co-op mode. Reinhardt's Firebolt can, for example, set fire to nearby enemies, while Tracer can use her Impulse Bomb to trigger devastating chain reactions, and thus stand up to seemingly overpowering enemies.

For these kinds of missions, Overwatch 2 uses an improved engine for larger co-op maps in PvE. Players will also encounter a variety of new enemies and factions. The game features graphical enhancements that bring the players' favourite heroes - and their new look in Overwatch 2 - to life with even more detail. Several new playable heroes expand the ever-growing hero line-up, alongside with new maps, and a new game mode called Thrust - two teams fight to push the map target to the enemy's side using a robot.

How will Overwatch 2 change Overwatch?

Overwatch 2 underscores Blizzard's promise to continue supporting its community. Overwatch players will be able to fight side by side with Overwatch 2 players in PvP multiplayer modes, and will also have access to the heroes and maps of Overwatch 2, keeping the community's PvP experience dynamic in the Overwatch 2 era. In the future, the two games are meant to melt together into one game and one community. That's why developer Blizzard's goal is to merge the two games into one single client.

The idea here is to avoid fragmenting the player base and giving no one a competitive advantage. If they are playing in the same competition pool, players shouldn't have a better frame rate, just because they are using different versions of the game engine. Accordingly, Overwatch will first receive all the graphical improvements of Overwatch 2. New maps and heroes will also appear at the same time in both games. In the end, the titles will have converged so much that they will merge into a single game.