Blizzard has huge plans for Overwatch 2 in 2025, and one in every of them is a brand new mode that’s in contrast to something the sport has seen earlier than. Referred to as Stadium, the mode is a aggressive, round-based, third-person recreation mode the place gamers improve their chosen hero over the course of a match utilizing forex.
Revealed as a part of Blizzard’s latest Overwatch 2 Highlight livestream, Stadium is meant to hitch Fast Play and Aggressive as a brand new, third pillar of Overwatch 2 when it arrives as a part of Season 16 later this 12 months. The mode will solely be playable as a ranked recreation mode with function queue, and matches will play out in a “better of seven” format. Overwatch’s regular Management, Push, and Conflict recreation modes might be featured in Stadium, and gamers will nonetheless be utilizing Overwatch’s colourful forged of heroes. That, nonetheless, is the place the Overwatch 2 gamers could also be accustomed to ends and in some ways an entire new recreation emerges.
Stadium would be the first recreation mode in Overwatch 2 to help a third-person digicam, one thing latest hero shooter Marvel Rivals has used to nice success. Gamers will, nonetheless, have the choice to nonetheless play in first-person ought to they select. The mode will function a pre-round “purchase” section, the place gamers can spend forex earned every spherical to buy skill upgrades and stat-boosting gadgets, MOBA-style. Objects can do every little thing from granting gamers easy stat boosts like extra well being and quicker motion pace all the best way to granting assaults life-stealing or decreasing the period of destructive results.
Hero skills may be augmented with forex too, granting them further results that may dramatically change the best way a hero is performed. Gamers will earn forex by killing enemies and incomes assists, in addition to a share of the injury and therapeutic they do over the course of a spherical. There may also be a bounty system, the place those that take out well-performing gamers on the enemy staff might be rewarded with a forex payout.
Based mostly on what Blizzard has described and proven, it seems that Overwatch 2 is taking the pre-round shopping for phases of video games like Counter-Strike and Valorant, mashing it along with the third-person gameplay and MOBA-inspired merchandise store seen in Valve’s still-in-the-works Impasse, after which combining all of it with Overwatch to type a brand new game-within-a-game.
Whether or not or not the brand new mode catches on stays to be seen, however Stadium is not the one main addition coming to Overwatch 2 in 2025. Blizzard moreover revealed loot packing containers (initially eliminated when Overwatch went free-to-play and transitioned into Overwatch 2) might be returning as a part of Season 15 on February 18. The season may also introduce a brand new gameplay system within the type of Perks, the place gamers will be capable of select between ability-altering bonuses over the course of a match. New heroes are coming too, with Blizzard giving followers a primary take a look at the crossbow-wielding Freya and the monk-like Aqua.