To limit server lag, the North American teams will travel to Asia. While they won’t compete in person, there will be a break before the playoffs resume. “Before the four finalists can face off, we will need a few weeks for health and safety needs and to account for travel logistics,” Blizzard said. 

Summer, Summer, Summer

Relive all of the #OWL2020 Summer Showdown action, and stay tuned for the Best of The Finals https://t.co/0tBmsyMFus pic.twitter.com/2Pf0HcQTGA

— Overwatch League (@overwatchleague) July 10, 2020

The entire format means there won’t be an in-person final. But that something Blizzard will likely take after the match cancellations and setbacks OWL faced earlier in the year. Since moving to more tournament-style competitions, the league has seen promising viewership numbers. Approximately 91,000 concurrent viewers tuned in to watch the North American Summer Showdown semi-final match between Paris Eternal and the San Francisco Shock. Those are numbers the league hasn’t seen since its opening weekend earlier this year. Moving forward, Spector said tournaments will likely play a big part in the league’s 2021 season.

Rich, orchestral music is one of the hallmarks of Overwatch, and you can now listen to more of it outside of the game whenever you like. Blizzard has released a soundtrack album called Overwatch: Cities And Countries, which includes tunes linked to all of the core maps.

Every time you load into a match, you hear a small snippet of music that evokes the setting of the battlefield on which you’re about to play. The album is made up of full-length versions of those, with tracks for each of the 21 main maps, as well as a couple of the deathmatch arenas. The maps are set all over the world (and, in one case, on the moon), so there’s a big variety of local flavors. The jaunty, guitar-driven “Route 66” piece and the Mediterranean vibes of “Ilios” are personal favorites.

When Overwatch League’s next major competition starts on June 13th, it will make use of the same format as its recent May Melee tournament. The Summer Showdown will kick off with three weeks of qualifying matches that will culminate in two weekend-long tournaments that will take place between July 3rd and 5th. As with the May Melee, the two competitions will feature Overwatch League’s North American and Asian teams playing separately. However, Blizzard has increased the stakes. Both tournaments will feature combined $275,000 prize pools, with the champions from each region taking home $50,000. 

Blizzard is also tweaking hero pools, a feature the studio introduced to add more variety to Overwatch‘s metagame. Moving forward, the list of heroes teams won’t be able to pick during their matches will change every two weeks instead of one. However, teams won’t have to worry about hero pools during the knockout stages of a tournament or in the week leading up to a major competition. In a separate post on its community forums, Blizzard also announced it’s disabling the feature “indefinitely” within Overwatch‘s competitive mode, which anyone can play once they’ve gotten their account to level 25.   

If you’re an Overwatch fan, you’ll want to mark April 14th on your calendar. That’s when Echo, the game’s 32nd hero, will join its official roster pool.

Following the flight plan.
Echo swoops into Overwatch on April 14! pic.twitter.com/BWO8W6ivDO

— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) April 9, 2020

As the shooter’s latest damage-dealing hero, Echo comes with a couple of nifty abilities. Her ultimate, Duplicate, allows you to copy the form and abilities of an opposing enemy hero, gaining access to their ultimate in the process. Echo can also use sticky bombs and a beam attack to quickly take out low-health heroes.

After two seasons of OWL matches taking place almost exclusively at a studio in Los Angeles, Blizzard took the league on the road this year. Teams were to play matches at live homestands across North America, Europe and Asia. But coronavirus concerns affected those plans from the jump.

The league postponed events that were scheduled to take place in China and Korea in February and March. Teams elsewhere were only able to make it through five weeks of homestands before Blizzard called off all league events through April. Matches resumed this past weekend with teams playing at their own training facilities or team houses.

With the spread of COVID-19 accelerating in many parts of the world, Blizzard’s call to cancel the remaining 28 homestands is understandable, though surely disappointing to fans who’d planned to see their favorite team in person. Blizzard is hoping the situation will have changed enough to run live events for the playoffs and Grand Finals in the fall. It will announce more details about those down the line.

Blizzard describes Echo as “an evolutionary robot programmed with a rapidly adapting artificial intelligence.” In the origin video the studio shared, we find out Dr. Mina Liao, one of the six founders of the Overwatch organization and the creator of the omnics, built Echo. It also turns out Echo features the same voice, as well as ideals and mannerisms, as her creator.

As the video nears its end, we hear them sync up. “All I needed was to help them all,” the two say in unison. From that moment on, there’s only a single voice in the mix. “And so she created me,” says Echo. “Her legacy. Her promise. Her echo.”

We don’t know how Echo will play yet, but now that her origin video is out, Blizzard will likely add her to the game’s public test servers soon. At that point, we’ll see what Echo’s kit adds to Overwatch.

Hero Pools will be in place for at least the next competitive season, which runs for two months starting in early March, and the design team will determine which heroes are available each week. Blizzard hopes Hero Pools will lead to players using a greater range of characters, though you’ll still be able to pick from the full roster in Quick Play and Arcade modes. It’ll also soon spell out how Hero Pools will affect the Overwatch League.

The system might not be a permanent addition — it won’t necessarily last beyond Season 21, depending on how things go. Blizzard might also switch up how frequently it changes which heroes are blocked, perhaps doing so daily or even on a per match basis.

While many will surely welcome the approach, some players might not be pleased Blizzard isn’t adopting a more typical hero ban system. Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan said last week that isn’t a “silver bullet solution” to shaking up the meta, the dominant team composition or playstyle at a given time.

Since it’s a player-versus-player game, he wrote in a forum post, “you don’t get to pick what the enemy team does. The challenge is overcoming the enemy team with teamwork, ingenuity and skill. It feels really off to me that the other team dictates how or what I play.”

Implementing a hero ban system would have required a “significant” time commitment from Overwatch developers, Kaplan noted — much of the team’s focus right now is on Overwatch 2. Because of the additional setup stage before a match starts, hero bans would also increase the time between games. Blizzard is hoping to reduce wait times, not increase them.

Elsewhere, Blizzard is promising more frequent and impactful balance changes with the aim of keeping the game fresh. It’s also adding a way for all players to try potential big changes before they hit the main game, similar to the way PC players have been able to do in the Public Test Realm for years. This so-called Experimental Card, which is coming soon, will let you try balance updates, game modes and rule changes that Blizzard’s looking into. In addition, the next major patch, which is scheduled for early February, will bolster the game’s anti-cheating efforts and add quality-of-life improvements to the Workshop.

The Overwatch team is introducing character leveling this time around. There’ll be unlockable abilities (or “talents”) for the hero missions and possibly story missions, but you won’t be able to customize hero abilities in player-vs.-player modes. You can expect to see several heroes join the ranks, including the long-rumored Sojourn. The current heroes will have new character models, and Blizzard is refreshing the user interface too.

Overwatch 2 will have an additional core mode called Push, which debuts on a map set in Toronto. It sees teams battling for control of a robot that pushes an objective to their opponents’ side of a symmetrical map. You can expect more maps, including ones set in Rio de Janeiro, Gothenburg and Monte Carlo.

Overwatch now has more than 50 million players and Blizzard doesn’t plan to leave fans of the original game in the lurch. All your progression (including achievements and unlocked cosmetics and emotes) will carry over into Overwatch 2 and you’ll get access to maps and heroes from the sequel. What’s more, players across both Overwatch and Overwatch 2 can team up with each other or duke it out in the series’ core 6 vs. 6 competitive mode.

Overwatch 2 doesn’t have a release date as yet, but Blizzard confirmed it’s coming to PC, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. It’s still planning to release updates for Overwatch in the meantime, but because its bigger focus is on Overwatch 2, there won’t be a new Archives mission during the anniversary event in May.

Kotaku reportedly confirmed with sources the game will hit Switch next month. It suggested that version will drop in North America on October 15th — just in time for the annual Halloween event.

We might get official confirmation on the port later today, as the latest Nintendo Direct stream will kick off at 6 PM ET. There was also speculation about Overwatch mascot Tracer making her way to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as a DLC character, so we might find out if that rumor’s true too.

A somewhat disturbing origin video describes him as an “eccentric astrophysicist” who is “unaware he’s been turning into a living weapon.” In the clip, he describes how his goal was to unlock the secrets of the universe and that “if the unifying theories are correct, we will soon be able to harness the power of a black hole.” But something goes horribly wrong.

By my count, he’s the fourth scientist character following Winston, Mei and Moira. He’s also the second aligned with the villainous group Talon, along with Moira. She appears next to him at the end of the video, alongside other Talon members Widowmaker, Sombra, Reaper and Doomfist.

If Sigma follows the current hero release cycle of tank (Wrecking Ball), attack (Ashe) and support (Baptiste), it appears he’ll fall into the tank category. Hero categories will soon be more important than ever in Overwatch once the role queue system rolls out, ensuring a player can only play characters from a pre-selected class during a quick play or competitive match.

Blizzard will surely reveal more details about Sigma, including his abilities and when you can actually play as him, in the near future. However, there are very strong hints in the video that he’ll have gravity-based powers.