Player feedback put a temporary halt to the competitive mode's release.
Overwatch’s absent competitive mode, tested during the recent beta but removed for the game’s launch, will be added to the game in a revised form towards the end of June. The timescale was revealed by the game’s director Jeff Kaplan in a Facebook live interview.
As it turns out, it’s player feedback that’s done for the mode – temporarily at least – as Kaplan explained.
“Competitive mode is the current focus of the Overwatch team, and it’s the most important thing for us to add to the game right now,” Kaplan said, before going into detail about why the release of the mode was delayed.
“Some of the things we wanted to change: one was the season length. We heard a lot of complaints from the community that they felt one-month seasons were too short. We thought there was a lot of cool about one-month seasons – in particular Hearthstone does it really well. But we realise our game is different from Hearthstone so we decided to go with seasons that are probably going to be more around three months. Even more specific than that: you’ll probably have a two-and-a-half month actual season with maybe a couple of weeks off in between, just to build excitement and give a little bit of a reset.”
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“We’re also looking into some of the formats,” he continued. “We like Sudden Death but we’re re-evaluating how frequently it happens and saying, ‘Can we have Sudden Death happen less frequently? And can we have Sudden Death resolve itself on the actual game-mode-type that you’re playing? So if you’re playing Assault, can we have resolution on Assault? If you’re playing Escort, can we have a resolution on that?”
Kaplan didn’t want to give too strong a commitment to the release of competitive play, although he did speculate that he expected the mode to be released towards the middle to end of June – so just over a month from now. He also confirmed that the mode is up and running at Blizzard HQ, and presumably undergoing heavy testing:
“I don’t want to promise an exact date because I’m sure whatever date I say right now will be wrong! My rough commitment or not-commitment would be sometime towards the end of June – middle-to-end of June we want to have Competitive mode in. We already have it in internally.”
Source – Eurogamer
