Overwatch 2 is extending its 6v6 playtest because of course it is

Overwatch 2‘s dalliance with 6v6 isn’t going away any time soon. As announced by game director Aaron Keller, the current 6v6 playtest will be extended to the middle of the season.

Keller’s announcement on Twitter/X was met with plenty of praise from Overwatch fans who are happy to see the game get back to its roots, and it’s pretty easy to see why. A return to 6v6 was an overwhelmingly popular cry to developers over the past year or two, with players tired of the 5v5 format the game switched to when the sequel was announced. “We’re extending the 6v6 playtest due to continued player interest and excitement for the mode,” Keller said in his post. He went on to say that the current test, which features the old 2-2-2 role queue version of 6v6, will give way to an even more classic format at midseason: 6v6 open queue.

That open queue experiment will be a very interesting one, considering it’s not just the Overwatch community it’s likely aimed at, but also will likely look at how Marvel Rivals has been stealing Blizzard’s lunch money over the past couple months with its fully open queue, 6v6, hero shooter experience. Notably, many Marvel Rivals players are already begging for role queue in ranked, where it’s incredibly easy to get rolled over if your team just has four Duelist mains who are unwilling to switch off their character of choice while the other team has far more balanced roles.

But in the end, I think 6v6 is more popular with the Overwatch community now because most of the people playing the game these days were also the ones playing when the first Overwatch was at the height of its powers. They fell in love with a 6v6 game, and now they’ve got 6v6 back.

It also doesn’t help that the switch to 5v5 has never felt incredibly comfortable when it comes to tank players, either for the tanks themselves or the people playing against them. To this day, characters like Roadhog have never felt like a “tank” in 5v5, and getting rid of the off-tank role always seemed like a collapsing of the position’s skill ceiling to me. Tuning up tanks to account for every team only having one of them has also been a fraught balancing exercise, as many tanks became incredibly difficult to punish for poor positioning and games often felt like one or two tanks could simply roll over the competition.

It’s early days yet on the 6v6 experiment and its future within Overwatch 2. But the fact that enough people are playing it to warrant an extension of the playtest bodes very well. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be in a ranked game and lock in four tanks and two supports sometime soon.

Then again, maybe some metas are better left in the past.