Priority Passes teased in latest Overwatch Developer Update

The newest Overwatch Developer Update is bringing some hope to players who are tired of long queues.

Game director Jeff Kaplan revealed today that “Priority Passes” will be enabled in a future update, giving players a faster queue as a reward for flexing to other roles. Overwatch’s Replay Viewer will also be getting some important updates. 

Every player in Overwatch has likely experienced a seemingly endless queue, especially those who play damage roles in competitive mode. At the highest levels of play, damage queues in role queue competitive mode can climb above 20 minutes, depending on the time of day. A future Overwatch update aims to solve this issue, though. 

Priority Passes will apparently be added in an upcoming Overwatch patch. These Priority Passes give faster queue times to “impacted roles,” according to Kaplan, which are likely damage-dealing roles. Nothing this good is free, however, and players will have to earn those passes. 

Players will have to queue for what Kaplan refers to as a “flex queue” to earn Priority Passes. In short, players will volunteer to play whatever role is necessary to reduce queue times, including support, tank, or even damage. Winning games within the flex queue will award additional Priority Passes. 

Players will be able to bank “up to 40” Priority Passes after earning them through flex queues, according to Kaplan. The feature will apparently be heading to the Public Test Realm (PTR) for bug testing before being enabled on the live servers sometime in the future. 

Overwatch’s Replay Viewer will also get a lot of interesting options in a future update, mainly for professional observers and content creators. Viewers will eventually be able to customize the user interface or change character outlines, for example. Content creators, in particular, will be able to delve deeper into replays thanks to these changes. 

Kaplan didn’t offer a specific date for when these changes will occur, but they’ll likely be previewed on the PTR before heading to the live Overwatch servers.