Overwatch 2 has had a rough time since its 2023 launch, alienating players of the original game with its changes to gameplay fundamentals while struggling to find a compelling identity of its own. Now, it’s set to get the biggest change since its release with a whole new game mode that’s fundamentally different from anything that’s come before. The week before Stadium mode launches, Blizzard is laying out what players should expect, and it sounds like this could be the most important moment in Overwatch 2’s existence.
As Blizzard previously announced, Stadium is a new mode that pits teams of five against each other in matches consisting of seven rounds and offers an option to play from a third-person view for the first time in Overwatch history. After each round, players can purchase upgrades that strengthen or radically alter their abilities in the fights to follow using Stadium Cash earned by downing opponents. Teams will have role requirements of one tank, two damage-dealers, and two support characters. Stadium launches at the start of Overwatch 2’s Season 16, which begins on April 22.
In the week leading up to Stadium’s launch, Blizzard has been going into more detail on how the mode will work in a series of blogs. That includes one on how Stadium mode has changed since its initial announcement and subsequent playtests. Originally, Stadium had a “mercy rule,” which ended matches early if one team won three rounds before their opponents had claimed a single victory. However, it’s still possible for a losing team to come back in that scenario by winning all four remaining rounds, so a new rule was put in place. Now, matches will only end early if a team wins the first three matches and has 15,000 Stadium Cash more than the losing team. Teams with fewer wins will also gain more Stadium Cash as well to prevent one team from getting an insurmountable advantage by taking an early lead.
Upgrading characters is the defining feature of Stadium, and those upgrades come in two broad categories. Powers are granted for free every other round, starting with the first, and each has a major impact on how characters play. They add new abilities or alter existing ones, and Blizzard gives the example of healer Kiriko being able to create a decoy clone of herself.
Items can be purchased with Stadium Cash between each round and offer smaller changes that add up over time. These might boost the rate Ultimate skills charge, add more damage to attacks, or grant smaller changes to existing abilities. Unlike powers, items can be sold back for a refund after being selected, so a player could choose to switch their loadout each round if something isn’t working.
There are dozens of items and powers to choose from in Stadium, so at the start of matches, the game will offer two example builds that emphasize the unique strengths of the character you’re playing, showing which upgrades to choose. You don’t have to stick to those examples, but they could be a good way of helping players learn the basics of the new mode before beginning to craft builds on their own.
Stadium is also getting its own ranked league, where players can climb the ranks with each victory. Stadium has seven ranks, and reaching the highest tiers will give players cosmetic rewards, just like hitting higher ranks in Overwatch 2’s regular competitive mode does. Hitting Elite rank, the fourth-highest, will grant players a new Epic skin for a selection of characters. Reaching All-Star rank, the second-highest, grants a new skin for a single character that can’t be obtained any other way. For the first Stadium season, All-Star players will get a new skin for Juno. Like in Overwatch 2’s regular competitive mode, playing ranked matches in Stadium will earn you points you can use to purchase new weapon skins.
Stadium will launch with just 17 of Overwatch 2’s 43 characters available. Blizzard is avoiding characters with extreme mobility at first, which could be difficult to balance, game director Aaron Keller recently told PCGamesN. There are plans to bring more characters into the new mode over time, including Tracer, one of the game’s speediest heroes.
Even without Tracer and her ilk, Stadium already looks incredibly fast and chaotic compared to the rest of Overwatch 2. The new mode is doing a lot to set itself apart, from the variability of heroes to the speed of matches, and it could be a make-or-break moment for the game. Since Overwatch 2 launched without its planned cooperative mode, and later cancelled it altogether, it’s struggled to differentiate itself from its predecessor. Stadium mode could finally offer a way to do that.
