Overwatch 2's season 10 launch makes it even more MOBA than FPS
Overwatch 2's next season, which starts tomorrow, will kick off with not just a new DPS hero, but a two-week-long trial run of its newest game mode, Clash, which feels designed for constant, MOBA-style combat.
The Clash trial will take place on Hanaoka, a map that looks surprisingly similar to Hanamura from the original Overwatch. Hanaoka canonically exists within the Hanamura district in Overwatch 2's near-future Japan, so Overwatch 1 players will get to play among the same cherry blossom trees and stone walkways that made the original map so iconic. It actually looks like Blizzard built Hanaoka out of the building blocks of Hanamura and I'm all for it.
Clash, however, is a very different mode than the multi-point mode assault (or «2CP») from Overwatch 1, and season 10's patch notes give us a good idea of how it'll work. There are five capture points in a line on a mirrored map, not unlike the design of the control point maps in Overwatch 2 already. Each team will start a match battling over the middle point. Successfully capturing it awards a team with one point before another objective opens up closer to the losing team's side (similar to 5CP in Team Fortress 2, actually). Teams will have a tug-of-war over the same points until one of them gains five points or successfully captures the furthest point on the opposite side.
The goal, as Blizzard said at BlizzCon last year, is to solve the stall outs that were common in 2CP—which Clash is positioned as a replacement for—and keep teams in constant combat. Downtime seems to be the enemy of Overwatch 2's game mode design in general with its maps becoming increasingly squished so teams run into each other more often. Push, Overwatch 2's first new game mode, has a similar tug-of-war style where teams try to escort a big robot to either side of the map.
This new era of Overwatch tends to feel more like a MOBA with a bunch of complex heroes ramming into each other rather than an FPS shootout.
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