‘It hasn’t evolved as much as it should have’: Overwatch 2 director says Marvel Rivals adds pressure to improve

The game director of Overwatch 2 says areas of the game haven’t evolved quickly enough, and that the popularity of newcomer Marvel Rivals puts pressure on his team to improve things.

In an interview with GamesRadar, Aaron Keller was asked if the team felt pressure now that Marvel Rivals has been out for two months and appears to be a success.

Keller conceded that the Overwatch 2 team did feel some pressure to deliver due to the arrival of new competition, but noted that it had already been identifying areas where the game was lacking and putting in work to resolve it.

“There is pressure on the Overwatch team, and a lot of it is internal,” Keller explained. “It’s [asking], ‘how do we make the best possible game that we can?’ And we’ve been feeling it for a while.

“You know, a lot of the things that we’re announcing for seasons 15 and 16, like perks and Stadium, they’re things that have been in development for Overwatch for quite some time. And I think what’s driving that is, when we look at our game, we feel like it’s either missing something or it hasn’t evolved as much as it should have.”

“I look at what happens in a game of Overwatch, and a lot of times, when you get enough hours in the game, it almost feels like you can be going through the motions sometimes. What we want to be able to do is to inject a bit of freshness into the game, but not just for variety’s sake. We want to increase the depth of play.”

Keller also said he welcomed competition within the genre, because it forces the team to actually take risks instead of resting on its laurels and delivering something more conventional.

“We’re obviously in a new competitive landscape that I think, for Overwatch, we’ve never really been in before, to this extent where there’s another game that’s so similar to the one that we’ve created,” he said, referring to Marvel Rivals.

“There’s actually something kind of exciting about this, for a few reasons. One of those is, it’s really great to see a game kind of take a different direction with some of the things you’ve kind of looked at before.

“But also, we think it’s a forcing function to our team – this is no longer about playing it safe. And I really think that seasons 15 and 16 are us not playing it safe. But really it’s a forcing function to execute – and for a team of super passionate craftspeople, that’s like music to their ears.”

Elsewhere in the GamesRadar interview, Keller said he understood why some players feel negatively about Overwatch 2, most notably because the story-based co-op modes promised during development were mainly scrapped to focus on PvP gameplay.

“I think that there’s been a lot of people that have stuck with Overwatch over the years that have really noticed the care and attention that we’ve put into it since Overwatch 2 has shipped,” he said.

“Especially over the course of the last year, we’ve really focused on leveling up the game. “I hope those people really see that with a lot of the things we’ve been sharing lately, and hopefully that can spread out to the broader community as well.

“But [on the other hand] I understand, you know? I understand when people have that particular view. They thought that the game was going to be something that it didn’t end up being. I get the criticism, but from the team’s point of view, the only thing that we can do about that now is to make the best version of this game that we can.”

SteamDB data researched at the end of January found that Overwatch 2’s average Steam player count had dropped by nearly 40% since the release of Marvel Rivals.