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Blizzard Entertainment announced a new experimental game mode titled Triple Damage for Overwatch, and it will try to reduce role queue times while implementing balance changes for the positions (via Windows Central).
Triple Damage touches down on February 25. It will introduce a team of three Damage players, two Support players, and one Tank player, instead of the standard two Damage players, two Support players, and two Tank players. Principal game designer Michael Heiberg said that the standard role queue structure has “ended up with a lot more damage players in queue than tanks and supports,” forcing longer queue times. Dissatisfaction abounds. “One of the things we considered was, what if we tried to make the team composition closer to the actual ratio of players by role? If that did work out, people would be waiting less, playing more. So, it behooved us to actually try it,” elaborated Heiberg.
However, this may strike fear into the hearts of Tank players, if they must act as their team’s only bullet sponge and shielding guardian. Blizzard claims that the Triple Damage mode will possess balance changes that compensate for the seismic shifts, but we aren’t sure just what these entail. Interestingly, the internal playtesting of Triple Damage was like Marmite. “It polarized the dev team,” admitted director Jeff Kaplan. “People tended to either hate it or be intrigued by it. Most people were cautiously optimistic, like, ‘Oh yeah, this could be really interesting.’ But then we had people staunchly opposed to it who said, ‘This is so different, it puts too much pressure on the tank player, the game feels too lethal.’”
The experimental rollout of the new structure will let the developer “balance our way out of those issues.” Moreover, Zarya, D.Va, and Roadhog will be getting tweaks in Triple Damage that turn them into “main tanks” instead of “off-tanks.”
Overwatch is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch. Check out the developer update below, or read all about it here.
