Overwatch players will be pleased to hear that today the Competitive Play patch will be going live today.
The PC patch is going live first ahead of consoles and this first season will be shortened to two months instead of three so Blizzard can see how it works out.
First, we wanted to be upfront and let players know that we won’t be able to release our Competitive Play patch on all platforms at the same time. The patch will be going live on PC today, while PlayStation 4 and Xbox One players can expect it sometime next week. We don’t have an exact date to share, but we can confirm that the patch is going through approvals right now on both platforms.
We know this isn’t an ideal way to deliver new content, so we’re going to continue to refine our patching processes over the next few months in an effort to sync up our release dates across platforms as closely possible. Although our Battle.net client will always allow us to be more agile on PC, we hope to reach a point where we can release major updates on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 simultaneously.
We also wanted to let players know that the first season of Competitive Play will be an abbreviated one, lasting only two months instead of the normal three. This is because our Competitive Play patch is launching in the middle of the Summer 2016 season, which technically began on June 1 (a minor side-effect of our real-world season system). As a result, our inaugural season will include approximately 1.5 months of play rather than the full 2.5 months, ending on August 18 across all platforms. The Fall 2016 season will then begin as scheduled following our standard two-week off-season break.
We’re super excited to release Competitive Play, and we made the decision to move ahead with a shorter season for two key reasons. One, we want players to be able to start working towards their Competitive Play rewards as soon as possible. And two, we believe this first season will teach us a lot of about what works well, what doesn’t, and what players are really looking for from a competitive system in Overwatch. Competitive Play is definitely one of those features that will take us a few iterations to get right, and by getting the system out there sooner, we can start making improvements based on your feedback sooner too.
These are the main points from the Overwatch update this evening.
