Blizzard seems to have heard players’ prayers. The Overwatch team announced Thursday that it’s bringing back 6v6 matches after controversially removing them for Overwatch 2 — for testing purposes, at least.
In a blog post, the team revealed that it’s running two 6v6 tests in the upcoming season 14. The first will be a week into the season, which begins on December 10, and will be trying out a new Open Queue-type scenario where players can change characters on the fly, but must fill at least one of the roles without going over three per team. So you can’t switch to Genji if you already have three damage heroes.
The second, which will take place sometime in the middle of the season and will go back to the 2-2-2 composition (so two damage, two tanks, and two support per team), but will incorporate Overwatch 2 changes. The post doesn’t specify what these are, but it will integrate the lessening of crowd control.
“Part of this series of tests is to not only judge our player’s appetite for larger team sizes, but for us to explore different ways that we might implement a change without running into the same problems we had previously,” the post reads.
Overwatch debuted with a 6v6 format, but that led to problems with team composition, especially in the early days when there weren’t role limits. That made it difficult for the developers to balance the heroes, and once role limits were introduced, it caused issues with long queue times and resulted in broken meta builds that made the game tougher in more competitive play.
Blizzard switched to 5v5 for Overwatch 2, which proved to be unpopular. It wasn’t a deal-breaker for people who wanted to keep playing Overwatch, but it changed up the game considerably — and not always for the better. Not only did it make the game faster, which doesn’t work for every hero, but it didn’t solve a lot of the developers’ problems.
The developers will be taking the results from these two tests — along with two others in season 13 that are iterating on 5v5 — and deciding how to move forward.
“Is there a world where both 5v5 and 6v6 exist permanently in Overwatch 2? If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have said no,” the post reads. “We know our players can want more than one experience, and it would be something we’d need to consider moving forward.”
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.