Overwatch 2 Season 12 Director's Take Talks "Avoid A Teammate", Wave Respawns, And "Drives"

The Overwatch 2 systems team has been hard at work over the last few months and that means interesting things are coming to the team shooter with Season 12. Today, the dev team dropped a post detailing all the things the team has been working on. It includes things that players have been asking for and things that they perhaps didn’t know they wanted. Of course, there is the chance that once they’ve had a chance to try out some of the new stuff, they still won’t want it, but that’s the risk devs take.

As mentioned, there are several things highlighted in the post. The first is a sort of upgrade to the game’s “avoid a teammate” system. The slots have been increased to 15, with three of those being “pinned” for those people you’d rather avoid forever rather than just 7 days. Of course, rank and match population will have some bearing on the system as well.

A new feature being introduced is a new competitive event called “Drives”. With Drives, players taking part in the Competitive Play Role Queue will earn Drive Scores and progress through checkpoints, earning rewards along the way.

Yet another change to anticipate is a replacement. The team has decided to remove group respawn and replace it with a feature called “Wave Respawn”. It seems that a failure of Group Respawn was that those who died first had to wait for teammates to die, making their respawn time take longer. Wave Respawn fixes this. The full explanation for this is rather more detailed and can be found in the blog post.