Blizzard Entertainment shared the latest director’s take dedicated to the first week of Stadium in Overwatch 2. Aaron Keller, the current game director of Overwatch 2, is checking in after the first few days of Season 16. The blog post addresses lack of cross-play support, high leaver rate, performance on older systems, and certain Heroes and builds being frustrating.
“I’m currently working on a longer Director’s Take about the past, present, and future of Stadium–complete with a roadmap for the mode–but I wanted to do a quick round-up of things from this week. There have been a lot of conversations around Stadium, and I want to make sure everyone is aware of the updates, changes, and how things are going.”
There are two ways to go around cross-play: either create an unranked version of Stadium and enable it there or turn Cross-Play on in the current ranked version. Part of this decision will come down to how popular the game mode is. All that being said, either version requires a patch and, after investigating the timeline, the developers are looking at Season 17 launch as the most realistic one.
The game data so far indicates that there are leavers in Stadium, but it’s not at a rate higher than in Ranked. On Thursday, the developers fixed a bug that caused leaver penalties to not be enabled for some players. With this resolved, the team is looking forward to seeing how the leaver rate will be affected.
“Because of the sheer amount of extra abilities and powers that players can equip in Stadium, it is a technically demanding game mode. We’ve heard that it’s hitting some systems harder, especially older ones. Because of this, the decision to lock older hardware to 30fps in the mode was made.”
There are some quick adjustments for Cassidy, D.Va, and Zarya while the developers are crunching data on Hero Bans and Perks, as well as seeing how players are responding to Freja.
