Stadium is the new permanent game mode making its way to Overwatch 2. The developers describe it as something unlike anything you’ve ever played in Overwatch 2, the best-of-7, multi-round fight where two teams of five face off in magnificent arenas as they purchase upgraded items and powers to radically transform their Heroes—all experienced through the game’s new third-person camera.
To highlight what had been changed since you last saw Stadium in action, Blizzard shared the new blog post dedicated to lessons learned from the playtests. The number-one comment that team heard was how much fun folks were having creating new hero builds. The feedback received helped Blizzard improve a variety of things, such as item and power balance issues, and some problematic builds that proved to be overly powerful.
“During these playtests, we had a “Mercy Rule” set so if a team won the first three games in a row, the match ended early. However, we quickly came to realize that sometimes a match isn’t exactly a stomp after the first three rounds, so we added a second condition before calling a match early. Now, if after a 3-0 the leading team has 15,000 Stadium Cash (or more) than the trailing team, the Mercy Rule will activate. Otherwise, at least one more round is played to give the trailing team a fair chance to reverse sweep.”
Additionally, the trailing team will have Stadium Cash boosts, plus both teams earn increased passive cash throughout the match. It will still take extra effort to settle the score, but the developers hope that this change will prevent major snowballing.
Stadium features unique third-person perspective, however, those who prefer to stay in first-person perspective (looking at you, FPS purists!) can switch to first-person in the game settings.
