In the very first fight I ever played in Overwatch 2’s new Stadium mode, I chucked Ana Amari’s biotic grenade at the enemy team, eager to watch them turn purple as the explosive’s damage and anti-healing took effect. I’ve been playing Overwatch for eight years and put hundreds of hours into Ana, so I know this is the way to win fights at the outset.
Instead, Orisa’s javelin spin, which would normally have harmlessly destroyed the grenade, deflected it back into my team, killing me and two teammates instantly.
It was the perfect introduction to Stadium, a new game mode that exists separately from quick play and competitive queues, and uses the same 5v5 role queue format. Despite that similarity, it’s arguably the biggest addition to the game since competitive was introduced a month after Overwatch’s May 2016 launch.
In Stadium, anything can and will happen. During my time playing in an early access media server, I suffered the aforementioned ‘nade incident, got shoved off the map by a Mei who had turned herself into a giant rolling snowball, nano boosted four teammates at once and gave Kiriko’s kunai the fire rate of an assault rifle.
I also watched a Reinhardt fly out of our spawn, coasting through the air toward the objective like a hammer-wielding rhinoceros soaring toward his destiny.
Stadium comes almost half a year after the launch of Marvel Rivals, the biggest competition Overwatch has ever seen. The new game mode is an important test of whether current players are interested in new ways to play and whether that will bring in new or returning players — the results will be an important signal for a franchise that’s almost a decade old.
I’ve been playing Overwatch actively for eight years, putting a couple thousand hours in the game over that time across quick play, competitive and even organized team play. While I’ve never been at the top of the leaderboards, I’ve been through the ups and downs and peaks and craters of Overwatch over those years, and Stadium is the first thing that has felt truly new in the game since it came out.
‘One Nano was never enough’
In a group media interview last week, I asked Overwatch 2 Game Director Aaron Keller about how the development philosophy had evolved since the launch of Overwatch 2. Keller said that over time, the team realized, «while players want to have a competitive experience, they don’t always want a completely even experience — they want to feel some of these highs and lows [and…] that power fantasy that the heroes can provide.»
I felt both ends of that power fantasy in early access games. Sometimes, it was getting nuked by a single Soldier: 76 helix rocket. Other times, it was watching my team’s Junker Queen fire off another Commanding Shout with every elimination, giving her a seemingly never-ending pool of overhealth. I was both the victim of an unkillable Reaper and the Ashe deleting enemies from an uncontested high ground.
Power fantasy and customization are the two biggest pillars of Stadium, which invites players to cook up their most busted builds for each hero. The game gives players two suggested builds for whichever hero they choose, but players are free to brew up their own diabolical concoctions.
Customization comes in the form of powers — free ability upgrades you get every other round — and «items,» which are upgrades you can purchase with currency you earn each round. There’s a suite of generic items that any hero can buy and a handful of items specific to each hero, but they largely increase stats like weapon power, ability power, fire rate, health, etc. Powers are generally more transformative upgrades to abilities — giving them an extra charge or adding additional effects like making Ashe’s dynamite explode into smaller bundles of dynamite that explode later.
It’s a version of Overwatch that’s faster-paced, harder to read, and a bit addicting. Whether I won or lost a Stadium match, my immediate response was usually, «Let’s go again and try out this different build.» I started with a weapon power build for Ana designed for bursts of damage and healing, then an ability power build meant to turn my grenades into nukes, plus a machine-gun sniper build and a «nano everyone» build.
I went through similar explorations for Juno and Kiriko. There was always room for experimentation. If I’m going for a turbo-torpedo build with Juno, do I go all-in on ability power at the cost of other upgrades, or do I diversify my build across cheaper items that give me additional benefits? Do I start with the power that gives me a second charge of torpedoes, or the one that reduces the cooldown for each person hit?
When I’m not grinding my way through hero shooters, I play games like Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, where «the build» is a huge part of the game, so I enjoyed having something else to think about in Overwatch. Stadium is a great mode for tinkering, even though I fully expect «optimal» build guides to flood the internet at any moment.
Stadium also seems to invite heroic moments more so than its core modes, where teamwork generally reigns supreme. In Stadium, the turbocharged abilities give you more opportunities to clutch in 1v3 situations or to carry the rest of your braindead teammates. If you can handle the fact that it’s also easier for the enemies to do the same, it leads to a more dynamic, exciting game. Sure, sometimes the enemy Cassidy will just burst you down before you can blink, but other times you’ll be the Junker Queen deleting enemies with a single axe swing.
Stadium concerns
Stadium injects a lot of excitement into Overwatch 2, but it’s not flawless. Matches I played in the new mode snowballed easily. That sometimes happens on early access servers where matchmaking is more limited, but even still, only a couple of the matches I played were remotely competitive. Almost all of them were 3-0 or 4-0, and I was on both sides of these wild swings. Winning the first round usually allows that team to buy better upgrades, giving them an advantage over their opponents, funding future upgrades and so on.
It’s something the developers say was improved from the alpha test, but I’m not immediately convinced the catch-up mechanics are sufficient, and I hope it’s something they keep a close eye on once the game mode launches.
Early into my time with Stadium, I was convinced that counters actually feel worse in this game mode because of your counter’s ability to supercharge their advantage. After more games, my position on that softened — Stadium offers upgrades like Genji being able to deflect beam damage and Junker Queen gaining additional knockback resistance that help even out those matchups, and with more experience in the mode, I was more successful in counter-building my counters. But I do still believe that the person whose hero naturally counters the other can increase their advantage through items and powers more than the other person can resist it.
The smaller maps and shorter round times also seem to favor speedy rush comps, which felt generally viable most rounds. There isn’t as much space to poke out enemies before they’re on top of you, and heroes like Ana and Ashe who rely on longer sightlines often struggled in my matches against teams who have a Juno or Lucio speeding close-range menaces like Reaper and Mei onto them. There are a couple of maps in the Stadium pool that offer longer sightlines and more significant high grounds, where ranged heroes have more of a chance, so I’d like to see more of those stages added as the map pool grows over time.
The strength of rush comps may also be a function of the limited hero options in Stadium — only about half the roster will be available at launch, and almost all of the tanks are ones that want to just run at the enemy team. And they have the tools to do that effectively, between speed boosts from Lucio and Juno and close-range damage threats like Mei and Reaper. I hope the next additions to the Stadium roster prioritize heroes that bring more diversity to team compositions, enabling more ranged compositions with heroes like Sigma and Zenyatta or dive compositions with Winston.
Stadium mode also locks you into the hero you select at the start of the match. I think that’s the healthiest way to run a game mode that offers so much other complexity — having to predict whether your opponent was going to stay on big-bubble Zarya or come out instead on booster-reset D.Va sounds like overkill. But I also know that there are plenty of people who believe that hero swaps are a core part of the game’s identity — this game mode is going to be a tough sell for that crowd.
A different, but familiar experience
Overall, Stadium feels like a good and arguably necessary addition to Overwatch 2. Live-service games like this have to adapt. And, to be fair, Overwatch 2 has been making smaller changes that consistently evolve the game for the past couple of years, with things like out-of-combat healing and the perks system.
But Overwatch has existed in some form for almost a decade. That’s a long time, and moderate improvements to the game aren’t enough to keep people around forever or bring old players back — not even since the launch of Overwatch 2 in October of 2022. The game needed something big, flashy and exciting.
Stadium is all three. It feels like Overwatch, but it also looks like something bigger, wilder and more impossible. A little less competitive, maybe, but perhaps more fun. People who are deeply invested in competitive Overwatch might not be swayed by its wild power swings and more uneven experience, but I expect it to be popular with players whose primary hope is to have fun. The sentiment in my lobbies skewed heavily positive, as did my own experience — except when I loaded into the wrong side of matchups on tank. But even the games where I was getting stomped on damage and support were usually fun in their own way.
The ability to try different builds, the busted nature of said builds, and the novelty of third-person Overwatch should be enough to draw people in when the mode launches with season 16 next week. Over the years, the game has changed and evolved, but the core gameplay suffered from feeling a bit «solved» — games felt more and more the same as people figured out which heroes worked best in certain team compositions, on certain maps, etc. Stadium reminds me a lot of my early time in Overwatch, where things generally felt more chaotic, more broken and more exciting.
The bigger question is whether the devs will be able to keep it fresh even after launch. A steady influx of new heroes will help, as will more maps, and I hope the Stadium team preserves the not-quite-balanced chaos of the mode over time. Stadium needs that to work, and Overwatch needs Stadium to work.
In my last game of Stadium, my team was losing in a pivotal round 5 with the teams tied 2-2 when my team’s tank died. In normal Overwatch, it’s extremely difficult to turn around a fight after losing your tank. But I said, «F*** it, we ball,» tossed my nano boost on my Soldier and watched him shred through the enemy team just in time for my allies to get back and eventually win the round.
That was Stadium at its best — a hero play, made possible by teamwork and overcharged abilities, swinging the entire match in just a few short, thrilling moments.
