Last month, developer Blizzard revealed the first details about the new upcoming permanent Overwatch 2 mode Flashpoint. The Season 6 mode is said to be larger than any other mode the team has released thus far and will ask players to fight over five different “flashpoints” in a race to be the first team to capture three points. Eventually, the mode is coming to both the ranked and unranked side of Overwatch 2, but recently a Blizzard developer announced some disappointing news. At least at launch, Flashpoint mode won’t be ready for Competitive mode.
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The news was first spotted by Dexerto, who picked it up from a live stream featuring Overwatch 2‘s executive producer Jared Neuss and former pro player and current streamer Emongg. On the short Q&A stream, Emongg asked about Competitive mode for Flashpoint. Neuss responded by saying, “As of right now, you’re going to be waiting a little bit.”
Obviously, “a little bit” could mean anything at this point. If the mode launches in Season 6, you would assume that it’ll come to Competitive at some point during that season. However, that could extend a bit further deepening on how things go. Neuss went on to say, “We want [Flashpoint] to be there immediately, but it’s also a brand-new mode and we haven’t played it in scale with millions of people. So getting the bugs worked out is probably the right thing to do before it goes into Competitive and ruins a bunch of people’s day because there’s something we didn’t realize was there.” In short, Blizzard doesn’t want to introduce something new to the Competitive scene and have it not work as it should.
All told, that’s probably the smart move for Blizzard. After all, the developer does have something of a history of releasing new games and modes that have early difficulty at scale. Everyone remembers Diablo 3‘s rocky launch, but that’s far from the only one. That said, Blizzard has been much better in recent years. Diablo 4 launched without too many major server issues. Hopefully, Overwatch 2 can have the same success when it eventually launches Competitive Flashpoint.
