At blizzcon last year we got a pretty clear roadmap of the first half of this year. But now that we’re approaching the midpoint of the year, I thought I’d recap everything we know is still on the way. Anything that is speculation or personal opinion is clearly indicated as such
Edit: I should mention due to some of the negative replies, but please remember that this is only a list of every single feature coming to the game this year, only the ones we know about. There could very well be more stuff
Season 12 starts on august 20th according to the in game battlepass timer, though they have changed this date before.
Seasons are typically 9 weeks, so season 13 should start on October 22nd and season 14 should start on December 24th. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the seasons deviated from the usual 9 weeks though, as I doubt they’d start a season right in the middle of the halloween event and I especially don’t think they’ll launch a season on Christmas Eve. My personal prediction is they’ll cut a week off of both season 12 and 13
Major content
Space Ranger, a new support hero who comes from a Mars colony, will come out next season. There are already teasers in the game in the form of comets present in the skyboxes of some maps. Not much is known about the hero’s kit, except that the jets on her outfit will provide vertical mobility and that she at one point during development had a “Smart SMG” weapon that has since been scrapped. Some speculate that this hero is Jiyai, a lore character who worked at Lucheng Interstellar, located in the Control Center part of the Lijang Tower map, and who is friends with Mei.
A new tank will come out in season 14, in December. All we saw about this hero was an icon, which shows what appears to be a male hero with a black turtle-like shell on his back and neon green hair as well as neon green spikes coming out of the shell. Some speculate that this hero will be a poison user based on the shade of green, and it is also speculated that the shell will play some role in damage mitigation.
At some point “after season 12” there will be a season where instead of receiving a new map, the game will receive reworks to at least 4 existing maps: Numbani, Dorado, Circuit Royale, and Havana to fix issues such as easily campable spawn rooms and overpowered sniping locations. This may not even be this year, but if it is it will probably be in season 13, since that is the only season where a map normally would’ve been expected
Clash is a new game mode which will launch with 2 maps, one of them being Hanoka, a map based on the retired Hanamura Map. It is heavily speculated that the other map will be set inside of The Temple of Anubis, based on a teaser seen in Venture’s reveal trailer showing a symmetrical indoor area with an Anubis statue. The actual release date of this mode is unknown, but it will definitely be sometime this year. Some speculate it will be season 13, since that is the next season where new maps are expected, but season 12, despite having a new hero, is also commonly speculated for a few reasons: some think the season with no maps only map reworks will be season 13 and thus clash will have to launch in one of the seasons with a hero, Season 13 seems like it might be too long of a gap between the trial run of Clash in season 10 and the launch of the mode, and some believed that they will try to hype up season 12 with a lot of content like they did in season 6 last year. This is speculated because it’s at the same time of year as season 6, season 6 and 12 were both preceded by a light on content “filler” season, and, to put it bluntly, Space Ranger looks like an attempt at creating a second Kiriko
Themes and cosmetics
We know two of the three season themes remaining for this year, but not in what order. The unknown theme is speculated to be season 14, since that is quite far off from when the season themes were announced at blizzcon last year
One of the themes is simply “Witches.” This could mean more skins like Witch Mercy and Witch Kiriko, but perhaps they will take it broader and create some more fantasy sorcerer type designs or maybe even some arcane or elemental creatures. This theme is speculated to be in season 13, since it’d be a fitting halloween season
The other theme is Egyptian Mythology. We already have some skins based on Egyptian gods including Ra for Zen, Anubis for Pharah, and Bast for Ana. Though these skins are all quite old so I wouldn’t be surprised if they took a crack at redoing some of these concepts on different heroes. This season is speculated to be in season 12, just by process of elimination based on when other themes are expected
In terms of mythic, going just in order of most to least recent, we would expect a tank in season 12, a support in season 13, and a dps in season 14, but mythics absolutely do not always release in a fixed pattern like this, this is a likely release order but not a guaranteed one. As for the new mythic weapons, we don’t know whether these will release every season and if so whether they will be evenly distributed to the roles like mythic skins currently are.
Events
Summer Games will happen in July this year but doesn’t seem like it will include any new gameplay. Some lifeguard skins will be available in the battlepass and shop
The Anniversary event should start in late September. Last year they created an event shop where you could buy a selection of 9 shop skins for white credits. They haven’t really done an event shop any time recently so I wouldn’t be surprised if they change how this event is ran.
For Halloween last year instead of having a designated set of event skins they just made almost all the season’s skins halloween themed. They only had 1 skin from the actual event, but you also could get plenty of others in the battlepass and shop. Perhaps they will do something similar with the Witch theme this year.
For Winter Wonderland last year they introduced an event battlepass, but considering it was rather controversial and it hasn’t returned since, I wouldn’t be surprised if they scrapped this idea and did something else.
We have a transformers event coming in early July. Perhaps this will include a gamemode since season 11 otherwise doesn’t have any new event modes, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. They’ve been consistent so far this year with 1 crossover per season, so we’ll see if they keep it up or not. My personal speculation is that they’ll do something big around the black friday season again to try to recapture that LE SSERAFIM magic from last year, and they may or may not to smaller scale collabs in the other 2 seasons.
In terms of season themed event modes, Season 11 was the first season in a long time not to have one of those. Hopefully this does not set a new precedent. Personally I hope we get a mode that’s just like Olympus but with the Egypt Gods instead.
Miscellaneous
For social features, more avoid slots and some enhanced UI that makes it easier to report disruptive players mid-game are slated to come in season 12 or later, not necessarily this year and not necessarily at the same time.
Reaper had a rework planned for a while now, but we have no idea when it will release. This includes changes to the shadow step ability, which the dev team claims are technically difficult to implement.
The Future
Blizzcon this year has been cancelled. However, it has been confirmed that Overwatch will appear at Gamescom in late August. Since this is a third party convention, they probably won’t be able to dedicate as much time to OW specifically, so I wouldn’t expect it to be like Blizzcon last year where we basically got a roadmap of this entire year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a big announcement or two.