GOOD NEWS? PR SPIN? 
tl;dr
- closed PvP beta starts today (OWL & Blizz employees only)
- closed PvP beta begins ‘late’ April (community can sign up, randomly selected)
- open PvP beta later this year (Q3 at earliest, July+)
Beta includes new hero Soujourn (for first Beta, maybe more later), new maps, PUSH mode, some reworks and a ‘ping’ system.
- OW2 PvP & PvE ‘decoupled’ so we can experience PvP ‘sooner’
What does that even mean? They are likely referring only to Beta testing because I don’t see a world where OW2 releases with only the PvP available…
- ‘more communication’
I’ve mentioned on these forums many times, we wouldn’t get any OW2 news until they were preparing for launch. I’d say we’re within a year now so expect the hype trail to slowly leave the station over the next few months…
It’s…nice to see a bit of a roadmap finally (even if it’s only for PvP).
A few comments from Aaron worry me:
“So we can bring you PvP sooner”
He doesn’t mention if this is just the Beta testing or the full version.
“This represents the most new content we have brought to our game since launch”
Bit of a hollow statement when we’ve had no ‘content’ since Echo…we would’ve had ‘more’ by comparison if you’d just continued your old update schedule… 
“We are planning additional public PvP beta testing later in the year…”
Very vague. Later could mean July or later could mean December…also ‘planning’ suggests they aren’t concrete on it yet either…
My personal take, a lot of ‘waffle’ and ‘we hear you’ type statements. Still nice to see anything new however…
Thoughts? Hype or Hope?
Andy certainly sounded very concrete earlier
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Thanks I wanted that quote.
“…and we are working on more, new, heroes for each role…”
Baja…they’ve had years now. They should have 5-6 new heroes lined-up at the minimum already…
That’s exactly what they’re doing I believe. Many of us predicted this because it’s the only sensible thing for them to do after all these delays. PVE will come later.
Just to confirm as you didn’t explicitly state it (as I gave two hypotheticals).
You think OW2 will launch without the PvE content or just give us a taste of the Beta stuff? 
“We are working on” does not necessarily mean there’s nothing else at sojourn levels of complete-ness(?)…I really doubt they’re just going to throw everything out there when the game is still a long ways away
It’s not a great statement from Andy and I’ll explain why, either:
- they have 5-6 heroes ‘at Sojourn level of completeness’ (considering they’ve had years to work on heroes at this stage and they’re still working on more
or
- they’ve only really got Sojourn finished and they’re still working on the other 1-? heroes for launch…
Either way you look at it. It doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, especially since they absolutely refuse to talk new hero numbers in any communications so far…
I believe it’s the former simply because doing hero pvp reworks means they also have to adapt their changes to PvE, so they end up slowing down.
If they focus on getting everything from PvP out first then they will for sure have things to go off of for things like skill trees.
Oh my bad. Yes, I’m confident the actual game will release without PvE, which will be patched in later. They might withhold the new OW2 branding until the PvE patch though. Not sure.
This is still speculation but I’m so confident about it that if I’m wrong, I’ll buy you a fruit basket.
That’s a good point. It’s funny how it took them years to come to that realization though… 
No worries haha! The branding is a big deal though…
They have let OW1 stagnate for years on the hopes of a big OW2 ‘relaunch’ and I wonder if PvP 2.0 will carry OW2 by itself…?
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Yeah I’m wondering that same thing. The rebranding is indeed a big deal.
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The game is going to fall on its face if we don’t have more than a handful of new heroes at launch.
People aren’t going to come back for the same stale game from 2016. New heroes are what draw people in.
…and this is what really worries me about this dev update we just got…
They’re keeping very quiet about the heroes, it could be because they want beta testing to see where the ‘new’ heroes fit and if they need fundamental changes to their kits and it also could be they haven’t got much to show yet…
If it’s 3 or less heroes on launch, they haven’t done enough imo…