Overwatch's Competitive Mode Hopefully Back In June

Overwatch [official site] came out yesterday, but I'm guessing by your exhausted hunch that you already knew that and are now desperately trying to cope with a whole day on no sleep. Just me? Okay. Well anyway, yesterday Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan took to Facebook to answer questions from players and revealed that Overwatch's anticipated Competitive Play mode would be returning in a big update hopefully near the end of June.

"Competitive mode is the current focus for the Overwatch team," Kaplan says around 9:20 minutes into the video. "It's the most important thing to add for us to add to the game."

Overwatch's Competitive Play was yanked before the open beta due to negative feedback from players, making the folks at Blizzard rethink the structure for competitive Overwatch. "The feedback we were seeing was a little bit critical of some of the decisions we made," Kaplan explains. "We really took that to heart."

Kaplan was hesitant to commit to a specific date for the launch, saying that his "'not-commitment' would be sometime toward the end of June—middle to end of June."

He then went on to talk about some of the adjustments being made from the last iteration of Competitive Play, including increasing the length of seasons from one month to "probably around three months." There's some other tweaks too, like reducing the frequency of sudden death, but we'll need to wait until later for more concrete details on all the changes.

For now, spend your downtime between each match by reading up on our detailed guide for every hero or read Pip's interview with Michael Chu as they discuss Overwatch's story and lore.

If you want some help with how the heroes play currently, check out our Overwatch character guide.