How do you follow a legend like Overwatch? That's the question the Overwatch 2 team needs to answer in its sequel, which arrives on Oct. 4 as a wholesale replacement of Blizzard Entertainment's bona fide cultural phenomenon, which first launched in 2016.

It didn’t take long for the competitive shooter to effortlessly muscle its way into the esports scene, simultaneously attracting an army of more casual fans drawn to its inclusive cast of heroes, its rich lore, and its buttery smooth gameplay. Fan enthusiasm has helped the game to endure and even evolve with the times in the midst of roster fumbles and toxic workplace struggles.

We already know some of the sequel's biggest changes. Team sizes are being cut, from six to five. The formerly even split between hero roles — two Tanks, two Damage, and two Support per team — will lose one of those Tanks. That shift led in turn to a mass overhaul of the Overwatch hero roster. The sequel will also add a proper story mode to the series for the first time, complete with skills to unlock for each hero and narrative cutscenes.

There's a lot more left to be revealed, however, as we learned during a recent two-hour battery of interviews with key members of the sequel's development team.

"Overwatch is fundamentally changing. And it's not just because this is our most significant release since the game launched," said director Aaron Keller. Of course there's the stuff like the team size change and hero overhaul that's already been discussed, he added. But looming over those is an even more dramatic shift that was revealed only recently, alongside the Oct. 4 release date.

"The game is going free to play," Keller said. While the original launched at a $40 price, when the sequel arrives in October, you'll be able to play right away without spending a dime. Overwatch's sometimes controversial Loot Boxes are going away completely as well, to be replaced by seasonal unlock ladders a la Fortnite's Battle Pass. Overwatch seasons will run for nine weeks apiece, and the cosmetic enhancements like sprays and character skins that used to come tumbling out of Loot Boxes at random will now be stuff you naturally unlock as you play.

"Free to play for us is about growing the audience and doing that around the world," said Jon Spector, VP and commercial leader for Overwatch. The new business approach responds directly to the social nature of the non-pro player community by creating new ways and reasons for people to team up, thanks to cross-platform play between PCs and supported consoles, and cross-platform progression that ensures any leveling up you do is tied to your whole account rather than the specific hardware you used to play.

"We think this is the best time to make that transition, with the launch of Overwatch 2," Spector added. "[The idea is to] drop any of those barriers to entry for players and make it as easy as possible for people to get in, fall in love with the game, and play with their friends."

Make no mistake, you're seeing Keller and Spector describe a fundamental piece of the Overwatch 2 pitch here: Easily play with more friends and in more places than you could before.

The main source of fun in Overwatch has always been the game itself: how it plays, the ways different roles click with different types of players, and the social layer inherent to having an intensely cooperative focus baked into a competitive team-based game. But the basic thrill of unlocking stuff is intrinsic to a game like this, and Overwatch 2 takes some big steps there.

In the original game, Loot Boxes could be a mixed bag. You might get a string of lucky drops that deliver a string of cool Epic (purple) and Legendary (gold) rarity cosmetic items, but the Loot Box experience was by and large one led by disappointment. Most of them contained far more common drops, and even Epic or Legendary items could be a buzzkill if you ended up with a duplicate.

The seasonal approach embraces structure and transparency instead. Loot Boxes and their slot-machine-like mystery will be replaced by a clearly visible rundown of which items you'll get for each level earned.

"We know that players care about [cosmetics] a lot," Spector said. But publicly addressing details like "What do you get at each tier?" and "What do you get for free?" isn’t the team's focus right now. With almost four months to go until launch, it's likely they're still finalizing answers to those basic questions behind the scenes as well.

"That's stuff that we will get into detail with for our players ahead of Oct. 4," he added, noting that it's a "small piece of the puzzle" right now. Spector did suggest, however, that the team is actively thinking about how to make the existing library of Overwatch cosmetics available to people who are new to the game.

"It's been a value for the team since the day that Overwatch 2 was envisioned to have players bring all of [their previously unlocked cosmetics] forward with them. And we've been talking about ... wanting to make sure that [newcomers] have opportunities where they can to build their collections to include some of that previous stuff."

In terms of what's new in the realm of Overwatch 2 cosmetics, however, "Mythic" skins are the capstone unlock on each season pass. They come in at a higher rarity level than the previously top-tier Legendary drops, and they earn that placement by embracing discrete customization.

It's going to vary from drop to drop, but the first Overwatch 2 season's Mythic skin, for the robot ninja Damage hero, Genji, exemplifies what you can expect to see moving forward. Unlock his Mythic skin and you'll be able to set different color options, like "Neon" or "Demonic," that change how both the character and his weapons look. Mythic skins also sport enhancements like custom animations that tie to specific in-game actions.

"There's a whole different set of particle effects for the [Genji skin] that's coming as part of the first season," Keller said. "When Genji [uses his Ultimate ability], the face mask opens up and it's kind of got this cyberpunk demonic look to it. So as he's moving around the battlefield, he just looks so much scarier."

The plan is to deliver one Mythic skin with each new season, which should help to fuel a slowly evolving visual identity in Overwatch 2. For any tweaks to the rules or business model, the fact that the sequel fully replaces the original Overwatch creates an unusual situation in which all the same stuff we've been playing since 2016 will still be there.

"In some ways, it's kind of like an Avengers movie. The next movie, the costumes change a little bit. Captain America looks a little different. So we wanted that in Overwatch," said Dion Rogers, the art director on the sequel. It's not just the visual differences, in Rogers' telling; changes in costume are also built to move the story along in subtle ways.

"A lot of [heroes], they're actually fully a part of Overwatch now," he added, referring to the in-universe United Nations-sponsored strike team from which the series draws its title. "This is what's fun about it. As we make this new game, we actually get to move the story along."

Some of Overwatch 2's most significant and labor-intensive changes aren't necessarily going to be obvious up front. There has, for example, been a massive effort behind the scenes to add more voice lines to the sequel that flesh out both the ongoing story of the Overwatch universe and our understanding of where different characters and their histories intersect.

"In Overwatch, we had about 1,200 interaction lines [during] pre-match conversations. In Overwatch 2 we have 1,800 new interaction lines ... and about 25,000 lines coming to Overwatch 2 [overall]," said Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie, the sequel's lead narrative designer.

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A chunk of that material is just new additions to old standards, like new voice lines when a hero uses a specific ability or enters a match to join the ones that were there before. But players who have invested in Overwatch lore will appreciate new dialogue that's more reflective of the speaker's journey since Overwatch, as the sequel picks up years after the world its predecessor introduced.

"We wanted to communicate the feeling that time had passed. Characters like [the Tank hero] Orisa, for example, have actually grown up a bit. She's no longer the traffic robot that she once was [prior to the events of Overwatch]. She now is coming into her own as a guardian of Numbani," Jurgens-Fyhrie continued. So some of Orisa's lines are meant to help us understand how she's changed.

There's also a lot of new writing that's just meant to heighten the vast assortment of extremely specific things that can happen during an Overwatch match.

So there's one for those times when the Support hero Ana takes out a specific opponent using her ability to put enemy heroes to sleep while said hero is in the air above a pit. Another one happens when the Damage hero Junkrat manages to take out Reaper, another Damage hero, from a distance while the latter hero is in the middle of using his Ultimate Ability. Just incredibly specific happenings.

"The team wanted to come up with ways for the game to feel even more reactive. So that when players do something ... you don't see every day, the game acknowledges it and gives the player a real sense of accomplishment," Jurgens-Fyhrie said.

There's still a lot of work to be done ahead of Overwatch 2's Oct. 4 launch. First up is a public beta test that kicks off on June 28, with sign-ups opening on June 16. That test will introduce players to one of the sequel's new maps, as well as the recently revealed new Tank hero, Junker Queen.

Blizzard also plans to share more specifics on how the season pass and free to play elements will work in Overwatch 2 in an eventual deep dive. That includes the eventual campaign mode, which is coming sometime in 2023. That's a totally new addition for the Overwatch universe, and it gives the development team a whole new outlet for telling stories.

The campaign will feature a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it sounds like the plan isn't to deliver it all at once. How exactly that will work, including the ways in which an ongoing story connects with each new season, remains to be seen. But here again, Blizzard's promise is to share much more detail ahead of any release.

Really, that was the common theme across all two hours of our discussion with the various principals on Overwatch 2: Transparency is part of the deal now. There are still going to be mysteries and surprises in the story, but for the game itself, making sure people know what the product is and how it works is vital to Blizzard's shift toward free to play.

"We put out a roadmap for the game that includes what's coming in Season 1 and in Season 2. [A new] hero is coming in Season 1. Another new hero is coming Season 2. We're committed to making three to four new heroes a year," Keller said, noting that these drops will be a part of the "seasonal cadence."

He also added that the six new maps coming with the launch of Overwatch 2 will be joined by others down the road, and it's a similar approach there. Three or four new ones each year, with one already confirmed as a Season 2 drop.

"I think it's really important for us to let people see what's coming to the game and to be able to expect what they can look forward to," Keller said. The notion of arming fans and newcomers with enough information to make choices about how they want to spend their gaming time is now a core value on the development team.

"Overwatch is special," Keller said. "What made the original game stand out, I think that magic is still a part of Overwatch 2. We have fans all over the world that are invested in our heroes and our universe and our maps and the story behind the game. We have a lot of fans that don't even play, [but] they're so invested in it."

Keller's obviously biased, but he's not wrong about Overwatch being special. It's a rare game that can command interest from an audience that includes people who consume transmedia content like the comics or the ever-growing lineup of animated hero origin shorts without ever playing, or who just passively watch other people play. The original game's specialness is plain to see in the runaway success story it's become.

How do you possibly top that, then? It's a question the dev team at Blizzard will be working to answer through Oct. 4 and well beyond. Overwatch is a legendary game. For the sequel to really succeed, Overwatch 2 will have to take a page from its own new rarity tiers and evolve into an experience of mythic proportions.

Overwatch 2 comes to PC, PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox on Oct. 4.