Overwatch 2: New (and maybe last) chance to win beta keys

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After this week’s key drops via Twitch, next week you can secure access via YouTube. We’ll explain what you need to do here.

Update from 29 April: From 5 May 2022, there’s another chance to secure a key for the Overwatch 2 PVP Beta.

What do you have to do? Simply watch the Overwatch League games on YouTube! Every hour, 1,500 entries will be raffled off among all viewers.

(~) You can connect your YouTube account to your (Blizzard account) here.

(~) You can find the complete schedule with all games of the (OWL 2022) here.

Original post: The Overwatch 2 beta has already begun, but only a select few have been allowed to play so far. If you are one of the unlucky ones who couldn’t get hold of a key, you still have the opportunity to secure guaranteed access to the PvP beta today. However, there are a few hurdles to be aware of.

What does the beta offer?

In the beta, PC players can try out the new heroine Sojourn, who has already been introduced in a trailer, from 26 April to 17 May:

In addition, you can play the new PvP modes such as Push and the 5-vs-5 mode on four new maps. Also included are reworks of well-known heroes: Orisa, Doomfist, Bastion and Sombra have been reworked. The new story mode, however, is not part of the beta.

Blizzard’s communication with the community did not go extremely well during the development of Overwatch 2.

Overwatch 2: Our expert verdict on the beta – 4 editors, 4 opinions

We have played the beta of Overwatch 2. Our multiplayer and shooter experts draw a first conclusion.


The wait is over: the Overwatch 2 beta is in full swing. Not only on Twitch is the test phase causing high viewer numbers and interest, but also in our editorial office the excitement was great.

Currently, you can only play the PvP mode in the beta phase, which Overwatch 1 and 2 are supposed to share and in which some changes have been made. Among other things, the team size was reduced from six to five players, a new mode called Push was introduced and the heroes Doomfist, Orisa, Bastion and Sombra underwent a rework. In addition, the beta brought the first new heroine named Sojourn to the game in two years.

So any enemy contact immediately leaves only the Supporters and they either get mowed down themselves or have to retreat immediately – making the task much more frustrating and thankless than before. Keeping track of who needs to be healed? No time! Reviving dead comrades? No chance! Form tactical formation? Much too hectic! Instead of sensible positioning, what counts now seems to be pure push power. As a Mercy player, I therefore hope that Blizzard will fundamentally rethink the support role, otherwise I see absolutely no hope for the match waiting times.

With better balancing this will be really good!

Michael: After almost 600 hours of Overwatch, the air was out for me in 2020. There were no new heroes, no new modes and only a few new event skins that couldn’t lure me out from behind the stove anymore. So I’m all the happier about the huge enthusiasm for the PvP beta of Overwatch 2. And although the new PvP probably has fewer innovations than we all wished for, the beta seems like the breath of fresh air that has been missing for the last two years and picks up exactly where it raked in the past.

The reduced teams of five instead of six players per side feels good and prevents eternally long positional wars from being fought. At the same time, the tank is now given more responsibility to play more tactically. After all, there is no second Meatshield to watch his back. Conversely, this also applies to the rest of the team: the times when you could just run off with a Reinhard and trust that the second tank would follow are over. Gathering before the attack is more important than ever.

The only downer is that the problems with the role queue have still not been solved. You still choose a role (tank, healer, damage dealer) before the queue starts and can then only choose from the role pool. This means you are still very limited in your team combination and have limited options to adjust your team combination.

Overwatch is broken!

Thomas: After my first rounds in Overwatch 2 I wonder more than ever where this “2” in the title comes from. I was aware beforehand that Blizzard was aiming for a further development rather than a new one, but nothing really feels like a sequel here. A new hero, small improvements to the game modes and the reduction of the teams from six to five players is for me more the content of a medium-sized content update. So either the marketing as a sequel is wrong here (more likely), or the beta by no means contains everything that Overwatch 2 offers in PvP (more unlikely).

And yes, the gameplay has definitely changed slightly compared to the original – I don’t want to deny that at all. Unfortunately, in my eyes, not at all for the better. Since I’m mainly on the road as support, I feel more useless in the smaller 5vs5 battles with noticeably less shield power than ever before in Overwatch. Because most of the time, the fire concentrates so much in a matter of seconds that the front line goes off the rails faster than I can even press a button! So you either get overrun or crush the enemies almost instantly – in both cases the support role can hardly intervene in any significant way.

So whenever there is enemy contact, only the Supporters are immediately left and either get mowed down themselves or have to retreat immediately – making the task much more frustrating and thankless than it used to be. Keeping track of who needs to be healed? No time! Reviving dead comrades? No chance! Form tactical formation? Much too hectic! Instead of sensible positioning, what counts now seems to be pure push power. As a Mercy player, I therefore hope that Blizzard will fundamentally rethink the support role, otherwise I see absolutely no hope for the match waiting times.

With better balancing this will be really good!

Stephan: Yes, the PVP beta of Overwatch 2 feels like a bigger patch. But that doesn’t bother me personally at all for now, after all, as an Overwatch 1 veteran, I’ll get all the changes for free at release. Campaign or single player? Could be cool, but to be honest I don’t need it.

Instead, I’m happy about the fresh wind blowing through the multiplayer matches: The most important change for me is that there is now only one tank per team and a lot of shield skills have been removed. I always found these bunker battles in the Role Queues, in which you spent a large part of the time shooting at enemy shields, to be incredibly sluggish. All in all, the games now play much more dynamically and aggressively than ever before.

However, the new system also poses some problems: Since most tanks are now more like damage dealers with a lot of health points, the game has become much more demanding as a healer. Having someone in the team who can play agile heroes like Tracer or Sombra really well is now even more important than before – because these flankers are even more valuable due to the smaller team size. If I surprise the enemy team with them and take out one of the healers, the following four against five is of course much easier to win than a five against six.

Even if the new gameplay with fragile healers and without much tank protection takes some getting used to, I’m still cautiously optimistic that Blizzard will be able to use the good foundation and fine-tune the class balancing.

The campaign has to fix it!

Kevin: Funny thing, this Overwatch 2. When I played with colleague Mary in the livestream, the most frequent question in the chat was whether we wouldn’t accidentally show part 1 here. And in fact, that is also true in a way. So you can rightly ask why Overwatch 2 exists at all if the new multiplayer content is being rolled out for both titles anyway. Couldn’t the planned story campaign have been added as a big paid add-on then? That would certainly have reduced the general confusion a little.

The multiplayer changes are hardly noticeable for casual players like me, even if they are mostly good and sensible from the perspective of frequent players. But then, there will be those for Overwatch 1 owners anyway. It will be the story campaign that will make or break Overwatch 2 – and that is still a big question mark at the moment. What kind of scope can we expect here? Can we expect the usual good storytelling from Blizzard’s golden age? Or will it be more of a small background story that briefly introduces the various heroes in the game? In the end, it will be the campaign that has to justify the 2 in the title. If it succeeds in doing that, then I’ll happily engage with it.

Beta system requirements

Finally, it certainly doesn’t hurt to check out the official system requirements for the Overwatch 2 beta. However, they turn out to be relatively moderate:

Minimum system requirements

  • Operating system: Windows 7 / Windows 8 / Windows 10 64 Bit (current service pack)
  • Processor: Intel Core i3 or AMD Phenom X3 8650
  • Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 600 series, AMD Radeon HD 7000 series
  • Memory: 6 GB RAM
  • Hard disk space: 50 GB available space

Recommended System Requirements

  • Operating System: Windows 10 64 Bit (current Service Pack)
  • Processor: Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 5
  • Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD R9 380
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Hard disk space: 50 GB available space

How interested are you in participating in the Overwatch 2 beta? Will you plant yourself in front of the screen and besiege Twitch to grab a key, or is the game not worth that effort to you? Let us know in the comments

News, Overwatch, Article, PC, action, first-person shooter, multiplayer shooter, Activision Blizzard