If you’ve been playing the heck out of the Overwatch open beta like I have, you’ll be surprised to hear that this version of the game will be pretty much exactly what you can expect from the full release on the May 24th. The game will feature the current roster of 21 characters, 12 maps, 4 different game modes and over 800 customizable items to find in loot crates. The one missing feature is the ‘competitive play’ mode which had appeared in an earlier beta but was removed due to the team reworking it.
This was confirmed by Jeff Kaplan, the game director for Overwatch on the battle.net forums:
The version you are playing now is what will go live at launch (there will be some bug fixes etc…). We also have Competitive Play, which was a feature that was live in Closed Beta. We removed it from Open Beta because we received a ton of great feedback on how to improve the system. We had a tough choice. It would have been awesome to have the feature in for Open Beta and Launch. But we felt like we could really improve on some things so we opted to have the feature come out shortly after launch. We’re hoping that our efforts in the Closed Beta to try to get things done quickly and at high quality aren’t lost on our community — but we also never want to sacrifice the quality of the game by putting something live that isn’t up to our standards.
We’re also working on a TON of post-launch features and content. It’s going to be a pretty amazing summer…
Overwatch is slated for release on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The current Overwatch open beta is open for free for anyone but will end on the 10th of May, an extension from the original end date.