How the Overwatch 2 battle pass works, and everything you need to know about it

Blizzard has explained in detail how the Overwatch 2 battle pass and associated monetisation will work. The information comes from a briefing document and roundtable group interview I attended last night.

There are no loot boxes in Overwatch 2, in case you didn’t know. In their place are a battle pass and in-game store, where you’ll directly buy what you want, using a new currency called Overwatch Coins.

The Overwatch 2 battle pass has two tiers, free and paid, and you will be able to unlock all new Overwatch 2 heroes on that free track. New heroes will be unlockable at tier 55, of around 80 total tiers.

Alternatively, you can unlock a new hero instantly by purchasing the premium battle pass, which costs 1000 Overwatch Coins, around $10.

The new hero in Season One is Kiriko, the support character who leaked recently. But if you’re migrating from Overwatch 1 to OW2, you get all launch characters for free anyway – Sojourn, Junker Queen, and Kiriko. It’s only completely new players who need to unlock them.

Here are the two battle pass offerings side by side for Season One.

Season One free tier:

• Kiriko (at tier 55)
• 2 Legendary Skins
• 2 Weapon Charms
• 2 Souvenirs
• 1 Highlight Intro
• 15 additional items (list types, emotes, etc)

Season One premium tier:

• Immediate access to Kiriko
• 15% XP Battle Pass Boost
• 1 Mythic Skin
• 5 Legendary Skins
• 2 Epic Skins
• 3 Play of the Game Intros
• 4 Weapon Charms
• 3 Emotes
• 3 Souvenirs
• 6 Poses
• 6 Name Cards
• 8 Player Icons
• 11 Voice Lines
• 12 Sprays

You can upgrade mid-season and gain all the previous rewards you missed.

The mythic skin you see in the premium list represents a new tier of skin above legendary, the current highest. Mythic skins are customisable, featuring layers you can mix and match with different colours and patterns. The plan is for there to be one mythic skin every season, the first being a Cyber Demon skin for Genji.

Mythic skins apparently take about a year to make, so they’re a big deal, and I know people were worried – because of a leaked Overwatch 2 survey a while back – they could cost as much as $45 from the in-game shop. But as it stands, there are no plans to sell them there at all.

“We don’t have any plans to do that in the near future,” Jon Spector, commercial lead, told me during the roundtable. “That’s not to say that we wouldn’t, somewhere down the line.

“One of the things about mythic skins is that it takes us more than a year to build … that whole pipeline, start to finish, is more than a year. So we are working on mythic skins already that you won’t see until the end of 2023 and beyond.

On selling mythic skins: “We don’t have any plans to do that in the near future. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t, somewhere down the line.” -Jon Spector, commercial lead

“So when we look at, well, we’re releasing one mythic skin in each of the first few seasons and we have thirty-five amazing heroes, you could get to a place where down the line, we’d want to create ways for a new player who’s missed out on mythic Genji, because they didn’t play in season one, where it could make sense to offer them a path to get that skin. But we don’t have any specific plans to do that in the near future.”

To clarify, then, Genji’s mythic skin is only obtainable through the battle pass for the foreseeable future.

You can also see a couple of other new kinds of cosmetics in the lists above: charms and souvenirs. These weren’t discussed in detail but are presumably relatively insignificant. There are also name cards, which sound like titles to unlock. There are special name cards offered for going about the battle pass tier-cap of 80 and into prestige tiers.

New heroes will not enter Competitive Play immediately. This is for two reasons: one, to monitor and tune them; and two, to give people time to unlock them via the battle pass.

If you miss a season and hero with it, there will be a chance to retroactively unlock them via challenges or, apparently, buy them directly from the in-game shop. I do not know how much they’ll cost.

Battle pass seasons run for nine weeks and there will be a new hero in every other one, in an alternating pattern with new maps. However, Seasons One and Two will both have new heroes in; after that it will be Season Four, Six, etc. Season One will also have a new map in, called Esperança, which is set in Portugal and is gorgeous.

Additionally, Season One will see the return of the popular event, Wrath of the Bride of Junkenstein. The plan is to bring back other time-limited events from Overwatch’s history too. And there are new ones coming. Blizzard said during the roundtable interview the game will debut “a cool new co-op experience” for Halloween this year – a Junkenstein event.

That’s it, broadly. Here are some chopped excerpts from the Q&A. I’ve picked out a couple of highlights in bold.

How long is it going to take to unlock a new hero, in play terms?

Jon Spector, commercial lead: “So the first really important thing to note here is the way that we’ve built all of these systems, you’re really talking about I have thirty-five heroes already, what happens when hero thirty-six comes out? A lot of free-to-play games, and games that ask players to unlock their characters in them, you start out with five of the twenty [characters], something like that.