Hear ye, hear ye, the first Overwatch beta test weekend is happening soon, soon, soon. A much larger selection of players will gain access to the beta from Friday, November 20 at 9:00 a.m. PST until Monday, November 23 at 9:00 a.m. PST. That’s 17:00 British time, 18:00 on the continent and midday on the east coast.
Get ready for the beta without our Overwatch character list.
A post on the official bloghas all the details. Players will be selected from the regular Overwatch opt-in pool, which presumably you’re already signed up for but is in the beta settings of your Battle.net account. Anyone from the Americas or European regions will eligible. There’s no way to guarantee access, but it is meant as a stress test so unless things immediately start to go wrong, expect a humongous number of invites to go out.
Which is worth pointing out if you’re already a regular player, or expecting to get a full weekend’s heavy time out of this – we, and more importantly Blizzard, have no idea what’s going to happen when they let so many people into the servers. Even with all the experience their engineers have, few of their games have had the same sort of demands as far as ping and responsiveness go as an FPS does. I’ll be expecting a few periods of downtime and some intensely dodgy games at the very least.
Still, hopefully this helps to satiate a desperate community for what is, I can confirm, a very good game. This version of the beta will have all the heroes but only three maps: Hanamura, King’s Row, and Watchpoint: Gibraltar. This doesn’t include my favourite, Dorado, but should be a fun time none the less. Good luck, and I hope you get in. Particularly you, guy who doesn’t play many FPSes, you’re going to begreat funto play against.