Update: It looks like Blizzard has had to push back its estimate for Overwatch's Competitive Mode content update. Around the time of Overwatch's release, the game's director, Jeff Kaplan speculated that the update would be ready for the last week or so of June. However, he did not give a firm commitment to that date and now it seems that Blizzard is shooting for a July release date instead.
While the June date was never set in stone, Blizzard has been tweeting out a new mid-to-late July release date, so hopefully this date will stick. Competitive/ranked play in Overwatch was tested in the closed beta but was taken out for the open beta in order to be completely re-worked.
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Original Story: Blizzard officially launched Overwatch last night, the studio's first new IP in over a decade but there is still a planned feature missing from the game that was present in the closed beta- Competitive matchmaking. Blizzard already announced earlier this month that the feature would not be ready in time for launch due to a complete overhaul but now it looks like we can expect it to land towards the end of June.
This is according to the game's director, Jeff Kaplan, who in a live interview on Facebook explained that a lot of changes have been made to Competitive mode in Overwatch, so it will take a little longer to implement.
“Competitive mode is the current focus of the Overwatch team, and it's the most important thing for us to add to the game right now. So our first big content update for Overwatch will be Competitive mode. I don't want to promise an exact date because I'm sure whatever date I say right now will be wrong! My rough commitment or not-commitment would be sometime towards the end of June – middle-to-end of June we want to have Competitive mode in. We already have it in internally.”
He then went on to mention what some of the changes coming to competitive mode will be: “Some of the things we wanted to change: one was the season length. We heard a lot of complaints from the community that they felt one-month seasons were too short. So we decided to go with seasons that are probably going to be more around three months.”
So for now, we can expect the re-worked competitive matchmaking to launch before the end of June. However, it is worth keeping in mind that Kaplan didn't give a firm commitment to that date, so things could change.
KitGuru Says: Overwatch's first post-launch content update will be aiming at the competitive crowd, which is great for those that have a well-coordinated team set up. Have any of you tried out Overwatch yet since its launch last night?