Overwatch’s Open Beta Won’t Feature Competitive Play

Overwatch’s ranked Competitive Play mode will be disabled during the game’s open beta until “sometime” after the title’s launch later this month.

Confirmation of this was announced by Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan on Overwatch’s official beta forums and it seems there’s still a few issues that need to be fixed in Competitive Play before the mode is available.

“We worked extremely hard to get Competitive Play in the game for closed beta,” Kaplan wrote. Competitive Play was introduced in early April and was available for around two-and-a-half weeks before the closed beta ended.

“We’ve been reading feedback from the community and taking it all to heart,” he continued. “As a result, we’ve temporarily disabled competitive play for open beta so that we can rework the system and make it better. Our plan is to bring back a newly re-designed version of Competitive Play sometime after Overwatch launches.”

Overwatch’s open beta starts this week. Those who’ve pre-ordered the game can participate from today while others will need to wait until Thursday.

If you have an early access code, you can activate it on your Battle.net account to avoid problems connecting to Blizzard’s servers across all platforms.

Blizzard released an animated short focused on the Widowmaker character earlier this month, you can watch it here.

Overwatch launches on May 24th for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. For more on the game, check out our dedicated game tag. If you took part in the closed beta did you experience any major issues with Competitive Play? Sound off in the comments below.