After a Week of Playing Overwatch 2 Stadium Early, It Might Be My New Favorite Mode

In the very first fight I ever played in Overwatch 2's new Stadium mode, I chucked Ana Amari's biotic grenade at the enemy team, eager to watch them turn purple as the explosive's damage and anti-healing took effect. I've been playing Overwatch for eight years and put hundreds of hours into Ana, so I know this is the way to win fights at the outset. Instead, Orisa's javelin spin, which would normally have harmlessly destroyed the grenade, deflected it back into my team, killing me and two teammates instantly. It was the perfect introduction to Stadium, a new game mode that exists separately from quick play and competitive queues, and uses the same 5v5 role queue format. Despite that similarity, it's arguably the biggest addition to the game since competitive was introduced a month after Overwatch's May 2016 launch. In Stadium, anything can and will happen. During my time playing in an early access media server, I suffered the aforementioned 'nade incident, got shoved off the map by ... Read full article.