Hero image: Overwatch Season 5 Battle Pass skins. Image: Blizzard Entertainment
I think the most important thing in the new Overwatch season is not the vampire, or the volcano prison, or even Sombra changing roles. It is a footnote-sized feature called Unvaulted Passes, and I think it is Blizzard quietly admitting that the fear of missing out was never a very kind way to treat the people who play its game.
Here’s what it does. Old Battle Passes come back into play in a revised form, from the very first season all the way through to Season 15, and any progress already made on one carries over, including progress on the Free track. One of them can run alongside the current pass, with the XP from every match counting towards both, and once a player has one, Blizzard says it stays on the account for good. Its own words were “No expiration date lurking behind you. Take your time and enjoy!” I mean, read that again. When was the last time a live-service game told you to take your time?
Because that is the opposite of how a Battle Pass is meant to work, isn’t it? The whole design leans on a clock, where the skin you actually want sits deep in the tiers and disappears if life gets in the way of your playtime. Blizzard more or less admitted this in its Director’s Take on the Battle Pass revamp, which noted that a reward someone wants “might require more time to earn than you have available to play in the season”. I appreciated the honesty, and I would go a step further and say that the clock was always the point, and that players noticed.
So I am glad to see it loosen, although I don’t want to oversell it, because there are limits and they are worth knowing before anyone gets excited. The unvaulted passes don’t include Overwatch Coins, XP Boosts, Mythic Prisms, Prestige Titles or Mythic hero and weapon skins. The season post doesn’t say what an Unvaulted Pass costs either, and I’d want to see that before calling any of this generous. It also arrived later than promised, since the Director’s Take had pencilled the unvault system in for the Season 4 midseason in September.
But I still think the direction matters more than the fine print. Every game with a seasonal pass has trained its players to feel a little anxious whenever they are busy, as if stepping away for a fortnight is a cost they will pay in cosmetics, and nobody should have to plan a week around a progress bar. Would you keep going back to a café that charged you for the days you didn’t come in? That’s roughly the deal the old system offered, just dressed up in nicer skins.
What I would like now is for the rest of the genre to take the hint, because if Overwatch can put its back catalogue on a shelf that players browse whenever they like, so can everyone else. I’ll be watching whether Blizzard keeps the vault open, and whether the price, when it appears, matches the tone of that line about taking your time. For now I am cautiously on its side, which isn’t a sentence I ever expected to write about a Battle Pass.
Source: Blizzard Entertainment – Feed Your Hunger in Reign of Talon – Season 5: A Grim Doctrine, Blizzard Entertainment – Director’s Take: Battle Pass Revamp