When I flew down to Blizzard HQ last week to see what the Overwatch 2 team had been cooking for the last few years, I expected a couple of new heroes and an animated cinematic. What I saw was way more than I ever could’ve imagined, to the point the words “soft reboot” came to mind. It isn’t quite that, mind you, but it’s easily the biggest update the game has ever had and a marked shift in the vision of what it could be.

Starting next week on February 10, Overwatch 2 will drop the 2 and launch the first season of a year-long storyline called The Reign of Talon. Vendetta, the gladiator woman who was recently released as a hero, has taken over the terrorist organization at the heart of Overwatch’s near-future story, and the rest of 2026 will explore the fallout of her coup.

To tell that story, Blizzard has five (five!) new heroes ready to go: Tank hero Domina, damage heroes Anran and Emre, and support heroes Jetpack Cat and Mizuki. Another five heroes are coming before the end of the year at a rate of one per season. All of them will figure in the narrative—via in-game events, short stories, comics, and cinematics—before the arc wraps up and a new storyline begins in 2027.

Game director Aaron Keller said every year Blizzard will launch an update that will “almost feel like an expansion,” and calls this first one “the biggest launch we’ve ever had in Overwatch’s history.” That’s for good reason because there’s even more than a bucket of new heroes, including:

• New hero sub-roles with unique passive bonuses, like healers who can store excess ultimate charge to get the next one faster
• An overhauled UI in the main menus with easier navigation and your chosen hero front and center
• New Stadium mode icons and a Hero Builder feature for creating builds based on live player data
• New story-based skins
• A lootbox refresh that adds most of the skins from last year
• A second Mercy mythic skin, a Juno mythic weapon, and a Mei mythic skin coming in the mid-season update

Most of this wasn’t available during my time at Blizzard campus. I’ll have to jump into season 1 next week to see how it all comes together, but it certainly sounds promising. I did, however, get to try the new heroes. They’re all incredibly fun to play and feel designed to stretch what Overwatch heroes can even be.

Take Domina, for example, a snotty, rich lady tank who can drop a big shield that breaks in sections instead of all at once like Reinhardt’s. Anran is a confident young Chinese girl who has has two versions of her ultimate: While she’s alive, it burns enemies to a crisp around her, but if used while she’s dead, she can come back to life in a burst of flames. And then there’s the cat. Jetpack Cat is an adorable orange tabby who can zoom around and attach a rope to an enemy player and toss them off the map. She can pick up allies too, which has me anticipating the moment I become Willem Dafoe squinting at the sky as a flying Cassidy High Noons me back into spawn.

After playing several matches with the new heroes, I’m convinced the Overwatch team has loosened up a little with hero design and is willing to experiment with the kinds of abilities that don’t appear very competitively balanced. I’d imagine they can afford to do that when the roster will be getting a regular shakeup every single season—I’m all for it.

In the past few years, Overwatch has leaned a little too hard on being the most competitive hero shooter out there for my taste. It’s desperately needed to be a little goofier and a little more bold with the types of heroes it releases. And by the look of the silhouettes for who’s coming next, I expect the game to feel a lot different by the end of the year (I spy a robot in a trench coat and a D.Va-sized mech in there).

Overwatch might actually be back when season 1 launches on February 10.