[Update #2]: The big Season 3 patch has now arrived, and with it a whole bunch of quality-of-life improvements.

[Update]: Overwatch 2 devs have now revealed the full Season 3 Roadmap, including a Dating Sim event!

After the somewhat shaky first two seasons, it looks like the Overwatch 2 team is pulling out all the stops for Seasons 3 and 4! As such you can look forward to major matchmaking improvements, a brand new Control map called Antarctic Peninsula, the return of freely earned Credits that can be used to purchase old cosmetics, the removal of seasonal rank resets, and naturally, some sizable balance updates to shake up the meta and perhaps even rework problematic heroes like Roadhog.

The good news doesn't end there, however, as Blizzard has now decided to add two more announcements onto the pile! First and foremost, the Overwatch 2 Workshop and its accompanying custom games will be returning in Season 3. The exact details have not been shared just yet, but given how long the Workshop was missing I can only hope it's going to relaunch with a bunch of new features that will pave the way for bigger and more elaborate custom games than ever before.

While I'm not exactly sure why they need to wait, Overwatch 2's Season 4 will also be removing the highly unpopular Map Pools. As for why, that I'll let Blizzard themselves explain:

"You were right. We were wrong," reads the developer update. "Map Pools are going away starting in season 4. We aimed to provide a bit of freshness each season and concentrate the number of maps that people were playing, however player sentiment around map pools was pretty low, the map roster doesn’t have enough maps where we truly need them, and the impact they had on seasonal identity was fairly low."

"Additionally, the cadence for maps leaving and returning to the pool didn’t align with the time it took to make changes to the maps. Gibraltar was supposed to return in Season 4 but the playtesting and iteration we were doing for the map started calling that deadline into question. There’s the possibility that we bring map pools back in the far future when we have a lot more maps in the game. If we were to bring them back, they would probably rotate at a faster rate, potentially every week. If you hate this idea, set a reminder for 2 years from now and let us know!"

The final thing worth mentioning are the changes coming to event challenges. Instead of funneling you exclusively into the new game modes, some of which you might dislike playing, the new system will provide you with a wide variety of different challenges to explore. What exactly these challenges will look like, that I'm afraid we'll just have to wait and see.

Once more information becomes available, most likely on February 7th once the Season 3 update goes live, I'll make sure to let you know. Until then, you can read a little bit more about Overwatch 2's future over at the official website.