Overwatch beta is what will be released at launch

The open beta for Overwatch has been running for a couple of days now and it appears to be going well.

Blizzard is treating this beta as a server stress test, and according to Jeff Kaplan, what gamers are playing now is pretty much what will be released on 24 May. Competitive play is expected to return for launch following its removal for the beta while they rework it.

Yes. The version you are playing now is what will go live at launch (there will be some bug fixes etc…). We also have Competitive Play, which was a feature that was live in Closed Beta. We removed it from Open Beta because we received a ton of great feedback on how to improve the system. We had a tough choice. It would have been awesome to have the feature in for Open Beta and Launch. But we felt like we could really improve on some things so we opted to have the feature come out shortly after launch. We’re hoping that our efforts in the Closed Beta to try to get things done quickly and at high quality aren’t lost on our community — but we also never want to sacrifice the quality of the game by putting something live that isn’t up to our standards.

We’re also working on a TON of post-launch features and content. It’s going to be a pretty amazing summer…