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If you’ve been deep into Overwatch battles and didn’t know half your team died 15 seconds ago, we recommend enabling Overwatch 2’s new setting. It’s a unique sound that plays when a teammate dies, and turning it on has saved my bacon many times.
The sound itself will be familiar to Overwatch veterans: a short, booming emergency siren that effectively communicates, “Oh my god, come back, my god.” It has been in use for years, but only in temporary cases. PvE event. It can now be used in PvP, but is disabled by default and easy to miss in the settings menu.
Blizzard aptly named this setting “Play a sound when a teammate is eliminated”. It’s at the bottom of the first audio settings page.
Once turned on, it basically lets me stop worrying about the kill feed forever. I’m amazed at how quickly Death Alerts improved my responsiveness. You can now focus completely on your target or whoever you’re treating, and you’ll quickly understand that your teammate dies and you need to retreat. The useful new word of warning slowly spread among friends and colleagues, and now everyone agrees with the death warning. It turns out that the old way was much slower and worse. Awkward, barely-there sounds are cute.
You may be wondering about a similar interpretation of the teammate death alert “Play Sound When Enemy Eliminated”. It does what it says on the can, but honestly, it’s barely audible. It’s a unique sound, but it’s either too quiet or your brain drowns it out. That’s fine with me – I’m more worried about teammate notifications anyway.I think it’s pretty obvious when you’ve swept the floor in a competition and there’s no one left to shoot.