Now that Season 1 is underway in Overwatch, we're going to see further changes echo through the long-established hero shooter. As the new roster takes shape, Blizzard's going to be a little less heavy-handed when it comes to adding characters, because the team wants to avoid situations where the freshest faces are the most rarely seen.
"We used to lean on this philosophy of safe, size, strong," Alec Dawson, associate game director on Overwatch, told PCGamesN. "So, when we had hero releases, we'd make sure that they were pretty high up [performed well] in whatever the role would be - tank, DPS, support - and they would be very, very competitive."
Putting out powerful characters has a knock-on effect, though - they can wind up perpetually banned in Competitive until there are significant nerfs. Blizzard wants to lessen this scenario to some degree.
"We're going to pull back on that a little bit: when a hero comes out, we don't want them to be perma-banned," he stated. "We want the hero to be impactful, but don't want you to go into Competitive and never be able to play them. So we're trying to find that right landing zone where they're still impactful, but they're not the most-banned character in the game, like Jetpack Cat is right now."
Jetpack Cat is a fine example: a veritable crowd-pleaser and fan-favorite, who got sidelined pretty quick because everyone wanted to be them. That's a relative rarity, as Jetpack Cat's abilities bring a particular kind of chaos to matches some players just don't want to deal with. Heroes don't often get quite so visceral a reaction, positive or negative.
Dawson mentioned bans as one of the "safeguards" the developers lean on to finetune the roster and maintain some semblance of order. "It gives us some time to react and see why and actually make adjustments as needed," he continued.
"I think all of those in combination allows us to feel a little confident about when heroes can be released," he says. "But at the same time, we're going to be trying some wacky stuff throughout the year - when it comes to releasing more heroes, there are more chances to take risks."
