Overwatch 2 Orisa almost lost her centaur aspect in a scrapped redesign

Orisa has received a rework for Overwatch 2 but it could have been much more drastic, reveals hero designers on the game. 

Announced yesterday, playable heroes in Overwatch 2 Doomfist and Orisa have both received new weapon and ability kits. The changes for Orisa include increasing her health and armor, giving her new abilities such as javelin spin and energy javelin, and removing the character’s halt. You can see a full list of the changes made to both Orisa and Doomfist on the Play Overwatch website. 

According to the website, the team at Blizzard noticed that Orisa "struggled with brawling and toe-to-toe engagements," so adapted her into the future of the game. Senior hero designer on Overwatch 2 Brandon Brennan explained in the post: "We don’t take Orisa’s rework lightly, we want it to be meaningful to the game and feel good for players who are attached to her."

Following this statement though, in an interview with For the Win, Brennan explained that the team originally wanted to completely change Orisa for Overwatch 2. "Some of our early discussions, we were talking about completely changing her model, getting away from the horse/centaur aspect. Doing a totally different design," the hero designer said. 

"Doing that is a huge production cost – we would be basically throwing away all this work we already put into Orisa." Brennan continues, "but we did seriously consider it, we had three or four totally different looking hero concepts, bipedal ones. She was carrying a shield, she looked very tribal, it was super cool."

So why didn’t Brennan and the rest of the team at Blizzard give Orisa a completely new look? Well, according to the same interview, production costs weren’t the only thing holding them back as player responses were also a concern.

Brennan reveals: "There’s some unanswered questions with how players would respond to something like that. Do we have to leave the old Orisa in the game for them to play? Is it something we bring back in custom game modes and whatnot for them?" The developer continues, "it felt more correct to go the direction we did than to chase a totally new hero."

The beta for Overwatch 2 is right around the corner, find out why we need the Overwatch 2 beta now more than ever.