When Overwatch 2 launches on a still as-of-yet unknown date, the development team wants the initial multiplayer meta to be “in chaos” and disarray, according to an interview with Edge Magazine.
As reported by RespawnFirst, the Edge Magazine interview with Vice President of Blizzard/Overwatch 2 Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan and Overwatch 2 Technical Director John Lafluer included mentions of a chaotic launch meta as well as how the team comes up with their more off-the wall hero ideas.
It should come as no real surprise to long-term Overwatch players that the team wants to see a new meta in their new game. Everyone, from casual fans to Overwatch League pros and dev team members themselves have stated that metas which dominate the game for long periods of time grow stale, and restricts player choice in determining which hero to play in any given match.
In addition to speaking of their desire for a crazy metagame, Kaplan and Lafleur spoke a little about how the team develops new heroes, and how their ideas are sometimes stranger than fans might imagine.
“Every so often,” said Kaplan, “we’ll do this thing where we’ll get everyone on the team to just go ‘Crazy hero ideas – let’s go! ‘Everyone will do a thumbnail of what the hero might be, what their abilities might be, and once – just entirely in jest – someone even came up with a hero that was a pizza. So we get some crazy ideas out of these sessions. We do it because it’s a great time to burn off steam, but we do get some great ideas out of these meetings. We still have some of these ideas, actually, that are back-burnered.”
“What drives us to them is simply, ‘What is their story, and what is the message we’re trying to get across with them?” said Lafleur. “What could their abilities be?’ When those three things go together and we have a nice story that everyone engages with, suddenly it gels and we can start making plans to put it into the game. But there’s little pieces of all kinds of things we play around with.”
No word from either Kaplan or LaFleur in regards to what new heroes might show their faces in Overwatch 2, though both Sojourn and fan-favorite Echo are 99.9 percent confirmed at this juncture in time. One thing is for certain—fans aren’t likely to be able to play as a pizza anytime soon.
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