Overwatch's new heroes and the design behind them
It's been 11 days since the Overwatch closed beta began on PC. In that time there have been more than 130,000 games played, and the game has had a confirmed launch window for PC, Xbox One and PS4 of next spring. Today's further raft of announcements saw three new heroes being added to the roster, and the design team were at BlizzCon to walk us through them.
Want to hear more from designer Geoff Goodman on Overwatch's balancing act? Here's an interview and hands-on with the new FPS
Some more stats from the short time in Overwatch's closed beta include an average match length of 7 minutes and 34 seconds, Pharah is the most played hero and Symmetra has the highest win rate (to absolutely everyone's surprise as they have barely even heard of the support class). Game director Jeff Kaplan also elaborated on the Xbox One and PS4 plans, by saying it was a day one design goal to have it playable on console.
"Designing it so it felt great on console controller really helped enforce our philosophy of elegance, due to the number of buttons," Kaplan said. He also laughed about no-one really catching onto the fact it would be a console release when the beta had to have controller auto-aim assist patched out of it shortly after launching last week when it was accidentally left in the build.
The PC and console ecosystems will exist independently of each other for the purposes of matchmaking, but when asked about e-sports, Kaplan said they were looking at all platforms as equal. "We know there are players of amazing skill level out there on every platform," he said. "We want to make sure there is support coming for every one." Sadly, Mac will definitively not be one of those platforms.
Happily, the new heroes were given form after weeks of attempting to put together a jigsaw where all the pieces are obscure blog posts. Mei, a climatologist, Genji, Hanzo's cybernetic ninja brother, and D.va the previously announced pro-gamer-turned-mech-pilot. There was a considerable amount of backstory and design planning for each and, as you might expect from any Blizzard property, a fair amount of self-referential cross-linking.
All 21 heroes have now been revealed for the launch of Overwatch, and Kaplan is fairly adamant that this will be the final number for quite some time, as there are no others in the pipeline right now.
Starting with Mei, Kaplan and the game's lead designer Geoff Goodman, discussed how the character's backstory fed back into her design. As a scientist of the all-encompassing Overwatch project, she was stationed in Anatarctica, but an ice storm cut off supplies so she was forced to fashion a cryostasis device so save her colleagues. It worked, but they weren't rescued for many years until after the Omnic crisis was over, and as a result, everyone but her died. To add to this harsh awakening, her entire science network was abandoned, so she now travels the world reactivating Overwatch labs to download their meteorological data, with her pet drone Snowball.
As for how she plays in-game, Mei is a defense character who uses her Endothermic Blaster to spray foes with a stream of freezing coolant. The stream slows them and, if kept on a foe long enough, freezes them in place for a while. The secondary attack is a large icicle which deals damage without the slow. If under attack, she can use her first skill Cryo-Freeze to turn herself into a block of ice, preventing damage and healing herself. Or, she can create a placeable Ice Wall, which can also push people up to higher ledges and be climbed by mobile characters. Finally, her ult sees Snowball create a Blizzard (geddit?) an AOE of freezing, slowing damage, which stacks with her basic attack.
Joining Mei is D.va, the ex-StarCraft pro (Kaplan jokes, StarCraft 6) who became a MEKA (Mobile Exosquad of Korean Army) pilot to defend her homeland from essentially a robotic Kaiju. The Omnic crisis created a massive robot which could control other robots in the Korean sea. So they needed human pilots inside their mechanised war bots, which obviously means they'd need the micro skills of a pro gamer.
D.va, despite her small stature, is a tank thanks to her mech suit. The mech has dual shotgun blast miniguns that never run out of ammo, short range and high damage, but slow the mech's movement while firing. To compensate for that movement, she has booster jets that allow short, controleld flight on a very short cooldown. To fulfill the tank role, she also has a Defense Matrix which shoots down all incoming projectiles in an area while active, even Pharah's ultimate rocket barrage. And her ultimate causes the mech to self destruct in 'the biggest explosion the game can allow' after ejecting her. On foot, pilot D.va is armed only with a pistol, fairly rapid firing but low damage. When she has built enough charge on her ult though, she can call in another mech.
Finally, Genji is Hanzo's estranged brother. The two are part of the Shimada clan, an ancient family of ninjas who are now more like a Yakuza family. Genji was the playboy brother, going out drinking and partying, while Hanzo trained to take over the family business. On the death of their father, Hanzo inherited whatever business that was (probably running arcades if the Hanamura map is anything to go by) and the family elders demanded something be done about Genji bringing dishonour to them. So Hanzo challenged him to a ninja duel, won and then left him for dead.
Overwatch aren't as cold-blooded as Hanzo, and Mercy – having stumbled on Genji's lethally wounded body – patched him up with cybernetics and put him to work taking down the Shimada clan. Assumedly because Overwatch are in the home console business and that arcade had to go. So now Genji can run up walls, like his brother, but also do a double jump in mid-air because cybernetics. His primary fire are shurikens, which he throws in a fan pattern for his secondary, and his first ability is being able to deflect incoming enemy fire with his sword to wherever he is aiming. Swift Strike also allows him to blink forward through foes and doing damage to them, they then take additional bleed damage and if they die as a result, he can instantly use it again. His ultimate is Dragonblade, where he really puts the sword to use, doing lethal damage to anyone in striking range for about 10 seconds.
From a design perspective, Genji and Hanzo were the same character until they began thinking along the lines of simplicity. His katana, bow and shuriken were then considered overkill, and they split him in half to form the two brothers. Also, two ninjas. Can never have too many ninjas.
Dont like any of them
Anime girl in robot
Fat girl for tumblr audience
Generic looking cyber ninja
'fat' girl? In what way is that girl fat? She's cute as hell.
She's "fat" by the "not a skinny supermodel" standard I guess?
Goodness knows what this has got to do with image sites.
EDIT: Haha, disagreeing she's fat is a downvote now or what? Seriously, what exactly is the issue with that character design?
Even on the assumption she _was_, what exactly is the issue with the character design?
You are 100% right, but I like them. Well at least the ninja dude. Name sucks though.
Fatties everywhere.
It's a simple promotional article to tell people how certain characters play. It's written so neutral & I still see SJW discussions in this topic? Not everyone likes a game, or likes how a game looks like. But honestly? You dare to discuss the form of some characters body? Hello? If that is what needs to be discussed in gaming. Then I certainly am old. Cuz thats the least I care for.
I think I'd be forgiven for being convinced there for a moment that I was actually looking at a Battleborn character, I really thought I was. To the point that I even forgot Overwatch was Blizzard's thing. See, I'd expect this from Gearbox but emphatically never from Blizzard.
By this I mean 'treating women like actual human beings with feelings whom one could hurt or empower, as opposed to quite horrendously oversexed objects for losers to take out their sexual frustrations on.' I tend to think of Blizzard as gingerly tip-toeing as close to drawing porn with every portrayal of women in their Universe as they can get away with.
This really isn't what I think of when I think of Blizzard women. I mean, sure, there's oh so much room for improvement (if you actually want a believeably chubby, stocky lady then you need to fix that waist and the shape of her breasts), but for Blizzard this is stunningly progressive. Except, sadly, it gets drowned out by all the other oversexed objects in Overwatch.
If they could have shown a little more respect than they're actually showing here for all of the women in Overwatch, then it might have been something I could play. As it is, I could never play it because if I was ever caught even looking at it I just wouldn't be able to live with the sheer embarrassment, it would kill me. It's rather contrary to everything I am.
Overwatch is clearly for lasciviously horny, white, straight, male, cis-gendered, extraverted teenagers with awfully bad attitudes and perspectives regarding the quality of life that people unlike them should be allowed to have.
That's my opinion, anyway. It just seems to be the target audience, no? There's so much they could've done differently to prove that it wasn't, but you'd be hard pressed to change my feelings on this. Sorry.
Anyway, this is one good example. But the one good example is the exception that proves the rule, usually. It just makes it more obvious how bad the rest of the game is.
Still, taken on its own? This is... almost okay. Almost.
Some people just rather look at attractive characters than realistic ones.
The point that you couldn't take it being caught playing it because of embarrassment tells more about you than about the target audience. Calling that target audience horny, white and straight is just you calling out your insecurities.
Besides this Mei character is most likely a wet, cartoony dream for many people and thus changes nothing in the way we perceive characters in games. Give people dull, real-life-like characters and you have a game that no one plays.
By 'some people', do you mean 'almost everyone as determined by statistical studies done of both men and women'?
Cause uh... that's generally the results they get. Shocker, people want to be attractive, strongk, and confident in their escapism! Crazy right?!
I have no idea what are you trying to imply with that. My first sentence was just slightly sarcastic.
Don't be dense. He was adding to your argument in a slightly snarky way.
English is not my native language so there might be some misunderstandings from time to time.
I am 90% certain that this post must be a satirical lampshade of Tumblr.
Is there a Poe's law of Poe's law?
See above for example of Neo-Victorian values. When Blizzard draws a scantily clad woman it's borderline porn; if there's a guy with his shirt off and has some major washboard abs on display, that's business as usual and not worth comment.
The only one who needs to update their ideas of sex are you, pal.