Overwatch and now Overwatch 2 have been around long enough to sand down plenty of meta-breaking edges, and while the modern game is in a much more balanced state competitively, the balance of fair and fun remains hotly debated. In an interview with GamesRadar+, Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller signals that the team will be leaning a little more on fun while still avoiding the “chaos” that was the original game’s launch.
Keller reflects on the fondness that some players hold for older Overwatch metas. “Some of it is just for nostalgia,” he begins. “And it’s like, ‘Hey, I remember, and it was like this,’ even knowing that it was broken, you know? There’s things that were fun because they were broken, but I think there’s also times where people point at things in the past that they had a great affinity for, and they feel loss now it’s gone.
“One of the things that I think about when I look at some of the older versions of Overwatch, because there’s been kind of a lot of versions of this game over the years, is that there was a bit of – I was going to say chaos, and maybe that’s really not the right word, maybe, but the launch version of Overwatch was chaos. There were those overpowered moments that heroes could have. Even though there were some really low lows in the game, there could be these moments that are kind of hard to replicate in the game right now. So I think that nostalgia sometimes points at things that people miss, which might actually be valuable for us to look at as a team to bring back.”
Keller specifically examines the “balance of fun versus fair,” and reckons that Overwatch 2’s new perk system will “address some of that.” Perks will allow players to adjust their heroes in the middle of the match, dramatically changing the nature or power level of certain abilities or even their core play style. This raises the ceiling of the game as a whole, and also brings some “zaniness,” as Keller puts it. When heroes get stronger, big plays get bigger, and it seems the team at Blizzard is embracing that with new modifiers as well as modes like Stadium, an alternate format with a whiff of Counter-Strike about it.
“We need to have a vision of where the game is supposed to be going,” Keller stresses. “And over the past year, I do feel like even though we’ve made a lot of improvements to the game and we’ve really focused on our players – it is a very balanced game – but we have maybe stripped some of those bigger moments out by doing that. And so for us, we don’t want to go all the way back to where Overwatch 1 was, but we do think that there is a shift in that direction. That’s where we’re moving towards right now.”
Looking at Stadium’s many new currencies and items, Keller adds: “We want that to be a competitive and fair experience, but sometimes competitive and fair means rewarding people that are playing well. It might not feel necessarily quite as fair to the losing team, but that reward mechanism for skill and then that ability to feel like you have that amount of impact over a match is something that we would like to have as part of that game mode, even though there can be some rough edges to it.”