Overwatch 2 is just a few days away from launching its radical new Stadium mode. Aiming to be a new core pillar for the hero shooter alongside its Competitive and Quick Play modes, its gameplay innovations and ability reworks look awesome, but it comes at the price of having a limited hero pool. Now, Blizzard has lifted the lid on how it decided on Stadium’s lineup of launch heroes, and why certain characters like Tracer, Widowmaker, and Hanzo have been left on the sidelines – for now, at least.
Overwatch 2 Stadium mode is the FPS game’s biggest shakeup in a long time. A new, permanent core experience that lets players jump into best-of-seven series with shorter, condensed matches, post-round buy phases where items and new abilities can be equipped, and the option to play third-person. It’s a mouth-watering proposition, but when Stadium drops next week it’ll only feature 17 of the game’s heroes – that’s less than half the main roster. Iconic and highly picked characters like Mercy, D.Va, and Genji will be available, but plenty of other popular names won’t be.
In a recent roundtable, attended by PCGamesN, with Overwatch 2’s game director Aaron Keller, senior game designer Dylan Snyder, and lead level designer Ryan Smith, some light was shone on how Blizzard selected the initial 17.
“The reason we chose the heroes we did in Stadium has a lot to do with what we thought we could do with their kits,” Keller explains. “The first heroes that we chose were ones that we had instant ideas for how to make really unique, exciting, and transformative builds for them. We also stuck with a set of heroes that we think are going to be a little bit easier to onboard players into. We specifically didn’t pick a lot of the really heavy movement ability characters, just because their movement capabilities are probably going to be amplified [when brought into Stadium].”
Speaking specifically about Tracer, Overwatch’s “poster girl” who isn’t featured in Stadium at launch, he says that the team at Blizzard loves her as a character, but the mode needs to “launch in as sane a format as possible before we start bringing in heroes that have really crazy mobility.” Keller does assure that Tracer will eventually be added to the hero pool, and that when she does, “she is just gonna wreck people.”
Later, Snyder says there are other factors away from just movement that make certain heroes very hard to balance for Stadium, making them unnatural choices for the mode’s starting lineup. Due to its more compact and frantic nature, Stadium will feel “more brawl focused,” which can make it tricky to balance and facilitate ranged, hitscan, or burst damage heroes like Widowmaker and Hanzo. “We have Ashe in there [the starting hero pool] and that’s awesome,” he adds. “We did find some really cool ways to go about making [sure] Ashe and even Cassidy had a lot of variety and options, but it was tricky, and that’s not going to get any less tricky as we bring more of those characters in.”
Smith also points out that certain mechanics and abilities, such as Widowmaker’s charged sniper shot, are incredibly difficult to transplant and convey in Stadium’s third-person perspective.
It seems that Blizzard is willing to really innovate and find ways to make these more problematic characters fit in the context of Stadium, but that the time just isn’t right for some of these more complex or high-mobility heroes. Keller has repeatedly promised that more heroes (as well as maps and game modes) will be added with each Overwatch 2 season, so the initial squad of 17 will steadily expand.
Overwatch 2 Stadium mode arrives at the start of Season 16 on Tuesday, April 22.
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