We Want Players To Have Access To As Many Heroes Over Time Just by Playing the Game says Overwatch 2 Game Director Aaron Keller in Interview

We got the opportunity to talk with three key members of the Overwatch 2 team in an interview – Jon Specter the Vice President & Commercial Leader, Walter Kong the General Manager as well as Aaron Keller the Game Director. In this interview we asked questions about the Overwatch 2 battle pass as well as the live service.

Aaron Keller, Game Director

Walter Kong, General Manager

Jon Specter, Vice President & Commercial Leader

Note: This interview is edited for clarification.

What was the decision to change the system for Overwatch 2 to include a battle pass, and how long would it take to grind and unlock the new heroes from it and are the heroes associated with the battle pass affect the meta?

Jon: We approached building the Overwatch 2 (OW2) battle pass from a ground up perspective of what system we think is the best for our game. Of course we are familiar with all the other games that have battle passes, but we were designing ours to create a system that is fair for players, as well as creating something very rewarding and fun to play through regardless whether you choose to spend money or not.

As we move to the live service free to play model, this is an amazing moment in a couple of weeks that where we would release 3 new heroes and 6 new maps and countless other new fun things coming to the game, but we all see this as a starting point for what we are building for OW2. We would come back 9 weeks later with other new heroes and another new map, and 9 weeks after that we’ll have another big update and that keeps on going.

We want to be able to support the game for years to come, so when we look at the system like the battle pass, the other goal that was really important to us was to build something that allow our business to support our team for a long term in a sustainable manner but to do that in the way that felt right for OW2 and address some of the issue like the player’s experience and rank mode.

Aaron: We believe that even with this change, OW remains a highly competitive game and we know that there is importance to our players and it is incredibly important to the game team as well. We have talked about this topic over the past year as much if not more than any other topic that involve with the game and we think it’s fair and still retain the competitive nature for a few reasons.

At the start of every season the new hero is going to be locked out of the ranked system and we’re doing that for a few reasons. The first one is just getting more time to balance the hero, so if the hero comes out and we feel like it’s really Overpowered or even really under-tuned, we are able to make some changes and it also gives players the ability to earn the hero on the battle pass in free track before it gets unlocked in the competitive mode. So I think right there just kind of evens the point from the start of the season.

At the same time, since there are lot of changes to OW2 like adding things such as hero elements, role queues and now the 5V5. We’ve made a lot of underlying changes to the rest of the game and one of the changes we’ve made is we reduced some of the reliance on hard counters and what this does is it opens up the freedom to choose from a greater variety of heroes in the game.

If you think about a hero like tracer and what her role is on the battlefield, she’ll get into the back lines, she will hit the enemy support and she can be really effective that a lot of time what enemy will do they might switch to Cassidy. Since Cassidy is a really good counter to tracer, it’s so good that a lot of times the right thing for the tracer player to do is to just swap to another hero.

We’d like to make that interaction a little softer than it is right now, rather than just the hard counter. So we think that with 35 heroes at launch and with a tweaked value for the counters in the game, it’s going to allow more players the flexibility and the freedom to pick the heroes that they want to. So having one hero absent out of the pool or having more than the 35 heroes in the game won’t affect the competitive nature of the game as much.

On top of that, when you look at some of the data for how many heroes players actually use and how often they’re hero switching, it’s illuminating and when we looked at that data, it gave us a lot more confidence that going with this direction would still be healthy for the game.

Most players play a very small roster of heroes and they actually don’t switch that often and we think that when they do, the reasons that they’re switching to another hero is because it’s another hero that they feel like they’re comfortable with that they’re more effective with and that they have fun playing. That’s one of the highest values for us as a team, is for people to always be having fun in the game and being able to play the way that they want to.

I guess maybe to wrap it up is there are a lot of heroes in the game and we want players to have access to as many of those as possible. So over time just by playing the game, people will be unlocking more heroes either through the free track of the battle pass or through hero challenges that come out this season after a hero is released.

In order to get in just to unlock the competitive system in OW, players have to win a lot of games. There’s a big time investment there and so when you put that time investment in front of a system like that, you’re also granting heroes just by playing the game. We think that most players by the time they actually even get into our competitive system will have most if not all of the heroes unlocked.

There’s been a lot of speculation online regarding how long it would take to unlock a new hero from the free version of the battle pass. Can we get some clarification on whether it’s something that if you can get it done it’s pretty quick or should we put a little bit more time into it?

Jon: One of the things that we’ve worked through the free approach for heroes on the battle pass that we’ve done right is to go back and to look through some of the existing Overwatch 1 player data on how people play the game and how frequently in all of that.

I think one of the immediate lessons that we learned there is that there’s not really an average player there, so when you say hey what does this look like for a typical player. Actually what I’ve learned is that, people have different players in mind, usually they mean themselves like how I play the game, and what we’ve worked to do is to build a system that allows players who are playing the game regularly throughout the season to unlock the hero before the end of the season.

So within the free tier of the battle pass, unlocking a new hero is going to be at tier 55. What we wanted to do there was basically place it so that players who are playing the game regularly but not crazy amount or anything. We’ll have the ability to unlock the hero for free but what’s really important is we want players to unlock the heroes by playing the game.

We don’t want to make it really hard for them or anything like that. That’s why it’s not on tier 80 for example, which I think when you look at some other battle passes they take sort of the most desirable thing and put it all the way at the end. We didn’t want to do that because we wanted to have a clear path for players who were just playing the game regularly and doing so without spending on the battle pass to be able to unlock the new hero.

Aaron: Because there are other ways to earn the hero in the game like obviously like the world knows we’ve put the heroes in the battle pass, so you could earn it on the free track or you could unlock it by upgrading to the premium track but there are going to be other ways of earning heroes.

I think the two most important ones is that they’ll be the season after a hero is released, we’re going to open up a persistent challenge and so just by playing the game and completing that challenge you’ll also be able to earn the hero that way.

The other one that is hopefully more exciting for players is that by playing the game in completing weekly challenges you’ll be able to earn overwatch coins, and you can use those coins to upgrade to a premium battle pass for any season. If you save those coins for a season with a hero release you’ll unlock the hero immediately.

We have a lot of players that play particular heroes, roles and they play for different lengths of time, but if you’re the type of player that plays a lot and are really dedicated, you have the potential to unlock every hero in the game the day that they’re released just by completing weekly challenges and using those coins to upgrade to the premium battle pass.

On top of that, if you are playing less frequently but let’s say you only play support, at that point you’d be saving your coins to buy one maybe two heroes per year and more than likely you’ll have enough to always have the hero relatively quickly if not immediately when they’re released.

With the Battle Pass monetisation being announced, are you guys planning something beyond hero skins, maybe like hero special effects?

Jon: We’re just sort of starting it off with the Mythic skins. In season one, we launched the Mythic genji skin, it’s the cyber demon skin for him and I think it’s the best skin that we’ve ever made for the game. It’s highly customisable, the mask animations and what it looks like when he uses the dragon blade, it’s just mind blowing how cool it is.

We think players really fell in love with it and it’s one of the coolest things we’ve ever put in the game and it’s one of the key reasons why we hope and believe that when players look at our battle pass for season one, they’ll see something with incredible value and something that feels really rewarding for them.

In terms of other types of cosmetics, we are planning a couple of different new cosmetic types for OW2, and we think players are going to love those as well. So in season one, you’ll see three big new types of cosmetics, the first are weapon charms, which again probably about what you would expect if you’ve seen them in other games but one of the things that we love about weapon charms is that you can use them on any hero. So if you find a weapon charm that you love and want to play with you can use it regardless of which hero you’re playing.

A second new type of cosmetic for us that we’re bringing are called souvenirs, think like sort of a 3D animated emote type. So an example, in season one we have a souvenir which is actually a pineapple pizza slice, which our team has debated a lot whether pizza should have pineapple on it. I was personally overruled, I think I would never put pineapple on my pizza but that is something the art team chose to do.

And so we have a bunch of those types of souvenirs. There’s another one that’s like a trophy that you can hold up or a heart that you can show, another one of my favourites is an actual salt shaker and I think players will have a lot of fun with that.

And then name cards are sort of another new cosmetic type that you’ll see in the season which is just another way that you can customize and express yourself with your player profile. On top of all of that, we’re still working on some other cosmetic types that you won’t see in October, but as we move in the live service you’ll start to see us introduce some new things too.

Regarding skins, with how loot boxes will be discontinued, will there be any events where players can get limited time skins? If so when those events end, do players have opportunities to get those event’s skins outside of the event period?

Jon: One of the things that I think will be a lot of fun for the team to work on has been with the live service seasonal content model to be able to go through and look at the sort of existing overwatch one seasonal events, like the Lunar new year, Junkenstein’s revenge and the summer games and things like that.

And thinking about what those would look like in OW2 and in some cases to make them feel new and fresh and also to try some other things. As an example, in the middle of season one, we’re actually launching an all new Junkenstein’s experience.

It’s not the same one that we’ve played the last several years but the team thought it would be a lot of fun to sort of continue the Junkenstein saga, and tell a new story there with a new experience for players to jump into.

Since we’re shifting away from loot boxes and moving to the battle pass in the shop, that’s gonna be the main way that we’re delivering cosmetic contents to the game now. Players who are interested in Halloween skins for instance, we will have some cool stuff that appears on the shop around then but it’s sort of a different model than how we’re running a Halloween event right now.

So instead of buying your Halloween loot boxes and getting limited time skins from that, we want it where we can to pull in some of those fun things into the main shop experience for players.

What is the price of the battle pass?

Jon: Across the entire battle pass, we have eighty reward tiers and we’ve really gone through for both the free and the premium options on the battle pass and tried to add as much cool stuff as we can.

I said this before but one of our key values when we were building the battle pass was that we want players even if they’re not spending any money but also if they choose to upgrade to the premium pass to look at the battle pass system and say there is so much cool stuff there that I’m excited about.

So in our season one battle pass is an example, we have nine skins on there which are some of our best there. And then in terms of price point, so twenty of those eighty reward tiers are totally free for players just by playing the game. And for people who want to unlock the premium battle pass it’ll be 1,000 Overwatch coins, which is 10 US dollars.

I personally have been somewhat of a competitive player for a year now and I’m interested in asking about the competitive aspects and how often are you willing to make hero balance changes in a competitive aspect?

Aaron: We talk about the competitive nature in the game and how to balance it a lot and our value is changing a little bit for OW2 and there’s a few reasons for it. Let me go over it a little bit first and we can kind of talk about why.

So in the future, we’re going to be balancing the game seasonally,  and the start of each season will have a larger balance patch associated with it and what we would like to do is to kind of have the tone or the theme of that patch exist throughout the remainder of that season.

It doesn’t mean we won’t do any other changes especially if there’s things that we feel like unhealthy for the game, we would address those issues as fast as we could, and we’d obviously be fixing bugs on top of that.

But we’d like to have a seasonal cadence, not just to the content coming to the game and battle pass in the cosmetics, we’d like to have a seasonal context for the balance of the game as well. On top of that,  a lot of the content that we release for OW will change the balance.

We’ll be releasing a new hero at least every other season in this game and when we do, releasing such a big gameplay like asset really can change the way that people play, it gives them new avenues and new strategies that they can pick up on.

So I think that competitively, we will be doing our best to always make the game balanced and as fair for all of our players as possible, while still trying to provide variety from season to season while leveraging all of the new content that’s going into the game.

Why does the season pass not have in-game credits among its rewards and will the season pass have a limited time for players to complete it?

Walter: We looked at the battle passes across the industry and some of them have currency in them, but we followed a philosophy with our battle pass that wants to focus on the system as a way to engage in the game over the period of the season to have fun and earn rewards.

We didn’t want to put ourselves into a position where we have to tune the battle pass to restrict the pace of progress, to protect our business for example. I think we wanted to have ways to earn currency that are outside of the battle pass so that we would not have that type of external constraint on players being able to earn their way through and unlock the rewards and not to have those things run into each other.

Jon:  One of the ways that Walter was just talking about, that sort of come to life within the game is you’ll see all of the challenges that we are offering players, which is the the sort of fastest way to complete your battle passes to earn big experience boosts from your daily and weekly challenges.

All of those challenges are designed to be fun for players to complete and things that you would do normally when you’re just playing the game of OW for fun and trying to win. Challenges like play a few games or win a few games or deal a certain amount of damage or block a certain amount of damage things like that.

We don’t have any challenges that we’ve designed where the goal is for players to not complete them. You won’t see challenges like get ten scoped critical headshots as widowmaker on Hanamura, or anything like that right where we’re asking you to play a specific hero or do something that is not how you would normally play and try to win together with your team.

It’s things like that when we’re designing a battle pass with the only goal being that this is rewarding and fun for players to progress over the course of the season. it lets us make other choices like, we also want players to complete their challenges, to have fun doing that.

The second part of your question where you asked about the sort of timing, so each season will have a new battle pass at the beginning of the season. Taking the season one battle pass as an example, we have a nine week season one and so players have nine weeks to progress that battle pass, and then in season two we bring in a whole new battle pass with another new hero on the free track again, and a whole bunch more rewards for players to earn.

Battle pass is a new thing for OW, and with a cadence of a set amount of weeks and being able to address player feedback but also keep up with new content in terms of heroes and maps. How will the team set up and prepare for this? And how does that affect delivering even more new content in 2023?

Aaron: It’s a really important point to transition to a live service game, to be able to support a free to play game takes a lot of dedication, takes a lot of planning, and it takes a team that’s structured to be able to provide all of that to our players.

I kind of want to just go on a little bit of a tangent because i think that there’s something unique about OW and I think that there’s something special about the way we develop games and the things that we create in it really is the quality and the amount of time that we put into the assets that we put into the game.

There’s a blizzard value where it’s commit to quality, it’s something that were always striving for at the company. For instance, mythic skins takes over a year for us to build and that goes through so many different people across the team, it takes us over a year to build a hero. It takes this year to build a new map like everything in this game it goes through a lot of different departments and a lot of different iteration and it’s very resource intensive.

But the reason why is because we are always striving to make the very best version possible of anything that we put out in front of our players, it’s one of the highest values for our team and so in order to do something at that high of an equality level at this frequency of cadence takes a lot of effort.

Our team is over three times the size as it was when we shipped the original game and not just that, but we have recruited help from all over Blizzard and from other parts of the industry as well.

We have a massive amount of resources working on this game and then the planning for the future is not just never ending but it’s incredibly important. When I say that something takes a year to create, that means we have to plan over a year in advance.

We have been testing our season 8 hero for a month internally and we are working on maps that are coming out in seasons 11 and in seasons 13. We are also working on mythic skins that are over a year in advance for this game.

It takes a huge effort to do it, but it’s something that I think we’ve committed to, and it’s something that we recognize what it takes to do and we have the capabilities to do it at the level that most aligns with our values of delivering the highest level of quality for our players.

Is there an option for players to buy a tier skip for the battle pass and what’s the cost for it? And if there’s a cosmetic from a battle pass that you miss, do players have any way to keep playing an old battle pass or just go into the shop and buy the specific things?

Jon: So we do have an option within the battle pass, whether you’re playing it on the free or you unlock the premium track to buy tier skips. Those are gonna be two hundred coins each which is about 2 US Dollars, but we think the sort of main purpose of those tear skips is not gonna be people who want to buy lots of them but rather you got really close to a thing that you specifically want and just want to sort of bump yourself up. They’re designed really for a player with that kind of need.

Right now we don’t have any specific plans about bringing season one battle pass content back to the game at a future date except as I said there will be clear ways to get any new heroes if you weren’t playing in the season when they came out.

But in terms of the cosmetic content for the battle pass, we’ve not ruled out the potential of bringing it back in the future but we don’t have any specific plans to do so and we do think that there’s something special about feeling like you earned that content through the battle pass.

With the big amount of content dropping as well as additional heroes every other season, do you plan on rotating the hero roster as it gets bigger and bigger?

Aaron: The hero roster is going to get bigger and bigger over time, and part of that is really exciting as it means that players are going to have more choices of what they want to play in a match.

It’s one of the reasons why we feel more confident about the competitive nature of the game with this decision, the more heroes you have in the game, the more you’re able to put together a team composition in order to answer what the enemy team is doing without having to rely on only one particular correct choice, so a part of this is great.

Right now we’re not thinking about limited hero pools or hero rosters or even something like a pick or a ban system in the game. That’s something we can always talk about later, the games are always evolving, we’re always willing to make big changes to it, I hope we’ve demonstrated that and the value behind those changes is always to make the game better and to serve better, that our players make it more fair and make it more competitive.

A lot of games that classify themselves as life services have a lot of Easter eggs and special content through the seasons. The seasons have themes, history perks and more about the characters. Do you guys intend to do something similar to OW characters?

Aaron: We have themes to the seasons in OW2 and there are things that were really excited about it. I think the game you know is been out for a long time but I kind of feel like we’re just hitting our groove right now with the quality and the imaginative cosmetics that we’re making.

The theme for a season one is cyberpunk and the mythic skin for that season is cyber demon Genji. He is really cool, but if you look at the lineup of all of the other cyberpunk skins, they’re absolutely incredible and the coolest things we’ve ever made in the game. Some of those they bring from the newest heroes like Kariko, to some of the first heroes we’ve worked on like Widowmaker and Zenyatta.

We’re building cosmetics for all of them and then on top of that, each season is not only relegated to the theme. Like that theme is amazing we absolutely love it, but there’s going to be a whole host of other cosmetic content coming out for that season.

There are multiple times more that will be coming to the shop over the course of that first season. Some of that is cyberpunk themed and some of it is its own unique stuff and some of it has its own themes as well.

Walter: As we transition from history as OW to this life service, we see it as our job to keep players engaged continuously throughout the season. So that’s going to be a combination of really cool content and that chase to earn the next reward, it’s also delivering this feeling of freshness in the game experience and that’s going to be a fun challenge for us.

We’re going to be learning how players interact with the game and I really believe that this team is going to have a lot of fun delivering that ongoing service as well.

The design philosophy for OW with everybody having access to every hero and swapping over to what Walter just mentioned about a life service where you want to keep players engaged. What are your thoughts about players that do not care much for the battle pass system?

Aaron: It’s really interesting to talk about a business model for a game you know, what players can get out of it, and how competitive it is. When we listen to our players, we hear what they have to say and it’s been a fairly consistent message over the last few years. it’s always been that they want more OW content. They want us to continue building things for the game and we really took that to heart.

The strategy of releasing OW2 this October, is not the same strategy that we started with years ago when we announced it in 2019. The reason we changed it is because we wanted to give players what they were asking for and the best way for us to be able to do that is to fund this team that’s so much bigger than it was before and to be able to bring that revenue in is to be able to provide enough content for people to be able to engage with at a consistent basis in order for us to be able to raise revenue for that.

And that’s the overall driving vision behind this is we want to give players as much of what they were asking for if not more than that is possible so that we can continue developing this game well into the future.

We would like to thank Jon, Aaron and Walter for answering our questions regarding Overwatch 2. The game will be planned to release on 4th October 2022 for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows.

Join Us!