On May 16, 2023, Blizzard delivered a shocking announcement. After years of fans eagerly awaiting a story-driven PvE Hero mode for Overwatch 2–a mode the studio showcased repeatedly in its promotional material and marketed as a major new pillar for the beloved game–Blizzard announced it was scrapping the idea.

It’s no exaggeration to say that fans reacted swiftly and negatively to the news, myself included. Following the announcement, there was one question that I kept coming back to: Without the inclusion of Hero mode, what set Overwatch 2 apart from its predecessor? It didn’t make sense to me to create a new game with a « 2 » in the title that merely felt like a patched version of what came before–not to mention one so similar yet so removed from the spectacle and heart that made the first game one of my all-time favorites.

It’s been nearly six months since that announcement. And after six months of wondering–six months of feeling my affection for the game ebb and flow as I watched the studio push head-spinning microtransaction prices alongside beautifully designed characters–I finally got the chance to ask that very question to the game’s executive producer.

Shortly before the Overwatch 2 team took center stage at BlizzCon, Jared Neuss sat down with GameSpot for an interview discussing the state of Overwatch 2 and what the future holds in store for the hero shooter. We also discussed the studio’s latest hero designs, as well the future for the Overwatch universe in terms of books, television shows, and other media.

GameSpot: Without Hero Mode, what makes it Overwatch 2? What differentiates it from Overwatch? In your words, what do you really want people to take away as the difference–and why should they play it?

Neuss: I want players to believe that Overwatch 2 is the best-supported competitive live game out there. I want people to really feel that we, as a development team, care about their experience, that we care about them, and that we are always working to make this game as good as it can possibly be. If, at the end of next year or the end of two years from now or whatever, that’s something that people are saying, I’ll be thrilled.

I think we’ve made great strides this year. I mean, we’ve made great strides this year, I’ll say, in delivering that kind of experience. And I know that we have a long way to go. We still will make mistakes, and we’ll still try things that people don’t love, and that’s totally fine. But yeah. That really is the goal, is just to make a game that people believe is well-supported, well-loved, and that they feel is being well-served.

I hope that folks feel the energy that we’re putting into the game, and believe that we are here for them. We, as fans and players of the game, are here to serve our fans and players of the game. And I hope that they are enjoying the game as much as we are.

Earlier this year, the Overwatch 2 team faced a lot of backlash after canceling Hero mode. What was the mood in the studio after that? Did you have issues with harassment? How did you tackle that, and how are things looking now?

Anytime you have a major change in what your goals are and what you’re focused on, and decisions get made that fundamentally shift the approach, there’s always that moment of turmoil. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of storming, forming, and norming, but there is that moment where it’s like, « Hey, we’ve made this decision. We realized that we can’t deliver the experience that was promised to players in 2019, and we have a path forward. » There’s that adjustment period where everyone has to rally around that new path forward and change their expectations for what they’re going to be focused on and working on.

I think the fact that we were still dedicated to bringing out that story content and getting it in front of players and having the team continue the work that they’ve been doing helped a lot to ease that transition. And actually, now that it’s been [..] awhile. I think we’re all really settling into the state of things and what we’re focused on and working on.

We have a roadmap for all of next year, which is a thing that the team really hasn’t had in quite a while. So there’s a bit of a reset that happened earlier this year. And I think that reset really helped us to focus on the future and to understand what we want to do for the next 12 to 18 months. And it’s great to be at a point where we can look that far ahead.

Can you share any details about the roadmap for next year and what your plans are for compensating for not having that mode anymore?

The overarching theme of next year is all about just being as responsive as we can. One of the things that we learned this year–which may sound like common sense but I think is a pretty big shift in the way that a team develops games–is that really tightening the feedback loop between learning a thing about what players are enjoying or frustrated by, and then taking action on that and putting in the game, is critical for a game like ours that’s constantly updating–that’s live every day.

We’ve made a lot of strides this year in getting better about being quick, making changes, reacting to balance issues, and things like that. But we really haven’t been able to move as quickly as we’d like on experimenting with new future directions for things. And so 2024 is going to be a lot about that. A lot of the event modes that we’re doing are focused around how we [can] learn specific things about what our players like and don’t like.

A lot of the smaller plans that we have coming up in Season 8 [and] Season 9 are around, « How do we test out a specific idea and just see if people like it? What if the game was a little more like this, or what if the game was a little more like that? » And then we have the opportunity to put it live, gauge player reactions, and then make decisions from there.

What are some of the challenges of being that reactive? What does the structure look like for interacting with fans?

That’s a thing that we have to evolve, really. It’s been very scrappy, I guess, is how I would put it this year. In some cases, it’s a mixture of team members identifying feedback themselves, either from people that they’re playing with, from the internet, from their own experiences playing the game. Everyone on the team loves Overwatch, and so they have feedback every single day in our internal feedback channels.

It’s a mixture of all those things, plus data. We’re always looking at, « Are things healthy? Are they not? » Because if you only ever listen to internal feedback or you only ever listen to what the internet thinks, you’ll only get a very specific view into how things actually are. So for us, it’s a mixture of looking and seeing what player response is, both internal and external to the studio, and looking at our data and just understanding, « Hey, is this thing actually overpowered the way that people think that it is? Or is this hero not being picked very often the way that people are saying? » And sometimes it’s true, and sometimes it’s not. And so we just have to take all those things, balance them together, and then figure out how to make the best experience out of them.

Is there a particular system that you’re looking to implement so that you can get more direct player feedback?

This is something we talk about a lot internally, actually. We’ve changed a little bit of the way that we gather feedback. So not only do we do ad-hoc listening to people on social media, listening to players, listening to members of our team… We also have a few really cool tools that are related to social listening, so that we can really aggregate conversations globally for what people are saying online.

And we also do a lot of surveys and focus-group-type work to bring players in or to talk to players directly and to understand what they think of things–to validate the goals that we have for a thing against their perception of it, because it’s really easy when you spend weeks and months working on a thing, and you’re super close to it and you feel like you know exactly how people are going to feel about it when it gets into their hands, to lose sight of the bigger picture.

So doing this more and more frequently and being a little more aggressive in what we show and how early we show it is a shift that we’ve made this year, and [it’s] a shift that we’ll continue to make next year. I think there’s no substitute for hands-on feedback from people who play and love your game.

Yeah, I do see that with your hero announcements. Following Mauga’s announcement, Overwatch 2 immediately allowed players to try him out this weekend with a free trial period. We’ve already seen concept art for the next two heroes. I feel like you’re looping fans in on these heroes a little bit earlier than ever before.

There are specific moments in Overwatch 2 from this year that I think really reinforced that direction. A lot of it is just the team has wanted, I think, to operate this way for a while, and has felt a little bit slow to react in some cases. And so I think for them, it was just getting the nudge to [say], « No, this is what we should be doing. We should be more open. We should be more transparent. We should be more responsive when we hear things from people who are playing the game every day. » I think that was innate in the team already. I think when we launched the game, it just became clear that that was what we needed to do to support a free-to-play live game.

And then there have been specific examples this year, where the need to really be transparent and reactive have come up. And I think Lifeweaver’s launch was one of those for me, where there were player concerns about how strong the hero was out of the gate. And so we very quickly took steps to address that. We were then prepared to do it with Illari. We even saw a bit of it when Sojourn launched … Or when Overwatch 2 launched, with how strong Sojourn was at certain levels of play.

So yeah, just to summarize it, I think it was a combination of the team wanting to move in this direction already, when I joined, even, and then just seeing how powerful it can be when you do respond to things that are happening live and when you have those tools. And so I think that it’s built momentum. Every time we’ve been able to do it and respond to something quickly for players, it’s been positive for us, and we’ve really felt that invigorating sense of … We’re delivering on the mission here. We’re doing the thing that we want to do. And so yeah. It snowballed from there.

Continuing with the game’s heroes, we’re now at 39. Is there a cap that you foresee in the future? Are you thinking of reassessing how many heroes you add [each year]?

I don’t foresee a cap in the number of heroes that we develop. I think what we really want is for every hero to have a unique personality, unique role to fill, a unique archetype, [and] to really fill a gap in the roster that exists. They need to feel like they are bringing something material, important, and impactful to the game. And I think what we’re seeing in ideation on the team is that there is no end in sight to opportunities there. And lots of games have deep hero rosters, and so there’s some precedent there.

But specific to our team, I’m constantly seeing new, innovative ideas. And for us, it’s about how we make sure that we channel those into the most impactful thing for the game at that moment. Having a bunch of support [characters added] was really great this year, especially with the support heroes that we were able to release. Lifeweaver’s in a great spot. Illari is in a great spot. Getting back to a DPS hero, and then filling out the tank roster a bit more, I think, is just going to be net positive.

If Team 4 is great at one thing–and it’s great at many things–but if it’s great at one thing, it’s having just an endless supply of ideas for cool stuff that can go into the game.

A lot of the characters introduced this year, as well as those foreshadowed [for later seasons], are all relatively younger, relatively attractive, and more humanoid, which feels a bit different from the Overwatch 1 roster. Is that an intentional pivot?

This is an awesome topic. And it’s one that I don’t think we have a perfect position on yet. The main goal for our heroes is to create characters that people can see themselves in–to represent a specific culture, a specific element of the world that we live in. And I think it would be easy to only go down that road forever, to only ever do characters who are human or humanoid, who are relatively young, and that kind of thing.

And so the interesting challenge for us is to keep introducing characters that are uniquely Overwatch in a way that other games really might not be willing to go to. Wrecking Ball is, I think, a good example. I think Winston’s a great example of that, right? Super-intelligent space ape is not an archetype in a lot of games. And Winston’s great, and Winston is so fundamentally Overwatch that I can’t imagine the game without him.

And so for us, it needs to be a mix of creating characters that people can directly see themselves in, who feel representative of the world that we live in, and the future version of that that we want to portray, while also just having fun and creating characters that resonate with people that are maybe a little bit different, and maybe not human at all.

So yeah. We don’t have a perfect approach to this yet. I do think it’s always going to be a balancing act. I think right now, we’re really trying to lean into characters that feel resonant with our player base. But we have a lot of years to go, and there’s no end in sight to how many heroes we can make. And so I imagine you’ll see some pretty wild stuff in the future.

In talking to other fans, it’s that narrative and the characters that a lot of people really love about the game. And it’s explored in comics, animated shorts, and even experiences like Loverwatch earlier this year. But have you thought about other ways to expand that effort? Have you thought about doing the whole Netflix animated series thing, like Cyberpunk or Castlevania have done?

If you could imagine literally any idea for what we could do with this world, I guarantee we have discussed it. For us, there is no ceiling on the directions that we could go with these characters in this world. Right now, what we’re focused on is just continuing to iterate on Overwatch 2, and making Overwatch 2 the best game that it can be.

But as you saw with this year, we are already experimenting with different ways to tell stories and different expressions of heroes. We’re going to continue to experiment next year. I think Loverwatch this year was a great example of us really pushing the boundaries and trying something different. And you’ll see, going into next year, that we’re going to try more new stuff. And hopefully, at some point soon, we’ll get to talk more about what that stuff looks like. But I don’t really see an end in sight to the number of things that we can do with the world. And we have a ton of great ideas.

We’ve also seen Overwatch 2 embrace a lot of crossovers. We had One-Punch Man, Diablo IV, now we have Le Sserafim. What led to seeking out these partnerships? What do you think that it brings to the game?

I think what it brings is just another thing that we can use to express our fandom for things. If I want to say it in a nerdy way, these collaborations are largely born out of things that our team loves. And when we look at potential future collaborations, it’s always through the lens of, « Is this a good fit for the people working on it, the audience that’s going to be hopefully enjoying it, and for the community at large? »

With One-Punch Man … We’re all huge fans of One-Punch Man. [We have] a lot of anime fans on the team, and a lot of K-pop fans on the team. So being able to collaborate with Le Sserafim, it was just huge for the people working on it. And we know that there’s a big group of folks who play the game who are also very much into it. So for us, it just brings another thing that we can celebrate as part of this game that we all love.

So [lastly], I’d like to talk metrics. Did you notice any influx or massive active player count going up from having the game on Steam?

We did see a ton of new players come in on Steam, which was great. And not only are people jumping in for the first time on Steam, but people are coming back and making Steam their primary platform. We also have people who are moving from Battle.net to Steam, or using both at the same time.

One of the things that I personally love about multi-platform games like this, but ours specifically, is just that the flexibility is really nice. It’s been really nice to see people come in, but then also move around the ecosystems.

How does your active player count look for Overwatch 2 compared to Overwatch 1? Have you noticed a difference in the type of players who are playing?

The gist is that the game is doing really well. The audience has grown significantly. And in particular, the cool thing there–and I think we’ve talked about this a bit in the past–is that we have a really healthy mix of people who’ve been playing Overwatch for a long time and brand-new players, which was the goal of going free-to-play and expanding it on to multiple different platforms.

So in terms of game population, player health, and active engagement, [we’re] really happy with where we’re at. And obviously, every game like ours just wants to grow and grow and grow, and so that continues to be the goal and will be going forward.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.