“There’s A Lot Of Nuance That Goes Into Balance,” Says Overwatch 2 Game Director

Overwatch 2 has been going strong into 2023 with the release of both the Winter Wonderland and Battle for Olympus events. The game’s director Aaron Keller was recently interviewed by NME where he talked about a number of items relating to the game post launch including the future of both the multiplayer and single player experience. This conversation focused a lot on the balancing issues of Overwatch 2 and how the team have been looking at striking the right gameplay feel with players.

During the interview Keller noted that he had “a hard time finding ways to get enough time to play the game, while also trying to run my game.” Alongside this he also noted that the team still has “a lot of work to do” when tackling Overwatch 2‘s reward and progression systems which has come under a large level of scrutiny from the game’s fanbase withy most of the criticism focuses on the difficulty in average players unlocking new heroes from the battle pass and the prices of skins in the game’s in-game store.

When speaking on the game’s balancing problems the conversation focused heavily on Roadhog who has been terrorizing matches since the recent update. Keller noted that this was down to other heroes changing and in turn this allowed Roadhog to “move into the place that he’s at right now.” Continuing on Keller said:

It would be very easy for us to change him so much that he becomes unplayable, or nerfed so hard that people would think he was a throw pick… We’d like to avoid that, so we’re trying to be careful here but at the same time, we want to make our change meaningful enough to actually have a real impact on him and the game.

Aaron Keller – Overwatch 2 Game Director

Keller said that the reason for the perceived imbalance was down to the fact that players are always looking to increase their winning chances. This in turn has led to Blizzard have to juggle a “hands-on approach” to both balance and allowing players to shape their own meta.

There’s a lot of nuance that goes into balance… It can feel like there are certain heroes that are allowed to be strong or popular, and others that, when they do become really strong, the community has a pretty adverse reaction to it. I think it’s all very natural. One of the things we’ve been talking about internally is…what happens when heroes that have mechanics that can be frustrating, or stifling to play against, become really powerful?

Aaron Keller – Overwatch 2 Game Director

This seems like a part of Overwatch 2 that continues to be extremely difficult to get right. When Blizzard nerf one character another seems to fill that role for players. It’ll be interesting to see how they tackle this issue going forward.