Overwatch is on a cycle for hero development—a new Overwatch hero is released every three months or so. The team has what feels like an endless supply of hero ideas, many of which were pitched at the game’s launch.
Overwatch producer Matthew Hawley told GameSpot in a group interview with journalists that there’s a list of 50 heroes that were pitched at the start of the game’s development, and a ton of them haven’t been touched yet. “We want to keep working through that,” assistant game director Aaron Keller added, as reported by PCGamesN.
Related: New heroes and maps will be added to Ovewatch’s competitive queue two weeks after release
But the Overwatch team isn’t stuck on creating heroes just from that list. Blizzard is also taking inspiration from player feedback. “[Overwatch] is a live game,” developer Geoff Goodman told PCGamesN. “We get to react and try to add things that people are asking for that we didn’t think of originally. In some ways, it’s hard to know exactly where we’ll be because we’re being guided by the community for some degree.”
The game’s Deathamtch mode is an example of community feedback being implemented into the game, Keller said. The community loved Overwatch’s free-for-all Deathmatch mode, and kept asking for more of it. And Blizzard delivered; the Overwatch team added a new map, Petra, and a Competitive Play mode for the gametype. “It was directly a desire from the community,” Keller added.
Overwatch’s newest hero, Brigitte, was added to the game in late March. That means we’ve got a few months of speculation before details of a new hero start dripping out.
