Blizzard has said that there are currently no restrictions in Overwatch‘s Competitive Play that limits players to one choice of hero per team. During an interview with VG247, Principle Game Designer Scott Mercer said that the developer didn’t want to restrict players prematurely and that if there are any balancing issues, Blizzard will continue to address them. Mercer is of the view that imposing limits at an early stage can have consequences down the line. He explained:
So you could, theoretically, right now have a team of six Torbjörn. Though, we are nerfing Torbjörn. Right now, we haven’t put hero limits in because we want players to be creative. We don’t want to limit players prematurely – we’re only five weeks into the game’s life. That kind of limitation would have a lot of consequences right down the line.
We want to allow people to play what they want; play with who they think is really good. You know if it’s too good, if it is a balance situation, then we need to react to that. That’s part of our job. Torbjörn is really powerful on console, we need to do something on that.
We’ll iterate, and we’ll see how it goes.
We don’t want a solution to be where we’re saying ‘you just can’t do it’. We want to provide a more flexible situation for players where, I think, it’s more fun to do the experimentation. It’s not necessarily fun if Bastion is mowing you down, but in most cases there are solutions.
Elsewhere in the interview, Mercer said that Blizzard sees Competitive Play as a way for players to “accurately gauge how good they are.” The mode is meant to appeal to anyone with a little bit of a competitive streak as opposed to just hardcore players.
In other Overwatch news, Blizzard has paid tribute to a Chinese fan who passed away a day before the game’s release. 20-year old Wu Hongyu was looking forward to the game but his life was cut short when he attempted to stop a thief from stealing his friend’s motorcycle. In Overwatch‘s Lijiang Tower, Blizzard added Hongyu’s name to one of the spacesuits in Chinese with the phrase “heroes never die.”
Rest in peace.
For more on Overwatch, stay tuned.
