In a new article just published on the official website, Aaron Keller talks regarding Season 4 ofOverwatch 2, including the introduction of Vital, the Starwatch event and Pride. Find it now below.
Season 4 will start in a few days! We recently unveiled a lot of details regarding what awaits you next Tuesday and the next few days. I’m going to go into a bit more depth on some of the points we’ve already touched on.
Vital
One of the big new additions to Season 4 is our new support hero, Vital. If you would like to learn more regarding Vital, you can watch its trailer here. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you quietly while you watch it… 🙂
This hero has a large number of completely new abilities: some, like Platform of petals, were already mentioned before the game was even released! His most incredible ability is Saving Grasp, with which he can grab an allied character and pull them towards him. This ability triggers almost instantly, without requiring any confirmation from the player, which can have a huge impact on combat. The first question people ask when they discover it is whether it can be used to annoy their playmates. It is, but it can also help save them or play an even bigger role. Team cohesion, and in particular the fact of being able to count on and trust your allies, is essential in Overwatch. Several abilities can sometimes have negative consequences for the team: Ange, for example, can launch a revival at the wrong time. But our goal is to develop Overwatch and to offer players new ways to interact with the game. When we create new characters, we look to add abilities to them that give them a certain power and offer teams a new collaboration. This can sometimes cause some difficulty, but we think it’s worth the effort. If you want to test this ability, try out the new BOB and Vital game mode, where you can use Saving Grasp to position your team’s BOB. This mode is crazy, but really fun!
Vital is the fifth new hero ofOverwatch 2. The next character, slated for Season 6, will also be a supporting hero. Before Vital, the game had eight support heroes, three fewer than tanks and significantly fewer than DPS. This gap seems too important to us and we would like to remedy it. But we don’t want to neglect the other roles. We probably won’t stick to an exact pattern, but we do plan to offer around two support characters for each tank and DPS.
Starwatch
We’re introducing a new game mode in Season 4, called Starwatch, where players fight alongside the Sentinels or the Infinite Empire. It’s a really fun mode that’s inspired by Schakalstein’s book and tells a story that takes place outside of the universe ofOverwatch. And who knows… if audiences like Starwatch, we might consider expanding on that story in the future. One of the things that I’m most excited regarding regarding Starwatch is that it introduces PvE elements to PvP combat. The turrets are on the side of the Infinite Empire and Doomfist is on the side of the Sentinels. We talked regarding these game modes recently and would like to be able to use them more. We have already carried out initiatives of this type in the past. The missions of the Archives thus served as a technical test bed and allowed us to tackle the creation of the history missions ofOverwatch 2. You have to see Starwatch from the same angle: as a first step towards a more ambitious project that we might develop in the future.
Prides
The prides will be honored in Overwatch This year ! I am delighted with this project and I would like to briefly explain to you why.
This is an important subject for us. It’s easy to be criticized for bringing up a fictional character’s homosexuality without relevant context, or to be accused of adding inclusivity for the wrong reasons. We have always seen Overwatch as a game that depicts a promising, hopeful and encouraging future. The world is heterogeneous. We would like not onlyOverwatch bears witness to this, but we would also like our players to recognize themselves in him. That it reflects who they are. We would like all people to feel valued and honored in Overwatch. We will reveal to you, before June, how we will celebrate the month of pride in Overwatch 2as well as the values ​​that drive our team every day and allow us to bring our ideas to life.
