Overwatch 2 Developer Blog: Designing heroes for a new era

news.blizzard.com:

The Overwatch team has been ideating and experimenting with a handful of heroes since the PvP Beta wrapped up. Here’s a hint to one of the heroes we’ve been working on so far:

"The true struggle is for the superiority of ideas."

We’ve been cooking up some new ideas for Moira, and we’re considering how she will perform as we step into the future of the game.

Led by Associate Hero Designer Alex Kwok, the Hero Balance and Design Team is looking at how to best update Moira’s kit for Overwatch 2. She’s an effective support—sometimes too effective in certain metas like GOATS. However, we believe she lacks the play-making ability and utility possessed by other supports on the roster. To improve the feel of her gameplay, we’re iterating on fresh changes that will give her kit more depth; as we navigate toward this goal, we’re here to give you an inside look at how we ideate and iterate on hero design.

We have two goals for Moira’s kit: we wanted to give her more utility and the power to make game-changing plays. The design process is multi-faceted and sometimes spontaneous. New ideas are shared with the entire Hero Balance and Design Team, and they collaborate and iterate on these concepts to see what works best. Some of these ideas make it into an internal playtest, while others send the team back to the drawing board.

When an idea passes through an initial round of internal tests, it gets shared with leaders across the entire Overwatch team to turn this idea into an ability. After the ability comes to life and gets polished, it goes into a wider internal test where anyone on Team 4 and extended support teams can play and share their thoughts. If the ability makes it through that final test, it’s ready to share with the players.

All