Summary
WhenOverwatch 2’snew Stadium mode was unveiled, one of its most eye-catching features was its third-person mode. This is only optional, but it opens up a completely new way to play.
Today, ahead of Stadium’s launch on April 22, we spoke with the Overwatch 2 team about the all-new mode. Here, we touched on the implementation of a third-person perspective - and how this was actually under consideration for much longer than we thought.
Third-Person Was Considered For The First Overwatch Game
It’s taken until Overwatch 2 for Blizzard to make the leap
“[We] toyed with it in Overwatch 1 at certain points, just internally, little prototypes and stuff. It’s been there,” says senior game designer Dylan Snyder. “When we animate and when we do art and all that stuff, there’s a first-person version and a third-person version of stuff, and [it] has always been that way since day one. So it was always been there as an option.”
Lead level designer, Ryan Smith, also recalls third-person being considered alongside other new ideas for the game. “As long as there’s been game mode ideation on Overwatch, there’s been a whiteboard somewhere at Blizzard where there’s a list of things that are like, ‘this is what we’re going to do’,” he says. “I bet third person has been on a lot of those whiteboards.”
However, just because it was considered all the way back in classicOverwatch, that doesn’t mean that its place was guaranteed in Stadium. Snyder tells me that they played around with it during development, dropped it, but then ended up missing it so much that they added it back in.
The third-person perspective has made it harder to add some heroes into the game mode, with Snyder naming Widowmaker as one of the most troublesome to get working in Stadium.
All of the devs, including Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller, also make the point that third-person has always been in the game, to some degree. For example, Reinhardt and Brigitte have always entered into third-person when they put their shield up, so they can better see what they’re blocking. That said, this has always been much more limited, even if, as Snyder puts it, third-person was “in our toolkit”.
“It’s always been there as an idea,” he rounds off. “We just committed to it, and it works great.”
The timing of Stadium’s announcement means that it drew a lot of comparisons toMarvel Rivals, since this is a hero shooter that is played wholly in third-person. However, in Overwatch 2, it will be limited to Stadium, andBlizzardsays that it was considered long before Rivals was announced.
