New Overwatch Hero ‘Far Along in Development’: Blizzard

Overwatch has 24 heroes with the recent addition of Orisa. And there’s more to come. According to Blizzard, the next hero is already in the works.It may or may not be Doomfist.

Yes! I absolutely know who the next hero is going to be," Overwatch Director Jeff Kaplan said to IBTimes UK about the 25th playable character. "The next hero is very far along in development, so we're at the point where we're doing art for that hero, we're doing a lot of aggressive play-testing.

"We know what that hero, what the abilities are and how they interact, so we're at that point. The heroes past that hero are more in prototype, exploration phase but the next hero we're pretty set on."

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The only character class in Overwatch that hasn't yet received a new hero is the defence class, leading to speculation that the next hero would be a defence class addition, though Kaplan stated that “it is not safe to assume that.”

Though it is safe to say that the new hero won’t be a cat in a jetpack, which was one of the earlier heroes that company conceptualised but eventually scrapped.

“Then there was this one hero that was a huge internal debate on the team because we just loved it so much but it didn’t make it. It was this jetpack and it had this cat that laid in it, like a cat does. Then every once in awhile it would paw at the controls. It was a cat in a jetpack,” Kaplan said to Gamespot.

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“When we were first starting to make Overwatch we had to test the boundaries. It was a new IP and we didn’t know how far or wide we could go,” he said.

Eventually Blizzard set the boundaries with Winston, a talking gorilla, at one end, and Soldier 76, a facsimile of your standard Call of Duty character on the other for deciding how crazy it go with new heroes.