We’ve had a lot of reworks in Overwatch, but they’ve mostly all been built around pre-existing hero mechanics. Or to add less preset things, like Turb Lava and Symmetra’s Wall. the Orisa rework is … extreme. most notably her refusal to use the shield and she ultimate her, using a javelin never seen before in her kit.
I’m not saying there’s a bad thing in considering 5v5, and I’m not even interested in going into it here … but rather the criticism that you recycle a pre-existing character rather than create a really new one born with a javelin. saying “he already had it in a summer games spray” seems to me rather weak as a thought, because the supercharger is visible in many other sprays (even basic) and is described in Orisa’s book.
What I want to deepen is that … there is really a lot of distrust for rework plans like Orisa’s, if this involves CREATING a new hero almost from scratch without really creating a new one with a lore of him. his is perhaps more incisive than that of Doomfist, Sombra and Bastion, who at least differently recycle their original mechanics / models with other functions and rhythms. is it really a good way to balance OW this extreme freedom in modifying heroes so much? I would feel a little calmer if I knew that at least the supercharger and barrier are present in the OW2 PVE.
Her entire kit didn’t fit the fast-rushing style OW2 has, her entire kit was built around bunkering down and being stationary.
Her shield was stationary, her halt isn’t very good with the spread out nature, supercharger would’ve been not great considering how dive oriented the game is, she needed to be made more brawly.
People keep asking for ow2 orisa to be a new hero…
So what do they do with ow1 orisa? Cause she sure as sh** isn’t going to make it into ow2.
They could keep halt, but halt is a team-centric ability. And in case you don’t understand why that’s a problem, go play ow1 tank and experience what it’s like to be gated by 4 other players on your team.
Tank is inherently team-dependent. Blizzard realized that they didn’t need MORE team-dependent abilities.
Cue outrage over how ow is becoming cod because we don’t all have to look at the same target for things to die.
Yes, but that’s not what I mean. That there is a balance behind it I think we all agree. what is strange to me, however, is the express difference in how it acts on the battlefield. Cassidy, Bastion, Doomfist, Sombra … they all have a different approach than before, but in the background are the same heroes using the iconic mechanics of their kit: a grenade, a punch, a remodeling of the turret body, a hacking. …
But Orisa? Aside from her primary focus and fortify, her equipment incorporated into her aesthetic (supercharger, and if you notice the barrier on her left arm cuff too) is something entirely different in the background. even more of a torbjorn that replaced an overcharge or a symmetra that replaced a “copy” of the TP and an inverted turret that pushed a shield. None of them have given up on an extremely important kit, while for Torbjorn you can well imagine that his turret v3 will be present in OW2 as an upgrade of the talent tree.
But the javelin vs the barrier? the supercharger vs “majorette time?”. in some interviews with PCGames there has even been talk of the consideration of removing her centaur aspect, and even the fact of having considered it I find it worrying.
Because she’s awfully boring in OW1 & her playstyle doesn’t belong in what OW2 is supposed to be. Blizz doesn’t want the turtle/bunker playstyle that promotes sitting back and throwing damage from across the map behind a barrier to be popular. It’s not fun to play against
The thing is, do you want any of her old kit on a new hero? ongo was fine, the shield was meh, halt was cool but problematic.
At a certain point, is it worth it for blizzard to try and rethink all these mechanics in fun and interesting ways? Or does it make more sense to just create new mechanics with that are aesthetically congruent?
Because no one wants her to have a barrier anymore and halt is worthless/not fun to use after all its nerfs. Take all those things away, and Orisa needs two things: self sustain due to her massive size, and more damage so she can be threatening/actually do something useful. Also her ult was bad too.
Overall, while I’m kind of sad to see the old design go, I am very pleased with the rework. The original design of plop barrier down, stand behind it and lay down suppressing fire was kind of dumb and one dimensional anyway. This makes her way more dynamic.
but then why not treat the barrier as something different? that moves? that disappears in a specific condition? which shapes itself differently? which behaves differently in different types of damage? there are tons of variables they have applied to other characters, all of which include a good integration to the variety of OW2’s talent tree (example: mercy single ress> mass ress in pve).
so why not summon a spinning photon barrier that repels enemies rather than a spinning javelin? And for the ultimate, why not give this effect to the supercharger instad this “majorette show”? maybe with Orisa standing still while holding it still as seen in her highlight? maybe that generates a strange energy wave instead of the impact of a javelin? what I want to criticize here is not the mechanics, because I am the first to agree that she is a funny new Orisa …
but it’s extremely strange to change the character’s underlying aesthetic so much. And I’m not just talking about her iconic techniques, but about her LORE, how she has always been described. In a PCGames article there was even talk of considering removing her the centaur aspect, and this gives me a little too much fear about the concept of “evolution” that overwatch wants to bring rather than commit to writing a really new character that is not Orisa . it is like saying that Sonic no longer collects rings but mushrooms, what is the continuity on the character?
I agree. They have pretty much deleted Orisa and replaced her with a completely new hero in her old skin, complete with a whole new set of “murderbot” interactions. I think it was an egregious waste of a hero that we’ve been playing for five years.
I mean, I suppose they could’ve done something differently, but I really enjoyed Orisa in OW2 and I’m not sure something else would’ve been better. Battle Cow was a ton of fun. I was lethal and tanky. And as they say, the best defense is a good offense. She protects people by beating up the enemy threatening them. She’s been the antithesis to Doomfist since their inception, and she remains that in OW2.
Her spear throw is a real thorn in Doom’s side anytime he wants to initiate or use power block.
we may find the throwing of a javelin laudable, but the same question remains: so why not make the javelin general from the same device that launched the barrier via the left armband? I talk about recycling hate what orisa has always shown but which works differently, just like it happened for Sombra, Doomfist etc.
from this interview: https://ftw.usatoday.com/2022/04/overwatch-2-interview-devs-geoff-goodman-brandon-brennan
Some of our early discussions, we were talking about completely changing her model, getting away from the horse/centaur aspect. Doing a totally different design.” explains Brennan, who worked on Orisa specifically. “Doing that is a huge production cost – we would be basically throwing away all this work we already put into Orisa. But we did seriously consider it, we had three or four totally different looking hero concepts, bipedal ones.
I don’t know, it’s scary enough to say that they took it seriously, and that Orisa’s type of rework “eliminates” some iconic aesthetic parts of the character (as I said before, the supercharger ALWAYS visible in every skin and described several times in the lore ). We accept a bastion that you change because you can relate it to torbjorn who changed it, lore speaking. and this makes it “special, our bastion”. Orisa may actually be another orisa, but if you’ve always described her to me as a character using a supercharger, a “tobelstein” gravitational technology and a barrier (novel and teaser say so) … well, why can’t you try to integrate things in a comprehensive way instead of literally writing them all over again as a javelin that occupies three types of techniques and comes out of nowhere for the imaginary that one had of the character of Orisa.
As an Orisa main, I’m not a big fan of all these changes in general, especially Orisa’s new kit, but I don’t hate it. I guess I’ll have to try it out when OW2 is released.
I’ve notice a lot of the changes are kind of dramatic and it’s probably needed since OW is no longer 6v6 but 5v5 now. It kind of makes me anxious about the other hero changes coming in the future… We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
I’ve never been a fan of reworks that just recycle the old kit (for the most part)
Some assets were created with limitations that just get baked into all future versions because the devs don’t want to re-imagine them (ex. Teleporter being placed on a surface. There’s hundreds of ways to handle teleportation that could feel more fluid than her 1.0 take that barely can sit on ledges)
When it comes to Orisa – I doubt we will hear anything concrete beyond this but I feel like this rework was them making Orisa into the version they are currently most excited about.
The devs already mentioned that they considered changing her physical design into a bipedal omnic. At her core, the devs wanted to rebuild her but stopped because of the fans that probably love her look. This new “centaur javelin hero” is probably like one big reboot that made the team go “oh yea, horse hero is kind of cool!” vs the mixed bag of defensive stuff she was before
In Orisa’s early days, the devs revealed her as the sum of their efforts to give players the “next anchor tank” they’ve been begging for. This feels more like Sigma’s situation – created to solve a problem (doesn’t fit Mauga, give the kit it to him) vs. something like Wreckingball (crazy idea they wanted to make regardless of the players).
I liked Orisa’s first kit a bit but this OW2 one definitely looks like something that could pass as her launch kit. I don’t know how heavily they will rework other heroes (come on, Sigma…!) but it is possible that they may go back and reevaluate other core features on different hero kits
(Like Symmetra’s beam gun – I don’t miss 1.0 much but from a design standpoint, her ribbon beam gun made way more sense visually. Symmetra bending light elegantly into a ribbon that attaches onto her enemy > buzzing beam sound, increasing in intensity to make the enemy feel alarmed and try to escape her melt beam > her “passive” pose while shooting that makes her look like she is casually just warding away a flanker with a gun that weighs nothing = a lot of details that feel a bit amiss on her stiff-lightsaber beam.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see her get a similar rework that gives her a completely different weapon or moves her away from the beam entirely)
There is lore.
Her voiceline “Some functionalities may be in beta.”
She always sounded very hesitant in saying that, as if her kit’s functionalities weren’t even finalized into beta, but were going to change in the future.
Her voice and personality rework. I just don’t like it. She went from charming and funny, to snooty and a bit pissy. I even got the sense that the Dev’s killed off Efi. I mean sheesh, times are hard enough without the Devs killing kids and giving nice sentient robots issues. I was hoping she’d evolve into something more endearing.
I know, I know. Silly. But I named my toaster “Sparky” so…yeah.
Make Ori Nice Again™ MONA. Maybe I should make some hats?
Part of the reason may have been due to what Blizzard wanted Orisa to played as and partially due to what the players believed Orisa was and that sort of behavioral clash that didn’t mesh well with the vision that Blizzard wanted for the hero.
Orisa was designed initially as an anchor-tank. That being a leader-type hero that led the charge and push into enemy frontlines.
Cue a substantial amount the playerbase playing Orisa like a Bastion-style turret and deploying barriers at her feet rather than ahead where her team could rally behind. While pro-players may have been attempting to play Orisa like the lead-tank that Blizzard wanted to her be (or at least the ‘proper-way’), most found greater success in playing her as a backline tank, once Double-barrier strategies became more of the normal; the bunker-style plays utilizing Orisa as a key element were an obvious source.
And perhaps, Blizzard saw that they sort of encouraged this style of play, perhaps unintentionally. After all, here was a Tank who had no fall off, and no ranged abilities beyond her basic fire (which had a huge ammo source). Sure her barrier could be deployed an enormous distance away and could help cover her team, but why bother when it’s better to sit it in front of her feet, on a choke and plug-away firing at bad guys. Or worse, get two Orisa’s going toe-to-toe and watch how boring that mirror match-up is.
So obviously, they had to change things to encourage players towards playing her aggressively and leading the charge. Hence the charges. Now her basic fire is on a heat-meter and does less damage to distant targets. Instead of barriers, she now has a javelin that disrupt and knockback enemy targets or act as a temporary shield against projectiles while increasing her movement speed. Lastly, let’s refine Halt and turn it into an ultimate that gathers targets - not toward an orb or projectile - but towards her and let her do some percentile damage like Sigma.
New game warrants more extreme refinements and changes. This isn’t unusual for many games - even more recent releases - tend to see more extreme changes when developers are unsatisfied (or maybe even the playerbase) with certain kits or designs. FF14 did this recently with Summoner, and prior to that, changed up the Machinist dramatically from it’s initial design from Heavensward.
You can view Mercy’s change of her ultimate something of a more extreme re-design in the middle of a game’s life-cycle, but changes to Torbjorn and Symmetra are more careful refinements and streamlining/re-ordering of abilities than distinct reworks.
In Torbjorn’s case, he only really lost his Scrap mechanic which - by the point he lost it - was only really used for Armor Packs. That mechanic moved over to Brigitte, the loss of the Level 3 turret was transferred to Ashe in the form of BOB, while the haste-effect from Molten Core was moved to Overload.
In Symmetra’s case, it was a refinement and re-ordering of abilities. Old Photon Shield became a Shield Generator as a secondary ultimate, and new Photon Shield became a moving barrier (later transferred to Sigma). Later refinements moved Photon Barrier to ultimate status and brought Teleporter into a regular ability. Everything else remained unchanged beyond some simple refinements and tunings.
Mercy saw Revive become a secondary ability (wherein she previously did not have because of her two weapons along with a huge assortment of other abilities), and the Ultimate Valkyrie was born, as a highly-flexible transformation ultimate. Obvious tunings and refinements happened, but again, not to the degree that Orisa in OW2 would have, or even in the case of Doomfist.
As for whether or not those old abilities would or will continue to exist in OW2? Hard to say, I could see Supercharger re-appearing in some form. But barrier deployment and old Halt might just end up being enemy-only abilities down the line. PvE Overwatch may obviously have some homages towards old Orisa, and there may even be a story or plotline there to explain away the changes. But I don’t really see the possibility of those abilities coming back in the same exact form for PvP on a new character.
Wouldn’t really matter that much because of Payload/King of the Hill maps still have a lot of stationary/point-control elements that would allow for Orisa to thrive in. But that isn’t really want Blizzard wants Orisa to do.
Don’t recall this. I remember players want to change some abilities or give her some kind of charge-ability that increased her movement speed. But not create a brand new hero to this degree.
Halt does still exist in her new Ultimate…
Not Overwatch Tanks. They tend to do a bit of everything.
Partially true, Turret level 3 still exists, it’s called BOB now. And obviously could show up as a PvE talent.
A big and frequent problem with Overwatch map design is how many chokes there are and how many players get stuck sitting in them without moving. Orisa definitely encouraged and rewarded this behavior.
It is different. At the time it was introduced, it could deployed 40+ meters away (whereas Winston could only drop it in his location and Rein carried his barrier), it could take damage and disappear on its own and was shaped different from other barriers.
The Centaur enemies in Heavenward’s (FFXIV) late/post-game dungeons have a lot of similar abilites that Orisa now uses. But there also ‘centaur-like’ enemies in WoW too.
I doubt that the developers would ever cross this line. Just wait and see what brought on the personality change.
ongo was fine, the shield was meh, halt was cool but problematic.