Back in the old days, competitive balance wasn’t much of a consideration. Classic Doom deathmatch maps weren’t symmetrical, and GoldenEye 007 was all about rushing to where the best weapons were found and preventing other players from obtaining them. In today’s era of online multiplayer, that doesn’t really fly anymore – for better or for worse. Competitive balance is simultaneously an unreachable holy grail and the bane of players and game devs alike. To this day, when a Super Smash Brothers player invokes ‘Fox only, Final Destination, no items,’ there’s only a 50% chance they’re joking.
And then there’s Overwatch. While not the first-ever ‘hero shooter,’ Blizzard’s FPS changed online multiplayer forever with its focus on team play, colorful characters, and surprisingly deep storytelling for a multiplayer-only title. Overwatch’s characters inhabit vastly different roles, with some focused on offense, and others on healing. I can only imagine how difficult it is to balance a game that’s been evolving for over a decade now, so I asked the devs at Blizzard how they handle this gargantuan task.
At BlizzCon 2026, I had the opportunity to sit down for a private chat with Game Director Aaron Keller to talk about where Overwatch has been and where it’s going, as well as that all-encompassing, never-ending journey towards the impossible goal of perfect competitive balance.
Keller explained how the team is able to keep Overwatch fresh and reasonably well-balanced even after a decade of additions. “We do talk a lot internally about this idea of what we call ‘resetting the mastery curve.’ We want to have these moments where players kind of have to relearn parts of the game.” While characters are still recognizably themselves, every hero is a different beast than they were back in 2016, to say nothing of the new heroes that have joined the fray since then. As of this writing, there are over 50 playable heroes in Overwatch, and that number will only continue to grow as the game continues to be a PvP destination for veteran players and newcomers.
In fact, the steady stream of new stuff to do and heroes to play helps with maintaining competitive balance, as Keller explained: “The meta is always changing. Now that we’re introducing a new hero every season, there’s always something to react to.”
When Overwatch announced its grand return with the launch of five heroes at once at the start of its current season (which also saw the game dropping the ‘2’ and going back to just ‘Overwatch’), the influx of so many new characters at once gave the playerbase plenty to chew on. And chew they did: “Toxicity in the game went down measurably because people were just in there trying things out and having fun. And I think the cool thing about the way we’re running the game now is that there’s going to be more and more of those every year.”
But even with more than 50 characters, the playerbase will eventually iron out an tier list and develop a new meta, and that’s where the fine-tuning comes into play. “I think the real art is to let players have fun, to let these heroes fulfill these fantasies and the archetypes they were designed for, but also have the game be balanced,” and I’m inclined to agree with Keller’s philosophy. I imagine achieving that sense of balance is easier said than done, but if the reception to the new era of Overwatch is any indication, the game is in good hands.
“We don’t make changes just for the sake of changes. When we do balance changes, we are trying to make the game more balanced and more competitive.” The characters in Overwatch are called ‘heroes’ because they’re supposed to feel powerful, and sometimes that’s more important than absolute balance.