Overwatch Roster Could Eventually Use Seasonal Rotation, Hero Bans

Overwatch's new hero, Baptiste, brings the roster up to 30 playable characters. Blizzard doesn't plan to stop developing new characters and has several concepts in the works already. But the studio has toyed with the idea of using tools like hero rotation or bans to help manage the roster if it grows too unwieldy.

"We have a bunch of heroes that we're playing with, a bunch of ideas, a bunch of gameplay concepts," lead hero designer Geoff Goodman said during a Q&A with media attended by GameSpot. "As long as people are playing Overwatch we're looking at adding content to it."

That may eventually lead to a roster that's simply too big to be manageable. Though the company has no immediate plans to implement fixes for this hypothetical problem, it has considered a few options of how it could mitigate such an issue.

"We talk a decent amount about [rotating heroes]--that, and what's paired a lot with it is hero bans, hero picks, things like that because they're both kind of related to roster size," Goodman said. "We don't have any plans about that right now. It does come up in conversation. If we get a big enough roster that we feel like we would benefit from that, or maybe each competitive season we could do something like that. We sort of idly talk about it; we don't have any plans. Right now we don't feel like we're at the point where we have enough heroes where that seems to make sense. But if we reach a point that it just feels like too many then yeah, we might do something like that."

Baptiste is now available on the PC test server, and will roll out to public servers and other platforms sometime soon. He's a combat medic with a three-round burst rifle, and he can lay down a field that makes all allies within it unable to be killed for a short time. His Ultimate ability puts up a window-like structure that amplifies allies' projectile damage or healing that passes through it.