Good morning, I’m Jeff from the Overwatch team. I’m very excited to be here with an awesome Developer Update, because we are introducing the 24th hero to Overwatch today. So, we’re here to talk about Orisa.
Orisa is a brand new character. A lot of you probably haven’t heard of her before. But she has a really cool backstory. So we want to talk a little bit about that and introduce you to how Orisa came to be. So, I’m going to back way up to the Omnic Crisis which, as many of you know, was this terrible world war that happened where robots sort of took over the world. Humans fought back. Overwatch was a big part of that. We eventually struck peace with the omnics. But during that Omnic Crisis there are many different omnic units used in the battles. So, as you know Bastion, as an example, was one of those units that was using the battle. Well, there was another unit called the OR-14 which was specifically designed to fight against the humans and be part of the Omnic Crisis.
Well, fast-forward many years later after the Omnic Crisis; peace has been struck. We’re in the city of Numbani where humans and omnics get along great. It’s actually one of the most technologically advanced and peaceful cities on the planet. But they to start run into some strife from a local villain who you might have heard of before. His name is Doomfist. And in order to guard against Doomfist’s attack and protect the city against any other dangers that might come about the citizens of Numbani developed a more advanced version of the old OR-14 unit which they, not surprisingly, called the OR-15. So, it was one version higher. Well the OR-15s initially were okay and suited for battle but they eventually lost horrifically against Doomfist, specifically in a battle that took place in the Numbani airport. And most of the citizens of Numbani just gave up on the OR-15s. You know, they failed miserably. They’re laying in pieces scattered throughout the airport terminal this is no good. We give up on these things.
Well, there was a young girl who didn’t give up hope. Her name is Efi. She’s an extremely smart girl excellent at science, robotics, mathematics, programming. She still had hope. She still believed in what these OR-15 units were supposed to do for her city. So, she, sort of, as a scrappy young girl, took the pieces back to her workshop worked on this unit and created the evolution to what the OR-14 and OR-15s were and named it Orisa. She made a single heroic unit that wasn’t supposed to be part of a huge battalion but was supposed to be a specific individual hero and named it Orisa. So, Orisa in terms of the timeline of Overwatch is a brand new hero just on the scene. So, we have yet to see what Orisa is really going to do. So, that’s part of what’s very exciting. Most of our heroes have a big historical background. We’ve seen them succeed and fail in their past history, as where Orisa is new on the scene and it is Efi who has created her, who is really encouraging her to become a new hero of the future.
Now let’s talk about mechanically what Orisa does and what she brings to the game and why we designed Orisa the way we did. So, let’s talk about her abilities first. First of all she’s a tank. So, she will be in the tank role. Her primary weapon is called “The Fusion Driver.” Think of it as a projectile-based machine gun She moves a little bit more slowly when she’s shooting it, but it has a good range to it. Probably more range than almost any of our tanks have on their weapons. Maybe Zarya’s alternate fire goes you know equally far. But she’s got a good range on it, good rate of fire, really high-sustained weapon with a large clip size. So, that’s the Fusion Driver. The alternate fire ability on the Fusion Driver is of extreme utility. So, it sends out, basically, a pulse. Think of Zarya’s Graviton Charge, which is Zarya’s ultimate. But it sends out a single pulse out from her and then you can click your alternate fire again and will bring any affected targets within its radius for a very short period of time. So, it’s like a little mini Graviton Surge that she can do more often and mostly she’s using it for positioning or re-positioning her targets. It also you know briefly puts them in place, so if you have a teammate who’s a Widowmaker or Hanzo or even Orisa with her her great range on her gun, can shoot towards that and it really helps you line up some critical shots that can happen. You can also pull people around corners with it. So that’s a really fun ability that she has.
She also has a tank ability called “Fortify.” And what Fortify does is it not only makes Orisa a little bit tougher but it prevents Orisa from sustaining any sort of crowd-control ability that might be used against her. So, like the most obvious examples are maybe Pharah’s Concussive Blast, which normally knocks people around you know moves them out of position. If Orisa has fortify on, and she’s going over that bridge in the gardens of Lijiang tower, you can’t knock her off at that point. She’s she’s in place. Plus, she doesn’t take as much damage as well. So, Fortify is a very useful, very straightforward tank ability.
Now one of Orisa’s most defining abilities is her Protective Barrier. The Protective Barrier is, you know, think along the lines of Reinhardt’s barrier shield or Winston’s barrier bubble that he throws out. The protective barrier has quite a range to it. It’s roughly the size and shape of about half of Winston’s bubble, and it goes out anywhere where she targets it. So it can be in front of her, could be slightly off to the side, she can use it in close on herself or she could use it you know further in front of her to shield an ally. And it creates a barrier that has the normal amount of damage you can take like other barriers in the game you can destroy it. Things that go through barriers like Symmetra’s alternate fire will go through this, so it’s got a lot of utility to it. And a lot of use and a lot of protectiveness.
And lastly there is herultimate ability which is her Supercharger. So, she wears this drum like item on her back. When her ultimate’s up she can take it off her back, throw it down on the ground, and it’s effectively damage boosting anybody who’s in line of sight of the Supercharger. Now the thing about the Supercharger is, is that the enemy team can k**l the Supercharger. So, you really need to make sure to protect your Supercharger either with your protective barrier or maybe you want to put the Supercharger you know just out off to the side out of line of sight of your enemies but in line of sight of your teammates. So, there’s some gameplay there to figuring out where the Supercharger is because if the enemy team kills it right away then your team loses all that benefit.
Now with Orisa I really want to talk about why are we adding another tank, because I know that topic will come up and a lot of people are sort of wondering you know how do we pick what heroes come next and there’s a lot of reasons for that but primarily with Orisa we were looking at our tank line-up and you know we have heroes like D.Va and Winston who are much more disruptive in terms of tanking. They’re much more defined by their mobility, they like to get in, they like to get out. They don’t stay in one place for too long. They cause a lot of disruption and harassment. You’ve got somebody like Roadhog. He’s all about punishing people who are out of position and positioning himself to punish people who are out of
position. So, he plays a very different sort of role, but we’re spending a lot of time looking at Reinhardt and saying what really defines Reinhardt and why is he so important and critical to Overwatch? And we started to describe Reinhardt that the term that we would use on the development team which we call him an “anchor tank.” And what we mean by that is that Reinhardt almost anchors the entire team with a properly positioned Reinhardt, the team builds and positions around Reinhardt. Because he doesn’t have a lot of mobility abilities and because he has that protective barrier in front of him you sort of know where to position yourself and when the team is going to engage or disengage based upon what Reinhardt is doing. So, we like this idea of what we kept calling an anchor tank and we felt like players needed more options in that sort of anchor tank role. We wanted another tank that teams could build around and position around and even though we think that tanks like Winston and D.Va are really great and what
they bring to the game they’re not necessarily bringing what Reinhardt was bringing. So, we hope that in Orisa there’s now another option to a low-mobility tank but one that brings a high amount of protection in her Protective Barrier where you kind of see her on the battlefield and go “oh, okay we’re approaching from from this angle. I will get behind Orisa. I’ll follow Orisa. She’ll put the barrier up. We’ll follow her in and will engage in that regard.”
So, we know that there are concerns about barriers in the game we’ve actually you know we’ve been working on Bastion re-tuning him to be more effective against barriers. We do have some very effective heroes against barriers right now, for example Symmetra with her alternate fire goes directly through them. Obviously, Reinhardt’s Fire Strike goes through barriers as well. Junkrat’s grenades do tremendous damage to barriers and will melt them very quickly and if barriers become too much of a thing, we’re looking at those in terms of balance and how to adjust accordingly.
Most of all we just wanted to bring a new and exciting hero to Overwatch. Not only does she fill a role that we felt was very needed. Not just a tank but one of these anchor tanks that you really build a team around. We also felt like Orisa was visually challenging. We often hear that you know when it comes to female characters they tend to be more limited in their size and appearance. Where the male characters get these really like big and challenging visual designs that are very exciting and we’ve heard a lot of desire to have a very visually challenging female character. So, that was fun for us to explore as well. So, we really want to bring that to Overwatch.
And most of all we wanted to bring a really cool hero with a lot of backstory that really rounded out our current cast, that is not only these old-school heroes who took part in the old Overwatch and Talon and Ominic battles of the past, but really brought something new and gave us some new hope to look forward to what are the heroes of the future going to bring to Overwatch. So, we’re really looking forward to all the feedback we’re going to get on Orisa. We’re going to keep working on her until she’s just right and just perfect.
We hope you enjoy her and thank you very much, we’ll see soon.
tl;dr
– Orisa is a Tank.
– Her primary weapon is the “Fusion Driver.” A projectile based machine gun. She moves slower while using it but it has one of the longest tank ranges in the game. (About the range of Zarya’s Ultimate Fire)
– The alternative fire ability “Halt!” sends out a pulse with the first click and pulls any enemy characters within range of the initial pulse towards her momentarily. (Her version of a graviton charge.)
– Her tank ability “Fortify,” makes her a bit tougher and prevents CC attacks from affecting her.
– Her “Protective Barrier” is the size of Winston’s bubble and can be deployed away from her (giving her space to protect herself or a teammate.) Are vulnerable to all barrier penetrating attacks but persists after death.
– Her ultimate ability is her “Supercharger”, she takes the tank off her bank, throws it on the ground, and provides a boost to all nearby allies. Can be taken down by enemy teammates.
– We wanted another Anchor tank, like Reinhardt, that players could build and position around. So Orisa is another option for a lower mobility tank.
– We know there are concerns about barriers in the game. We are looking at re-tuning Bastion to make him for effective against barriers.
– We hear our players say that our female characters are small and diminutive and that their male counterparts are big and challenging in comparison, so we wanted to provide a female that changed that dynamic
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