At BlizzCon 2023’s opening ceremony, Blizzard announced Mauga as the 39th hero to be added to Overwatch 2 with the upcoming Season 8. A damage-based tank hailing from Samoa, Mauga was available to try both at home and at the event itself; we played a few games and discussed our first impressions here.
Later, we had the opportunity to join a roundtable press interview with a few members of Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 development team to discuss the entire design process of creating Mauga.
As a reminder, Season 8 will be released on December 5th across all platforms. To unlock the new hero, players will have to either buy the Premium Battle Pass or level up the standard Battle Pass to 45.
One thing that stood out to me was even though the character is a tank, there were a lot of support-style skills. That stuck out to me because of how vital tanks are and how they can kind of be inaccessible for less skilled players because they’re so vital to the team. As you were designing this new hero, did you design him to be a more approachable tank? And how do you go about designing tanks when they’re so important to the success of the team in Overwatch 2?
I think that for Mauga, a lot of his design is based on his weapons first because he has giant chain guns. You can actually use both close up and everything.
A lot of newer players, the main way they’ll play is to try to get in with his Overrun ability in which he charges right in, uses both chain guns, and tries to mow people down. When we think about how he can actually be a tank for his team and help his allies and defend everyone. His abilities are much more around doing damage, right?
Cardiac Overdrive is this big lifesteal aura that he puts out for his whole team and if they’re in it, they’re actually gaining health too. Mauga himself, as he deals damage and when he deals critical damage, he’s gaining on his own temporary health.
We truly wanted to focus on Mauga as a damage-based tank. How he sustains himself and his team is through damage. We think that’s fairly approachable as a tank in particular and we think new players are gonna love him.
One of the things I really like about his ability set is that it has a broad range of applicability. You don’t have to be good at tanking or at first-person shooters in general to make use of his abilities with your team. It’s really easy for low-level players like myself – I’m also not really great at this game – to use those abilities, have a fun time and do well for your team. But also, as players rise in skill level, you can make more specific use of those abilities to do even better. I really like that about Mauga; he’s one of those broad-range heroes who’s fun at just about every level because you can do something fun with him.
Could you talk a little bit about balancing the character over time, how you found where we are now as far as when you first started designing Mauga and then getting to the place that you felt, OK, it’s approachable for all different types of play styles and different characters and maybe some situations where you saw, oh, this is a little too overpowered/underpowered.
I think we’re working on all that throughout the development of Mauga. We still are as he releases and people get to play him over the weekend, specifically how much damage is too much damage. When you’re laying down on both guns, he deals a lot of damage.
So we’re looking at how much spread, how easy is to actually get value out of that compared to his other method of attacking enemies. There’s really this mini-game with his left click and his right click. If you hold down the left click and you do 10 shots, the enemy ignites on fire, and then using the right click that would then deal critical damage to the enemy that has that burning on them.
It was one of those things where we wanted to make sure the bounce of the character wasn’t just geared toward getting and unleashing both chain guns. We want that to feel very good, even devastating, but it can’t just wipe people out immediately, so there’s a big spread on it.
When I look at the Cardiac Overdrive ability specifically, I recall a thing with Roadhog a long time ago where his Take a breather would at one point heal some of the people immediately around him. Was that any inspiration for the Cardiac Overdrive?
It was more of a revisiting of what made sense for Mauga. I think with that ability, one thing that we did learn is like, how can you make that callout so big? When we were looking at Roadhog to do that, it’s like how can we make that be very present on the ground for all your team to rally around it.
That was one of the biggest challenges right on, making sure that everyone understands the visual for Cardiac Overdrive. The one thing that was kind of a challenge is we don’t wanna put too much on the screen. We want you to know what’s going on without using too many resources from your PC or covering the screen with all of those effects. It was a good way for us to know what is the good balance of finding that sweet spot where everybody knows that they’re getting heals and at the same time, it’s not too much going on.
We also never really throw away any ideas that we iterate on. So it is possible that something was in a test on PTR or something like that years ago and then you see it come back and it’s usually because we’ve iterated on it numerous times internally over the years and that just is a part of what we do. We don’t like throwing things away, even if an idea doesn’t work out for a certain hero, it can come back later on for another one.
You mentioned that Mauga is a damage-based tank. What considerations did you make to ensure that, as a tank, he’s not outputting more damage than DPS characters?
I would say he will do more damage than some DPS in some games. Mauga may be the leader in that sense. I think when you’re looking at attacking him, it’s like where he’s this big body on the field, right? Compared to Roadhog is like, how do you counter him? Where do you make up for where his downtime is? If he uses Cardiac Overdrive or needs to reload, there’s big windows of opportunity for their team to really get on him.
Because he’s just a large, large body, right? Sleep darts, things like that will be able to effectively deal with him. At the same time, Mauga is one of the heroes that you’re gonna have to peel back. If he’s attacking your back line, you’re gonna have to help them out a little bit.
He has two different attacks with the right and left triggers. What was the inspiration behind having a tank that has two primary attacks? Can you talk a little bit about the process behind that?
We tried a couple of different things for his two primary attacks. It was an iterative iterative design process. I think we had one version of it where the right click would only deal critical damage to characters in the air because we were trying to give tanks more ability to poke and deal with those flying characters. But a lot of that came from his backstory. We all knew that he was going to be a tank with two big main guns and we wanted to make them just as important and just as useful to players as the other one. We didn’t want one to outshine the other and I think we found a good balance in synergy with both of them.
Yeah, we want to get that fire theme back in the kit as well. There’s a lot of that in Mauga’s back story. So bringing that back in really just creates a unique space for him visually as well.
One thing to add to that point is from a design point of view, when we made the two guns, it was a little bit hard for players to know what each gun was doing, so we changed the left one a little bit and added like a little bit of flame icon so you know which gun is doing what with the sound and the effects. All that together will guide the player to know what is going on with both guns.
When you create characters, they’re always rich with their backstories. For instance, Reaper is a Latino. It’s a big part of his character. Now, how is this gonna play a part in this character? Because it appears that Mauga is Samoan. Can you tell me a little bit about the process of implementing that culture into this character’s background?
Yeah. We usually do cultural consultancy when we begin making a hero after we’ve kind of worked out the backstory and have decided to go with something, an interesting location or origin. We also had cultural consultancy when we did the Samoa map in season seven, so we piggybacked a lot off of the lessons learned there. In addition to that, we worked with a traditional tattoo artist from the Samoan culture to kind of guide us in how the art would look and how real Samoan tattoos would look and we tried to get as authentic as possible, as close to real as our engine could handle. It turned out great.
Overwatch 2 has a really rich variety of characters. Obviously, their voice actors make up a massive part of their identity. Who’s the voice of Mauga?
John Tui is doing the voice of Mauga. Casting Overwatch heroes is a long and complicated process but also super rewarding. We cast a wide net for voice actors and when the team heard him give his audition, it just clicked; it was magic. We really feel that he’s gonna bring a lot of character, that chaotic energy that Mauga has, to life. He’s doing a great job there.
Can you guys talk a little bit about the story of Mauga inside the Overwatch universe? How does it fit within the factions and other characters?
One of the interesting things about Mauga is he was part of a group called the Deep Sea Raiders, a gang that his father was the head of. He was injured in battle and needed to get a second cybernetic arm, which is kind of where the Cardiac Overdrive comes from, but that heart needs a lot of upgrades and maintenance and it’s very expensive.
He actually encounters Doomfist at one point. He challenges Doomfist to a fight because that’s just how Mauga is and Doomfist was so impressed that he offered him a spot in Talon and said we’ll pay for the rest of your upgrades and stuff like that.
I thought that was a cool interaction between a faction that fans might not know so much about and one that they do and we can see some of the interactions in the game. I believe there are voice line interactions in the game between the both of them and just go into that a little deeper.
What was working with the character design that made him the next hero?
Well, Mauga has had quite the history actually. There’s been multiple times when the team has visited whether the next hero was going to be Mauga.
At one point that was Sigma, who ended up turning into this hero where everyone wanted a barrier tank, but we had these two guns and how does that sort of actually work together and look visually coherent on the screen? How would this person choose these two guns to deploy a barrier? It didn’t really fit the whole psychic theme to have this giant guy on the street who really just looked so physical.
And then actually Mauga at one point was going to release where Ramattra released back in season two of Overwatch 2. But the team really wanted to take some more time to get the kit just right. Some of the things we developed with that extra time were making sure that there was this interplay between the left click and the right click, making sure we got the ultimate just right with the visuals on the chain to actually tell the player and communicate to them Hey, you’re trapped in here with Mauga. There’s just a number of other things that we wanted to continue to iterate on. I believe this iteration that we have of Mauga is the best one we’ve had so far.
Is this version of Mauga that players are playing this weekend essentially finalized, or will you be monitoring how the weekend goes, taking player feedback, and maybe tweaking him for the final release later down the line?
Maybe just some numbers here and there. But the abilities are definitely final. We are really happy to see just what players do with them. There might be some bugs that pop up that we will track down before season eight. But yeah, this is the version that everyone’s gonna play on day one of season eight.
As a producer, I’m really stoked to see what a free trial gives us in terms of data and I cannot wait to get back to my desk and crunch the night.
WCCFTECH: With the dual chain guns that are part of his kit, I was curious about maps that have a much smaller area, say you’re going through a narrow tunnel or something like that. You talked about how his chain guns would have a high recoil, for example. How do you balance his attack power in areas where recoil won’t matter as much if you’re up close or in a narrow environment?
If it’s in a tight encounter, you are gonna use both of them at the same time, even with that high spread. So he does become a threat in close quarters and other players need to understand that and play around that a little bit. You don’t wanna play Mauga up close unless you’re gonna be able to take him out. So he’s quite successful in those places. I think where Mauga can struggle at times is when he’s burned through his cooldowns, Cardiac Overdrive is rather long, and when he does run out by himself, he’s not supported by his team. He’s such a big body that he really needs support, he needs a high healing output support to really keep him up at times as well.
But yeah, in close quarters, he’ll be scary. Getting through these really tight choke points, he can lead the way.
Did you guys hint at any potential event modes involving Mauga to come?
I don’t think that’s something we can really talk about right now.
What about the relationship between Mauga and Baptiste?
Baptiste saved Mauga’s life, right? They’re really deep friends. They have a rich history together in Talon. Other than that, there’s not much we’re willing to go into any potential romantic ties or whatever has been going on online. Right now, they’re just two really good friends and have a deep mutual respect for one another. And I think that’s a good thing.
You mentioned in the presentation that a traditional Samoan artist designed his tattoo. I was just wondering what other ways you used to express the Samoan culture.
I think a lot of how his personality comes out kind of honors that, his attitude along with the name Mauga. He’s very loud and boisterous, and we kind of learned about the meaning of that name and how the personality fits. But a lot of it was based on his backstory and the Samoa map plays a lot into it. A lot of the Easter eggs that are in there and stuff. But a lot of heavy work was done on those tattoos. We learned a lot through the making of those tattoos and the cultural consultancy.
Every time we do a change, we make sure we run that by the consultant, make sure we’re representing the right way and they’re all approved by them.
Some of it is stuff that is not necessarily shown in the game because as we went through the consulting process, we had either blocked out or planned certain behaviors or phrases or something for the hero, and then our consultant would be like, that’s not the way we would do that. That’s not how we would behave. So we took some stuff out that we had planned because it just wasn’t proper.
And the tattoos have a lot of meanings. For example, while working on the guns, we thought maybe we could put some of it on the side of the weapons, but then it wouldn’t give the same meaning that it would because you need the whole thing. So we just scratched that idea.
What was the most complex thing to decide for Mauga?
I think his Ultimate in particular. The team’s gone through multiple iterations of that ability. Getting it just right in terms of communication that everyone is trapped in this barrier, their mobility locked, and how you are supposed to use it.
I think a lot of times early on in the playtest, players would trap everyone outside of Mauga. Well, you probably don’t wanna be there just by yourself. It’s really good to block off one or two people or maybe capture the tank, or you get that Mercy and she can’t fly away, which is really scary for her.
So it was one of those things where communication and what this is doing and also sort of leading players on how is this affecting them. One of the things that we did later on to amp the ultimate is we gave Mauga unlimited ammo in there. With everyone in close quarters, good luck with him in there.
But yeah, it is something that went through multiple iterations. It’s not just an ability that was always solely on Mauga. Whenever we start playing with mobility and impacting their mobility, because ours is a very mobility-focused game, you run into a whole lot of edge cases.
Testing around that was a really interesting process, getting it just right. The entire idea of creating a dome around people or a barrier around people has gone through a lot of practice over the years. Originally, it was on Diva. That was her Ultimate to begin with, way back in, it was like a dome of lasers.
As mentioned earlier, it’s the kind of thing you don’t throw away even though if it doesn’t work out the original time. Mauga was just in general a really fun hero to test around. But the Ultimate was definitely a lot of work on our part.
From a design point of view, the guns changed five times because we had an issue where the concept looked cool, but once we took it to the game, it was blocking too much from the player view and we know how much we appreciate that space. We had to go back, edit the concept, and test them again. Another thing we actually talked about is the two different types of damage. We needed that to show with the guns because you don’t want to get confused about which one is doing what.
In the course of testing Mauga, did any gameplay counters emerge from those sessions?
Well, the Ultimate is a ring around him. If you can get above it, you can shoot down into it pretty effectively. Farah from a distance is pretty solid. If you can get Widowmaker up on a ledge from a distance, she can fire into it. I think those kinds of things will develop over time, but there are definitely pretty clear counters once you get used to it.
The other thing is that since Mauga is also trapped in his Ultimate, if you can just bring a massive force into it… Because opponents can enter the barrier once it’s up, they can jump in there if they need to.
So if Mauga uses it in the wrong location, if he’s alone or something like that, if your team against him is coordinated, you can just go en masse into it to try to overrun it. That’s a possibility, too, depending on what options you have available to you.
And since Mauga is a tank that relies on damage to sustain himself, there’s definitely some counters there. Things that can shut him down, like Sigma and Diva I think are the two that really stand out. He needs to be able to deal critical damage, needs to be able to get that temporary help on himself to stay alive all the time.
How do you choose the next hero to add to the game?
We look at what the game needs overall. I think you saw that with the past releases, we knew there just wasn’t enough support in Overwatch 2 for now. We also want to have variety.
I think that’s why we teased our next DPS hero, Venture, because that pool of heroes hasn’t seen a new hero in quite a while. We want to make sure that every so often, your role, the one that you may play a lot, is getting that cadence of a hero.
So when we’re talking about what they do, that can be a different story. There can be heroes that can start from the art process, or there can be something that’s more mechanical where it’s like, hey, we have this really great idea for a gun. How can we build the rest of the kit around that?
They can kind of start from anywhere. But for Mauga, there was a hero and a concept that we knew we had to make for everyone who plays Overwatch. That’s been a goal for a few years now and we’re really excited that he finally gets to come out.
WCCFTECH: Two quick questions on Cardiac Overdrive. First one, does it stack with Reaper’s passive?
Yes.
WCCFTECH: Okay. Secondly, the healing that he provides to his teammates, is it gonna be flat damage regardless, or if the teammate is augmented with some sort of damage buff, will that also increase the healing?
It’s not necessarily Mauga giving them healing. They’re in the aura and they’re healing by doing damage themselves. If they’re doing more damage, they’ll get more healing back.
Question about the overrun ability. At this point, we have a lot of tanks that Overwatch that have some sort of a rush or charge. How is Overrun different? What makes that Mauga’s, not just the standard tank ability?
I think two things stand out making Overrun a little bit different than, say, Reinhardt’s charge or something. The first is that Mauga is unstoppable while he’s coming at you. You can’t crowd-control him during that ability. Also, there’s a nice little precision bonus if Mauga lands directly on top of someone. He will stamp them down onto the ground. Other people around the radius get docked up into the air. If you land right on top of someone, they’re gonna fall over and they’ll be briefly stunned. It just creates a nice skill ceiling there for the ability itself.
There’s a lot of things that you can interrupt in Overwatch 2. Unstoppable doesn’t really get used very often.
Yeah, it’s definitely scary. I think though there’s some considerations there where Mauga is this big body, right? We have to make sure that we can design things that enable him to get in because that’s what he likes to do quite often. Unstoppable helps that, it actually alleviates some of those downsides that he may have moment to moment. On the other hand, once he’s done, he’s vulnerable. He doesn’t necessarily keep it afterward. It’s only in the moment of getting where he wants to go that he is unstoppable there. So you can still save your cooldowns for once Mauga lands and then, he’s gonna need some help.
You mentioned that the opposing team could enter his Ultimate. Now, while he has enemies trapped in, in addition to receiving bottomless ammunition, does he receive any kind of buff to compensate for being essentially the sole target?
No. The infinite ammo can be really good because you can run through your ammo quite fast as Mauga if you’re holding down both chain guns. The Ultimate also blocks healing, though. So if you do get the jump on someone, you trap one or two of the enemies, their healing is going to be blocked by their allies, too. So it can be very brutal once you’re in there with Mauga.
Also, when you do enter, there’s this downside of your trapped in there and you can’t use your mobility, so you can’t actually escape at that point either.
I assume if you were to eliminate him during his Ultimate, the enemies would be freed?
The Ultimate actually keeps going. There’s this really funny combo you can do. We’ll see if people are doing it already. If you have a Lifeweaver in your team, you can pull Mauga out of the Ultimate and the enemy team is still there. So it could be a really, really interesting stalling tactic.
WCCFTECH – Can Mei Ice Wall block Mauga?
Yes. So, to be specific, he will run into it and he’ll just keep running. You can turn him away from it. He doesn’t stop like Reinhardt does. He keeps running until you either cancel or run. He’ll run into it and you can turn him out of it if you want to, or you can change your mind.
There’s a Mauga on your team. Who do you pick to complement?
Yeah, that’s an interesting question. As I mentioned earlier, you definitely want a support character that’s gonna have some high healing output. But we envision Mauga fitting in compositions that Reinhardt might fit into. If you imagine who’s going to actually facilitate that, Lucio can be a really good pick, right? Helps Mauga get in. Just by having that speed boost, he’s able to charge right in.
Also, whoever is benefiting from Mauga’s Cardiac Overdrive the most. Earlier, we talked about Reaper. Reaper gets to double up on that passive. Mei is really good in those close quarters.
You can heal in the Ultimate, right?
Yeah, aside from locking people in place, other abilities work perfectly fine inside of it. Healing is physically blocked by the barrier, so any heal that doesn’t go through the barrier won’t go through it. If you’re outside of it and you throw like Moira’s orb into it, the orb will go through it because it’s a barrier.
Thank you for your time.
