I recently got the chance to attend a roundtable interview with members of Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 team to discuss the game’s latest support hero, Wuyang. The people giving us answers are senior producer Kenny Hudson, senior narrative designer Joshi Zhang, and lead character concept artist Daryl Tan. While you can watch the newest trailer for the character formerly codenamed Aqua below, the discussion below discovers various aspects of his creation, gameplay, and story.
Wuyang Lore is to Keep the Overwatch World Large
Wuyang is definitely a unique character with his abilities, but focusing on the lore surrounding him is quite interesting too. With yet another new hero bringing in a new faction into the fold, we asked if there was any worry from a narrative standpoint that too many different factions were being added too fast.
Zhang: “Yeah, so the way that I look at factions in Overwatch is the world is huge, and I think in general what we don’t want to do is make the world feel small. We just had Freya who is directly related to Overwatch and her story explores some of the fallout that came out of that. Of course, even with heroes like Hazard, you know, we always are making sure that we’re connecting things in our world and making sure that it stays relevant in-universe and making sure the world feels large.”
“Each of our heroes can only come from one place. It was really important to, I think, a lot of the Chinese devs on the team, myself especially, that we take an opportunity to explore a different facet of China that we haven’t had the chance to touch on yet. So, you know, having this university and, like, Wuxing philosophy be at the center point of what we wanted to portray was just really important in terms of diversity and showcasing beautiful parts of Chinese culture that I don’t think often have a chance to shine through.”
Tan: “I think in terms of just considering the IP, we’re still in our infancy, if I can describe it that way. Personally, that’s how I feel. Even though the game’s almost 10-years-old, I do think that there’s so much more that we can do with our IP. There is so much more room to grow that I think exploring both our width and our depth would be super helpful for us to tell the story of Overwatch going forward.”
Writing Wuyang’s story was a very personal experience for Joshi Zhang. They are a Canadian-born Chinese person who wrote a very emotional letter in the new comic for Wuyang about never feeling like they could live up to the successes of their parents and older brother.
Zhang: “When I was writing the story, I drew on a lot of very deeply personal experiences about confronting my own feelings of wanting to give back to my family, and sort of the shame and guilt that comes with that and kind of exploring what it means when you fall short of your parents’ dreams and how you pick yourself up from that because I think it’s something that people don’t talk about a lot.
I hope people feel seen by his story because I didn’t when I was younger. I think that there’s a lot of people – a lot of young people – playing Overwatch that need to see themselves in order to understand that they have what it takes to be a hero too.”
Zhang also is going out of their way making sure players know that Wuyang’s abilities are not connected to magic.
Zhang: “The staff and the way that the water moves is all controlled by technology, so there’s zero magic involved. I’ve seen a little bit of whisperings, you know, out and about and I just wanted to help debunk. It’s not magic at all.”
“The staff condenses the water from the air and it does stuff to it, like ionizing it, and there’s something to do with the charge of the water particles and the molecules are combined in the form at the front.”
“We really love this idea of the Chinese fantasy of, this guy trains so hard he can control water. We do want to lean into that fantasy because we think it’s very poignant to players that grew up with that kind of media and fantasy, but it’s really important to us that we don’t cross into the magic realm because magic doesn’t exist in Overwatch and we’re trying to lean into that fun side while keeping it technical.”
“Water” You Talking About, Wuyang?
Wuyang definitely has the most unique of primary fires when it comes to the Overwatch cast, sending out a glob of water that the player can trace to hit enemies. According to Hudson, that actually came together quite quickly, it was reworking a new form of water into Overwatch that works completely different than any water that is already in the game that proved to be a challenge for the team.
Hudson: “Our game is very stylized and has its own unique art style and making sure that [Wuyang’s] water felt not only unique to the Overwatch universe, but also set itself apart from things in the environment and how we had done water before on different maps. It was something that our engine team really took to heart like a challenge.
Giving our VFX team the tools that they needed to kind of control and morph this water to make it feel liquid and natural again in such a stylized environment I would say was the biggest hurdle we had to overcome.”
Tan: “In the beginning, when we were exploring his wave ability, we were envisioning maybe some sort of a simple tidal wave moving forward, but there were so many different technical and gameplay considerations that we had to consider like, what would happen to the wave if it hit a wall or hit a pillar and it had to continue going forward?”
“We decided to change that from a straight up wave to be presented as choppy waves that had like this triangular shape and kept cascading forward. It could hit a wall, hit a pillar, and then parts of the wave would disappear while the rest could carry on forward. So, that was one of the examples of how do we present water? How do we show the wave happening right? And how do we stylize it?”
Difficulty and Best Companions
In terms of best teammates for Wuyang going forward, Hudson had a few examples that he said he particularly enjoyed seeing in early playtests. Fast and mobile heroes like Lucio and Doomfist are great recipients for Wuyang’s ultimate, which covers a teammate in water and then bursts, resulting in nearby enemies being knocked down. He said that combining that with Reaper’s teleport and ultimate was also a particularly strong combo for a surprise attack.
Wuyang’s primary fire got us wondering how approachable he would be for players giving him a try for the first time. Hudson thinks players will adapt to using him pretty fast and overall, he thinks when comparing him to the rest of the supports, he is in the middle of the road for difficulty, placing him behind tougher characters like Ana and Zenyatta.
Hudson: “I would say in terms of difficulty level, it’s actually not as hard as it looks. You get used to it fairly quick. I don’t have a ton of hours on Wuyang [because he plays tank on playtests], but I’m pretty proficient with the primary when I need to be. We wanted it to be easy to learn, difficult to master.”
“When you get your hands on it and feel it, you’ll have a better frame of reference for understanding what I mean by that, but it will feel kind of natural to where you’re aiming.”
It was also explained that when creating Wuyang, there was never much of a specific void that they wanted the new hero to fill. They did want another hero that could passively heal while doing damage so players felt like they were contributing to the fight more, but that wasn’t a dealbreaker in his development.
NetEase and Chinese Cartoons Played a Role in Wuyang’s Development
One of the more interesting tidbits from this interview arrived after I asked if there was any outside influence when designing Wuyang either from a gameplay or artistic standpoint. Tan revealed that Blizzard got some pointers from NetEase, who publishes Overwatch and other Blizzard games in China.
Tan: “In terms of approaching a Chinese hero properly, we did have a little bit of cultural feedback and input from our Chinese partners from NetEase. So, that was some of the outside influence that helped us, you know, make sure that we were approaching the cultural aspects of his design, his kit, his visual appearance appropriately. One good example of this is their input helping us make sure that we get the text on his outfit right. Also, at the same time, what kind of Chinese mythical creatures that we’re using to represent his weapon, for example, and how that makes sense within the whole zeitgeist of Chinese culture.”
Zhang then hopped in and talked about the influences of Wuyang’s story coming from older Chinese cartoons, while remaining as authentic as possible.
Zhang: “On the narrative side as well, we were talking a lot with our own Blizzard China team. Our localization consultants there were super, super helpful in making that we stayed as authentic as we could to what we thought would resonate most with someone from this region. We had a lot of extensive conversations again about Wuxing philosophy and why that was important to Chinese culture, so we were definitely with someone every step of the way.
The other thing I wanted to call out was that I love Chinese media, and I think that Chinese media is not quite as, I would say, mainstream as some other media from other parts of the world now.”
“One of the influences that I had for this character was the protagonist from Legend of the Condor Hero, which is probably something that no one’s ever heard of if you didn’t grow up with your parents blasting cartoons on the TV. It’s that sort of like Wuxia [a genre focusing on martial artists in ancient China] kung fu fantasy type of thing where the guy is jumping across water and all that kind of really cool stuff.
I think Daryl and I had some pretty good conversations, especially at the very beginning of what we wanted to target in terms of setting that tone of like, this Chinese martial arts fantasy, and we wanted to make something that would feel cool to the whole world, but also specifically to people like us, where it’s like, “Oh wow, I grew up with that!”
Wuyang Cut Content
I asked about any potential cut content for Wuyang that didn’t make it to the final version. Hudson and Tan said there was a waterfall component of the wave ability that was cut because it felt unfair to be pushed around by an unseen force. There also was a unique way that Wuyang would jump into the air.
Hudson: “From the ability side, one of my favorites is that the E ability [Guardian Wave] used to actually travel from high ground to low ground. We were planning on having this little waterfall that would continue the wave on the floor below, and he was actually kind of a problem in those early playtests because you would actually have no idea where you got booped from and what hit you.
His movement ability actually used to do a little bit of movement speed, but actually a lot more increased jump height. We wanted him to get to high ground a lot easier, and then you can imagine that paired with the waterfall was just an absolute problem, and so a couple of those got reworked through playtesting feedback.”
Tan: “Yeah, I missed the waterfall. That was one that I thought could be pretty cool, but yeah, that definitely caused problems. In terms of his shift ability [Rushing Torrent], like Kenny was mentioning, we were focusing a lot more on height instead of lateral movement on the ground.
So, one of the abilities that was scrapped, we were planning to have him stand on his staff with a very cool Shaolin monk pose, where he was balancing on the staff, and the staff would extend and send him up to the sky. That was one of the pretty early ideas that we tested out as well and we thought that was pretty cool.”
Zhang: “I remember that staff ability, where it was like extending and that was kind of like Journey to the West, as a very early influence.”
“That was something that we actually consciously made an effort to move away from based on some feedback from our collaborators in China. Just because – this is a personal opinion – I feel that Journey to the West is a little bit overdone sometimes in the sense that there’s so much more cool stuff that China’s done and so many more cool stories.”
