Overwatch’s Reign of the Talon season 1 it’s starting to go down, and the big story is five new heroes who joined the list. Most of the attention has gone to Jetpack Cat, a hero who was originally from the game’s original design, but was resurrected at the end of the game’s 10th anniversary. He’s become the story of bans and misses due to his unique kit with eternal flight and the ability to fly any other hero into the air with his Lifeline ability.
But another supporting hero has quietly slipped under the radar as one of the most played characters in the new season: Mizuki.
Mizuki is a complex hero, similar on paper to support heroes Brigitte and Lucio, who mix damage and healing around them, but with his own unique mechanism. He has a permanent healing aura around him, growing stronger as he deals damage with his weapon or uses other healing abilities. His main weapon is a projectile that bounces up. One of his abilities, Katashiro Return, gives movement, but also the ability to teleport back to your starting point within a few seconds.
All of that adds up to a hero build that gives players a lot of options but also requires you to carefully plan battle-changing strategies. Do you stay with your team to increase the value of your healing aura? Or do you part with them for a higher risk, higher reward play? Do you use your Katashiro Return ability to turn your back on the enemy team, or save it to get yourself out of a surprise attack?
In this clip, I used Mizuki’s Katashiro Return ability to take the dangerous side with a guaranteed escape. Good, too, because I didn’t expect to meet Junkrat in a small room.
Despite spending most of my time in Overwatch playing support heroes, including Ana and Kiriko, I found Mizuki challenging early in the season, even as I watched enemy Mizukis dish out damage and defend clutch kills while constantly healing their teams.
This “non-challengeable” element was a deliberate part of Mizuki’s design, as I soon learned in an interview with the hero’s creator, a former Overwatch eSports champion.
In general, the supporting cast accepted this challenge. An Overwatch spokesperson told me via email that “Mizuki is consistently in the top four of all support picks in Season 1, across all regions.” He’s one of the few things that powers the game’s renewal, along with a new ongoing story, weekly quests for the team and the promise of more new heroes every season. People have flocked to the game again since the start of Season 1, with the average number of players on Steam more than doubling in the past month.
Mizuki’s design was led by Scott “Custa” Kennedy, who spent a long time in the Overwatch professional scene as a player and game analyst, and is now an associate hero producer. I spoke with Scott at Blizzard’s highlight event and also caught up with him and Mizuki’s character artist, Melissa Kelly, in early March to discuss how they created one of the game’s most popular heroes.
I fought a bunch of Mizuki duels in season 1. I didn’t win all of them, but I won this one.
From a professional player to a collaborative designer
After a few years as a professional player and a few more as an Overwatch League commentator and actor, Kennedy was looking for the next step in his career.
“Overwatch [had] it’s been my life for, like, the last 10 years in a lot of different ways,” he said, but as he reached retirement age in the esports scene, he wanted a change. He talked to some of the Overwatch developers, including associate game director Alec Dawson, about what it takes to get into game development.
After doing some hands-on QA and game development work (“I made the world’s hardest 2D cat platformer in three days,” he said), Kennedy got the chance to open designer for Overwatch’s co-op hero, which fit his experience perfectly.
When tasked with envisioning the game’s next healer, Kennedy said he didn’t want to do another franchise designed around “point-and-shoot” machines that heal teammates and damage enemies, like Ana or Juno.
“I wanted to [Mizuki] to be an AoE hero that heals the aura type because I think that’s something that’s been very underrepresented in our heroes,” said Kennedy. Instead, he came up with an area heal similar to how Lucio and Brigitte heal, but with an extra layer of that healing becomes more powerful the better you play in battle.
Managing that difference was a learning experience for Kennedy.
“One of the biggest things I’ve learned is how great complexity can be on paper, but when you make a hero how quickly it can frustrate the player,” Kennedy said. But he feels that the team has finally found a good balance, where inexperienced players can still contribute with him, while more experienced and skilled players can benefit even more.
Mizuki’s concept art adds a different edge to his design, but still sets him apart as a support.
Kelly added that Mizuki was a complex hero on the design side, too.
“One of the problems is that he looked like this [damage hero],” he said. So we were trying to calm him down.” Kelly revealed that Mizuki’s weapon is a hybrid of a cleric’s staff and a scythe, further blurring the lines between support and damage heroes.
That nuance seems to be a big part of Mizuki’s appeal. Even though I usually prefer the “point-and-shoot” type of healing hero that Kennedy said he wants to avoid, I found Mizuki to be one of the most interesting additions to the roster, especially among the support heroes. His Binding Chain ability, which removes a chained enemy from the area, rewards good aim and timely use, while his healing Kasa and Katashiro Return abilities allow my brain to ponder creative escapes and ambushes.
When I play Mizuki, I’m always thinking while fighting, and I enjoy feeling that kind of active engagement with the game.
Here my Katashiro Recovery ability allows me to flip the map against the enemy team and give allies the last defense of my Kekkai Sanctuary.
Mizuki’s reception and prospects for the pro game
Kennedy worries that players will be turned off by the complexity of this hero — wondering, “Will players try him, not understand him and be like… ‘I’m going to play a cat?'” (The cat, of course, is Jetpack Cat, who was released along with Mizuki in season 1 and quickly became one of the most popular and banned heroes. He has an extra point, and he allows his great design – especially in the province – and allows his design in tu. aggressive gameplay.)
Instead, Kennedy enjoyed watching the players stick with Mizuki and later posted about how they “unlocked” the hero by finding a formula to succeed with him. Kennedy said it’s exciting to see the players grasp his original concept of the hero as it plays out in the game. After that first match, which was somewhat of a disaster, I started clicking with Mizuki, too.
Players still struggle with parts of Mizuki’s kit, and Kennedy noted some initial frustration with the “deliberate design limitations” he and the team placed on the hero. Players seemed to want to use his Katashiro Return ability to continue his rampage, but found that it didn’t last long enough to successfully move behind enemy teams. That kind of larger repositioning would go against the design team’s vision for this hero, which is intended to stay close to his team and use the ability to quickly return to it.
Now, Kennedy said, “the players seem to understand the limitations of the hero, and that was good to see.”
Mizuki’s Spirit Glaive is a unique weapon, especially among the support ranks.
Mizuki launched in strong form, and has been sitting close to a 54% win rate in competitive modes since the start of the season. That’s pretty high, ranking behind last season’s best player: damage hero Vendetta. I asked Kennedy how he reads that data — whether Mizuki is overmatched or on par with the season’s most played heroes.
Kennedy said Mizuki is in a “healthy” spot, but could be pushed back a bit in future seasons. “The numbers he can put up in terms of healing and damage output are the things that put him above everyone else at this point. So it’s something we’re really looking at.”
But that strength won’t translate to Mizuki being selected for the professional game, at least based on last month’s Overwatch Championship Series Bootcamp. Kennedy said the hero kit isn’t ideal for staying alive and making plays like heroes like Lucio and Kiriko, who have long been preferred in the main play.
“I’ve seen Mizuki get a lot of playing time in a world where we’re starting to play rush metas [centered around tanks like Ramattra or Orisa],” he said, “but with the way the game is played at such a high speed, it may be difficult for Mizuki to continue.”
Kennedy pointed out one of the biggest and inevitable challenges of Overwatch during its decade: balancing the heroes of both the professional level and the rest of the game, and how the difficulty lies in the fact that certain resources — such as increasing speed, mobility and burst damage — are very important at high levels of coordinated play. The design team is constantly working to ensure that heroes are never completely out of any skill level, he said.
That work has been on display since the launch of Season 1, with balance episodes coming out almost every week during the midseason on March 10. Those updates mainly focus on five new heroes but also include some changes to Vendetta, which continues to terrorize the game with its powerful win rate and ability to take someone down in an instant, leaving opponents with very little time to react.
However, the season as a whole has been a success for the game, thanks in large part to the influx of new heroes and different gameplay modes that add to the game.
“[I’m] I’m really overwhelmed by how positive everyone has been about Mizuki — and to be honest, all five heroes,” Kennedy said. “I think the reception has been great. We couldn’t have asked for anything better.”
