When surveillance 2 going live in October, veteran over watch Players will find that some cards – notably Hanamura, Volskaya, and Temple of Anubis – will effectively disappear from the game. These three Assault cards will not be part of the normal rotation in Quick Play and Competitive Play as Blizzard moves away from the controversial game type and introduces a new mode, Push over watch 2.
while a few over watch Players will breathe a sigh of relief that Attack cards (aka 2CP cards) are being phased out surveillance 2Maps like Hanamura have strong ties to the Overwatch narrative, especially for heroes Hanzo and Genji.
In a roundtable interview with Overwatch developers, art director Dion Rogers said the studio hopes to eventually bring cards like Hanamura back, but in a very different form.
“It was a tough decision for us to lose the attack cards,” Rogers said. “Hanamura is one of my personal favorite maps in the game, with the Japanese aesthetic and arcade you destroy. We plan on reusing this in some way because it’s so tied to the lore – [just like] Temple of Anubis and Volskaya.
“When we originally created the game, many of the maps were directly related to the backstory, so we hope to revisit [them], specifically Hanamura, in a way either as a new card that uses a similar aesthetic or as a different section of Hanamura. There are a lot of ideas.”
Rogers noticed this surveillance 2 Players can still access Assault maps in custom games, but not in the popular Quick Play and Competitive game types.
“But we really think it’s better if they’re part of the key cards in the game,” Rogers said. “So we definitely talked a lot about how to reuse these cards. We will recreate a new map but with the same aesthetic.”
