Overwatch 2 dev reveals that Mauga once had a flamethrower & grenade launcher

Overwatch 2’s Mauga used to look quite different. In a recent Reddit post, a developer revealed he had alternate abilities and weapons, including a flamethrower and grenade launcher.

Mauga‘s long-awaited arrival to Overwartch 2 has been interesting. The character brings a controlled chaos to fights, and even landed a little hot with some players going as far as to say he’s a little overpowered.

That’s why he’s already seen a couple of nerfs to his power, making him a little less of an outlier. Most of his damage comes from his exceptionally powerful dual-chainguns that allow him to burn and critically hit opponents.

However, he didn’t always look like this. The tank went through some iterations, as revealed by Lead Balance Designer Josh Noh in a Reddit AMA.

Mauga used to have a lot more chaos to abilities

Answering a question about previous iterations of Mauga, Noh said: “The weapons had a couple alternates such as a flamethrower or incendiary grenade launchers. There were a few attempts at having two very different firing weapons in each hand, so one being hitscan like it is now and the other being a travel time projectile.”

“It didn’t play as well when trying to fire both at the same time unfortunately.” This was because both hitscan and projectile weapons require you to aim differently. This would have made using both at the same time incredibly awkward. On top of that, Noh says tracking ammo usage between both was difficult.

Mauga’s weapons weren’t the only aspect of his kit that saw experimentation. Noh revealed his mobility ability, Overrun, also used to work quite differently. Ultimately though, initial tests were too tricky. He said: “We tried a few alternate mobility abilities for Overrun. One of the first ideas was a short-range dash that would toss enemies into the air behind him if you impacted them.”

It was fun to use but the transition from third person to first person and trying to turn around to shoot them wasn’t easy, and solutions like automatically doing a 180 with the camera took away control from players.”

While what we have now does sound better for Mauga’s overall abilities, it’s always fascinating to get a peek behind the curtain of a character’s creation. Here’s hoping this kind of transparency can continue as it’s always interesting to see the process of iteration for new heroes.