Almost a year ago now, Team 4 debuted a new kind of Overwatch, and as part of the huge spotlight we learned that the live service FPS would undergo a new cadence with yearly themes comprising several seasons. Five new heroes were also added straight away; Mizuki, Emre, Anran, Domina, and of course Jetpack Cat.
Ahead of being added to the game, Overwatch's community was overjoyed to see Jetpack Cat, an adorable little ginger kitty in a flying mech—what's not to love? But sentiment quickly shifted after she took to the battlefield. Jetpack Cat broke the game with her new Apache helicopter meta which saw her haul Bastion high into the air so he could gun down the entire enemy team while in turret mode, it was truly horrific.
Who could've predicted that the adorable little cat would cause so much havoc? Well Team 4 had an inkling while Jetpack Cat was in the testing phase. "Internally we were like, 'oh, that's a little scary'," Associate Game Director Alec Dawson tells me. "We were play testing [Jetpack Cat and Bastion] a little bit. I think at one point it was also Jetpack Cat, Bastion, and Mercy. The full trio. It's like an even scarier helicopter."
This Jetpack Cat meta became so strong that it dominated OWCS from the get go. I haven't seen a new hero utilised so heavily and quickly in Overwatch's esports scene for a long time, so it brought home just how busted this team-up was.
Jetpack Cat would eventually undergo some reworks, for example, there was a nerf to how quickly she can move while carrying another hero. It helped to even the odds a little, but she can still be very frustrating and a hard hero to deal with. But the choice to leave Jetpack Cat initially un-nerfed was a deliberate decision according to Dawson:
"We want to make sure we put some of those moments in front of players. Allow them to experience a little bit of that crazy stuff before we come in and try to make sure it's in line, right? It's really that fine line of not taking away all the fun, not diluting it, not trying to take away some of the extremes, and seeing how it actually plays out. Because those are the moments that are going to be really exciting for players, those are going to be the moments that they remember in Overwatch, and that's important not to whittle away too early."
