Daily Star caught up with Overwatch 2 Game Director Aaron Keller to discuss the new Stadium mode's influences, and you might be surprised to hear how much Hearthstone had a sayTech13:01, 17 Apr 2025Stadium mode's third-person views mean you can see more of your character's skins(Image: Blizzard)Is this the year Overwatch 2 starts to come into its own? Between a new in-game perks system, fresh new characters, and the huge Stadium mode coming next week with the new season, it might just be enough to bring many players flocking back.We caught up with Aaron Keller, Overwatch 2's Game Director, earlier this week, and he revealed that while Stadium takes influences from just about anywhere, it owes more than you might think to another Blizzard title.‌Here's all we learned, and don't forget to check out yesterday's chat with Keller about the huge undertaking moving Overwatch 2 to a third-person perspective for Stadium.Stadium mode is inspired by Hearthstone's Battlegrounds(Image: Blizzard)As part of a roundtable interview, Keller was asked about Stadium's unique pace and structure among Overwatch 2's modes, and admitted, "Stadium takes influences from all over the place".Article continues belowHe said: "There's a lot of things that we looked at in MOBAs, especially some of our currency system that we have in there. We do reward players and teams for their performance in a Stadium match, while also having a lot of tuning to prevent snowballing as much as we can."We want players to feel like they have the ability, if they perform well and build their character correctly, to really carry their team, and when you're doing that in a match, it feels pretty amazing.""One of the biggest inspirations for Stadium was Hearthstone Battlegrounds. It was an inspiration in multiple ways," Keller revealed.‌"[Battlegrounds] kind of exists as its own game or its own main game mode inside of Hearthstone and we were looking for something like that inside of Overwatch as well, but also just the round-based structure of the matches that they have there."Third-person perspective is new for Overwatch(Image: Blizzard)‌"The way that you can grow in power if you build correctly in a game like that was something that we really looked at as we designed Stadium.""And the nice thing is that the Hearthstone team is a Blizzard team! So we had quite a few meetings with that group of people and were able to leverage some of their incredible experience in building their game as we developed ours."For more on Blizzard, be sure to check out reports that the company is working with Netflix on something new – could it be Overwatch related?Article continues belowFor the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.‌‌‌