[2021] Ask Us Anything! - Join the Overwatch development team for the fifth anniversary AMA

We're pretty excited about the possibilities of cross-play and cross-progression, but we don't have anything to announce, today. However, given the additional complexities of cross-progression, it would probably make most sense to tackle cross-play, first and then explore progression as a potential add-on, if we go this route.

I answered this in a question a bit further up, but I'll repost, here, just in case you miss it:

We're pretty excited about the possibilities of cross-play and cross-progression, but we don't have anything to announce, today. However, given the additional complexities of cross-progression, it would probably make most sense to tackle cross-play, first and then explore progression as a potential add-on, if we go this route.

Aaron would love it if we could get this in! Unfortunately, that's a really complicated problem for us given how our asset system works. We've tried, and will continue to try, to expand workshop as much as we can to extend custom creation as far as possible. But custom assets is a massive challenge. It's been something we've wanted to give to the community for years, but up to now we just haven't found the right way to deliver it without an unrealistic investment of resources.

2/2/2 Role Queue will become 1/2/2 Role Queue due to the move to 5v5, and we'll probably still have Open Queue but that's not set in stone yet since hero balance will be quite different in OW2.

We might have an Arcade card that still has 6 player teams in the future, we'll honestly have to evaluate all of them with an eye towards how they work with the new hero balance.

This is something we're actually in the middle of testing right now. The idea is to reduce crowd control (especially stun) effects on non-tank heroes.

This doesn't mean that tanks will gain more CC, or that they will lose damage and focus on CC more. Its more that by removing some CC effects on existing non-tank heroes, it means that the the current tank lineup would retain the majority of the CC effects as part of their role. This not only gives Tanks something unique and interesting about their role, but it significantly reduces the amount of CC effects in the game as a whole, especially in a world where there is only 1 tank per team.

This isn't a hard rule either. Currently we're pretty happy with Ana's sleep dart, for example, so I don't think we'd change it just to fit within this new paradigm.

As for Doomfist/Hammond, well Hammond is a tank so its ok that he has more CC effects. Doomfist is a hero we'd need to look at though, for other reasons as well (he can be frustrating to play against for other reasons).

I'd say the more pressing matter, for us, is how powerful Doomfist/Hammond and other high-mobility heroes such as Tracer can be in a world where there is a lot less CC to control/stop them.

That's an interesting idea, and how players interact with barriers is something we're always looking at closely. This might not as be required with the new 5v5 teams that only have one tank, and therefore less barriers on the field. We'll keep an eye on it as we continue to work on hero and gameplay balance.

Thanks!

I know this wasn't "behind the scenes" because it was a live bug, but when I asked our QA team for a bug that stood out to them they linked me this bug. The linked pictures are nightmare fuel, but also absolutely hilarious.

One that's more behind the scenes, when we first implemented Ashe if there were any BOBs alive at the end of the match they would vote on the end of round cards.. AI will definitely take over the world some day.

I'll take this post as chance to thank all of our amazing QA folks, you're all amazing.

For OW1, most of the philosophy changes have been small tactical changes throughout the game's life, rather than large sweeping changes. The biggest sweeping changes to philosophy were when we went to single hero limit, and then later to role lock.

At its heart, the game has always been about super over-the-top heroes, that are simple to understand but have a lot of depth in gameplay, especially when combined with other heroes on your team. When making new heroes, or changing old ones, its a constant fight for us internally to try and make sure the heroes are simple and focused from a gameplay perspective. This has been gotten harder over time as we add new heroes and push to keep every hero feeling unique at the same time.

For OW2, this core philosophy is still the same, but we're looking at some of these things in somewhat of a new light. We're still pushing hard to keep heroes simple and deep, but there are some specifics we've changed such as more aggressive tank play which can change how we make Tank heroes.

We've been doing a substantial amount of work in the areas of AI for Overwatch 2... which is probably obvious given that we'll have PvE. :) Much of those improvements should apply across the game, workshop included. But Workshop plans for OW2 are still quite fluid.

Yea we feel like this is pretty core to Lucio so we're not likely to change this. Also Tanks have a role passive to have reduced knockback effects against them now, so that helps Tanks players quite a bit.

Possibly, that's still on the list to play around with.

For what its worth, she can still freeze with her ultimate.

Honestly we're not sure yet. We'd like to have it exist in some form, but I'd say balancing the game for both 5v5 (1 tank) and 6v6 (2 tanks) is unlikely, so the 6v6 mode would most likely be an arcade mode or something like that if we can do it at all.

The difficultly centers around how we track entitlements and policy concerns with platform manufacturers. There are also a lot of technical concerns, but most are manageable with a good amount of work. It's all feasible, just a LOT more ducks to get in a row. And, unfortunately, the more groups involved, the more complicated something becomes. And cross-progression just gets more complicated, in that regard.

Hey mutsuto, we're unlikely to ever add this. My instincts were that this would add a lot of complexity and probably not be as helpful as one would hope. I spoke a bit with with an engineer on the team who the most knowledgeable about our matchmaking system, he noted that there are a lot of factors that contribute to matchmaking that are outside of a single person's control. For example in role queue the amount of roles in queue are the dominant factor for matchmaking time. Also the time of day and how active your particular region is at that time plays a big part in what matches can be made.

Adding a feature like this is also unpredictable, there are likely to be knock-on effects that we'd have to work through. It's tricky if many players set the slider to "match quickly", maybe the "prefer quality" players would never get a match, and if we decide to eventually pull them in that would be a poor experience since it wouldn't match your expectations based on the slider.

A key rule to matchmaking is when you introduce constraints in any way, even if they're meant to be helpful, you generally increase matchmaking time. The matchmaker is by far one of the most complex systems we maintain, we really appreciate ideas and feedback, even if we don't directly go with a particular suggestion.

Special thanks to Alex from our server team for helping me get some detail into this answer.

Cheers!

We are planning to do an update on the endorsements system in the future, so it's great hearing your feedback on this. To clarify one element on the system, you won't really decay if you don't play for a week or so. You naturally decay a certain amount when you play a game based on your current endorsement level, with higher endorsement levels decaying faster and requiring you to earn more endorsements per game. That's what makes higher endorsement levels harder to get.

As far as golden guns, we have no plans for providing them as rewards outside of earning them in competitive play.

The animated short will play on all versions, but on PC we only play it once. We track if it was shown in the settings and on console versions this is before the user logs in and we don't have access to any saved setting information at that time. We intentionally show the movie this early because we're loading core assets during this time.

We agree it'd be nice to be able to skip it, I spoke with our lead engine programmer a bit just now and it's something we'll look at, though I can't promise we'll be able to do it (because it would require moving where it plays, and reviewing asset loading times).

Cheers!

Sure!

When re-approching Bastion the biggest starting point is like, "what is the core of this hero that feels like we should make sure to preserve". Our answer to that is he is a transforming robot, with huge damage potential when he is using his various modes well. We want to make sure Bastion isn't purely about aim-skill, but he also has a big focus on situational awareness and timing/positioning.

We're looking at pushing his recon form's range out by changing his recon weapon. This helps him generally be more useful, but also helps create separation between his other forms, especially sentry. For sentry form, the cost of reducing his mobility to gain huge damage is still interesting and its the heart of what makes him work. However, completely removing his mobility has proved to be too harsh of a penalty, and frankly its not realistically possible to balance him with this downside in mind (especially between different skill levels). So right now we're testing allowing him to move in Sentry form, but just more slowly than normal. This comes with new tuning for his Sentry weapon, of course, so it isn't quite as deadly as it is in OW1.

There is more to talk about with him down the road, but we're still in the middle of reworking him so hopefully we'll be able show him off in more detail down the road!

Great question! I think the first season I watched was Season 4, so it'll always have a special place in my heart.

I was so happy to see Jinkx Monsoon participate in the Mei Gala, that was rad. If anyone knows someone at World of Wonder have them call me, I want to be a guest judge.

I would say a lot about OW2 is going to be different. The tank play will certainly change, but if you're an experienced off-tank player im sure you'll find great success with those same heroes in OW2 as a solo tank.

We don't have any plans to do so, at the moment. We would have to invest a non-trivial amount of time to upgrade original Overwatch to recognize and separately treat the PS5 (it involves changing the platform SDK). Instead, we're taking that time to focus on making OW2 the best we can on the next gen consoles.

We do use 120 tick for the Overwatch League but right now we're not seriously considering them for the main live game. We find the most significant benefit of playing on 120 tick comes only when combined with all players in a match having excellent network quality and extremely low latency.

I'll never say never, it could happen, but not currently planned.

For me, in the short term, i'd say the biggest misconception I see about 5v5 and 1 Tank being that off-tanks are being removed, changed, etc. But really, many off-tank heroes are getting tankier, and many main tank heroes are getting less tanky and more damage/options, so really the new Tanks are somewhere in-between MTs and OTs.

If anything, I would guess that off-tanks would have an easier time adjusting to OW2's new Tank role than main-tank players.

Almost certainly, yes. If I knew when, I couldn't tell you. If I told you, I'd have to kill you. But u/blizz_akeller is our resident secret-leaker, so you might give him a try! :)

I would say freezing with her primary in PvE is a minimum of what you'll see. We have so many crazy ideas for talents for every hero, I can't wait to show you guys more as we get closer.

Hey there! As a live ops engineer I loved shipping Overwatch on all platforms and in all regions at the same time, it was a huge challenge and was very exciting. It's definitely our goal to do the same for Overwatch 2, but of course I can't promise that we wont' hit any blockers that prevent us from doing that.

Cheers!

Yes, we've had a lot of changes to the game engine. Many optimizations, better lighting, and many new features have been added. PvE has also allowed us to look much more at how our environments tell our story, so we've added many features that help with that. In addition, since the hardware landscape has changed a lot since Overwatch was launched, we're taking the opportunity (both on the artist side and the technical side) to beef up our high end features and assets.

I think the common one that comes up here is Mei, which is something we've talked about in the past, but we haven't run the "mei tank" experiment internally yet. I feel like she would have to change quite a bit to fit the tank role, so its a bit more of a rework to have her fit well into that role. That doesn't mean its off the table, just that its not a trivial change to throw in and try out.

If we did try it, im sure we'd try the ice slide that everyone loves to think about :) It certainly feels more acceptable on a Tank, which would allow her to engage in front of her team etc.

Doomfist I think requires a bit more thought than even Mei. He is extremely unique, even amongst the Overwatch roster, but he essentially requires CC to control him, and he throws out a bit too much CC himself, even if her were a tank. We haven't started digging into him yet, as we're still figuring out how some of these CC changes are going to play out, but hes on my list to look at as soon as we can. Ideally i'd love to keep his high mobility ability-based gameplay in tact, but be less frustrating to play against.

Hey there! We ARE working on something super cool in this space, not exactly what you called out, but I'm pretty excited about it. We're not ready to announce it yet, but I thought I'd drop a reply here and let you know that yes.. more workshop related things are still coming :)

Cheers

We've tried and discarded quite a few abilities during development of our heroes, it's a very natural part of the process. Sometimes the ideas are better fits for other heroes, sometimes they just don't work and we chalk that up as a lesson.

Here's one I worked on for Torbjörn:

Torbjörn had something we referred to as the "Claw Trap" that he deployed similar to Widowmaker's Venom Mine, but instead of dealing damage the trap grabbed a hold of you and prevented the enemy from moving outside a fixed radius of the trap. You could move freely around next to the trap, but couldn't move far away until you destroyed the base of the trap. It had some fun moments as it could do things like stop a charging Reinhardt or prevent Pharah from launching high into the sky, but it really caused a lot of confusion. After a bunch of iteration, we decided to go in a different direction.

I'm not sure what SR this person is at now but the highest I'm aware of was around ~4300. We really have a wide range of skill levels on the team, while we do many team wide playtests, we also have focused playtests for specific skill ranges when necessary.

Cheers!

Other than a bunch of stuff we've thrown on the test server and pulled at the last minute (like Zen's discord being able to target through barriers), maybe the most significant was Sombra's hero design. For most of her development, she was a Support hero instead of a Damage hero. In this role, her main goal was to hack every enemy, while sneaking around and trying to stay alive. At that time, Hacking an enemy was a long duration debuff that reduced their healing/damage output, rather than the short duration high-impact debuff it became later.

The idea was that she was balanced so that if she successfully got enough hacks on the enemy team, your team would effectively be able to win a 5-6 (since she wasn't very good in combat for her team), simply because the debuffs were strong enough to allow for that. This is all fine and good on paper, and it was pretty fun to play her this way, but people just hated getting debuffed in this way. In fact, every time we've tried to put this kind of debuff in the game (Wrecking Ball also had it in early development, instead of his shield), we get overwhelming feedback that it is the most terrible thing we could put in the game.

There is something psychologically painful about a -damage/healing output debuff, compared to just about any other debuff, it makes it hard for it to find its way into the game in any form.

I would say overall, yes there is a shift towards at least slightly more of a raw FPS game. However, Tanks and Support (and even some dps like Doomfist) have always been more about abilities than just aimskill/shooting. This isn't going to change. I feel like this is core to what makes Overwatch what it is, reflecting many different playstyles and empowering many different types of skilled players in different ways. Its always been a balancing act for us, but for a while during OW1's new hero additions it was really starting to feel like we were pushing maybe a little too far away from our FPS roots.

Great question. As hardware has advanced since the launch of Overwatch, we are extending the OW2 engine with more high-end features. However, we're also working hard to make sure all of our platforms get the best experience, even in PvE. Switch is a little more challenging than some, and we'll have to make some compromises there. For that reason, some of the higher end visual enhancements might not be visible, there. We'll focus on making sure all of the gameplay-related features get in, first, and then accentuate with additional features as much as possible.

Hey there, I think we're unlikely to put a child playable character into Overwatch given the core gameplay of the game. We really love Efi though, and it's possible we'll continue to see younger lore characters incorporated in the same way she is.

Cheers

<3

Good questions.

We're definitely looking to combat what I will refer to as "abusive" alt accounts, ie players who repeatedly create new accounts just so they can play against lesser skilled opponents. Part of this is improving the matchmaker's ability to determine your skill even faster, detecting those that repeatedly abuse alt accounts and taking action against them, and looking at ways to limit access to additional accounts. We can't go into all the details here, but it's something that's being actively worked on.

Do remember that many "smurfs" are just friends who want to play together but aren't of the same skill. The matchmaker doesn't just simply average their SR together when considering how to matchmake them, and its also good to remember that the other player might not be a smurf at all. They might just have gotten a lucky streak of head shots. Skill is not a static thing, it ebbs and flows, and we all have our moments we feel like gods of Overwatch and other moments I can't hit a player to save my life.

There's also legitimate reasons to have alternate accounts, many people have them for different social circles, etc. So we have to be careful here.

Talking about tanks in 5v5, it's unfortunate that tanks can often get the brunt of team negativity simply because they're in front leading the charge and their actions are easier to see by other members of the team. That spotlight is one of the reasons we often hear from people about not wanting to play a tank. When a damage player has a bad game (and hey, it happens to everybody!) it's often harder to notice. You're losing team fights, but you're not sure why.

So we're looking to give players some better tools in OW2 to look at game performance, including match history. We also looking at further ways to celebrate positive plays made in a fight. I don't think we have a silver bullet to address every negative aspect of human behavior around competitive play, but we'll certainly try and help.

She actually started as a Support! I talked about that in a different answer already though.

For OW2, I've done some iteration on her in regards to how she might work in a world where there is less crowd control effects for Damage heroes. Recently we've run two different playtest ideas for her:

1. She couldn't hack players at all anymore, but instead she gained a +50% damage bonus when shooting an enemy in the back.
2. She could hack players again, but a hack on an enemy just meant your allies could see that player through walls instead of silencing them. She could also hack while invisible (she was visible while hacking, but invis wasn't broken). Then, she gained a +30% damage bonus against hacked targets.

These were interesting tests, but each had their own share of big problems.

For #1, it felt weird/bad to just never be able to hack enemies. Shes supposed to be this hacker but her hack was relegated to health packs mostly. This is potentially solvable if we added a lot more things she could hack, such as objectives and barriers etc, but im not sure its worth chasing at this point.

For #2, it was super fun to hack people while invis and play more of the cat/mouse game more often, but her ult was terrible in this version without further changes to it. I'm unsure about this direction as well, as it sort of downplays her hacking in general.

This is just an example of stuff we try when iterating on a hero, and playtesting new ideas. Both of these ideas were in the camp of "what if she was more deadly, but we downplayed her hacking a bit", but there are other directions we could try as well.

Currently, no EMP does not remove over-health. But, hopefully as evidence from some of my other answers, things are very heavily in flux right now, especially in regards to CC and Sombra, so its possible we'll make it work on all over-health.

Brig and Torb gain over-health instead of over-armor now, but it acts like normal health and so doesn't have any innate damage reduction built into it anymore. We'll have to compensate for that as needed, probably by giving more health for them.

Though I will go one step further and ask, "should armor even work the same way it does in OW1?" Its fairly complex and if you ask an average player how exactly armor works most of them will just say something like "oh i dont know, it reduces damage taken somehow". We haven't changed anything with it yet, but its on my list to look at and maybe simplify into something like, "armor health takes -X% damage".

It has further implications if we do that, like bigger hits no longer feel like they are armor-piercing, such as a widow shot or a Pharah rocket.. but maybe its worth the trade off? I'm not sure yet!

We don't have any plans to remove it. If anything, we'd like it to be able to leverage some of our improved and new features to make it even better. We don't have a full picture of Workshop for launch, at the moment, though.

I think that the team had made great decision with changing the team composition to be 5v5, but I think most reason why people get upset on that change, is because of the tank synergy we have right now. Has the team thought about forgiving that in any way, by idk changing dps maybe?

One of the core goals of Overwatch hero design is to create these fun synergies and combos throughout the entire roster. It certainly sucks to lose some of these combos, but a lot of game design is making a call to decide if what you are gaining is worth what you are losing. In this case, after significant playtesting, we think its more than worth it for the benefits we gain out of 5v5.

It seems that the tanks with OW2 go more in brawly direction than protect and peel direction, which I am scared makes the game more 'watch out for yourself' than 'watch out for your teammates', and I don't like this direction. Should we expect loads of changes from what we have been shown on the stream in terms of tanks?

I think we want to make sure we offer a lot of different options for different playstyles, as always. As a broad answer, yes tanks will be getting more brawly. But looking at heroes like D.Va, she is gaining much more matrix meter and she isn't losing her flight knockback or anything else (at the moment anyway), so she'll be even better at peeling than before. Even our current Zarya iteration allows her to potentially use 2 of her barriers back to back on an ally instead of shielding herself, which actually significantly increases her peeling potential as well.

What is most-challenging thing about developing OW2 and maintaining OW1?

Really the biggest thing is how different OW2 has become, and how it is constantly changing. We have to keep in mind how OW1 is currently playing and what changes we think would be best for it, without thinking about how different they already are in OW2. Its like juggling 2 different metas/environments, and its easy to mix them up in my mind and/or memory sometimes.

Pineapple on pizza - yes or no? :)

More people need to open their minds, hearts and most importantly, mouths, to the fact that pineapple on pizza is always great. Bonus: Try pineapple + jalapeño on a pizza together, its magical.

That's disgusting.... ;)

The Overwatch team was formed from the ashes of Titan, and much smaller in size. While we learned a lot during that development, it certainly was a blow to our confidence, as any set-back can be. But the one thing we knew we had from the beginning was each other and we bonded together extremely well. Getting that confidence back and making it to the success of the Overwatch announce at BlizzCon was a big hurdle to overcome. Our trust in one-another and the incredibly open and supportive atmosphere we have on the team really enabled us to get over that.

I can answer a few of these!

Why no backfilling or pauses in Competitive?

There's no backfilling because we're pretty sure no one would want to do it. If you ever backfill in a game and lose shortly afterwards, you're not happy. If we allowed players to backfill without consequences to their SR, its giving them a license to throw or act negatively. There's simply not a lot of great options there.

As far as pauses, and I think you're asking about pauses due to disconnect/leaves, we have to consider cases where players might abuse the rules in an attempt to harass someone or waste people's time. The best way to try and minimize leaves is to not provide any kind of outside motivation for them to occur. We're never going to be completely leave free, due to internet outages, personal emergencies, random acts of chaos by cat, we just want to make sure and minimize them as much as possible.

Is there a reason for the "minimum draw" scenario on Assault and Hybrid maps?

Yes, its because a lot of players would not think it would be fair for a team to complete an Assault map with 5 minutes left, and a team that completes it with 0 time left, to have a result where the team that had 0 time left can go on to win. We had to draw a line somewhere, and we drew it at a minute because that felt like the minimum time required to have a decent shot at taking 33% of the first control point.

The rules also exist as they are to try and avoid "anti-dramatic" or "what happened?" endings that aren't understood. If we handled escort in the same way, in the same scenario we'd be asking a team to defend the payload for 5 minutes and prevent it from moving AT ALL (or come up with a 33% minimum mark on payload, which could creates ties, which we also want to avoid.) So we increase each team's time up to a minimum of 1 minute, which is again a good amount of time to allow for a decent team fight and movement of the payload. This then creates a dramatic and fair ending to the game.

Yeah I know it’s pretty awesome. Some comments on the bug in our bug tracker were saying we should keep it. :)