Overwatch Dev Tracker

The biggest challenge, in that regard, was how we handle the budgets around the heroes and how we handle loading. It was tough, but we found a solution that would work (with some compromises). It should be okay for additional heroes, as well. But the imagination of our hero designers never ceases to amaze me, so perhaps I should knock on wood.

The one that immediately comes to mind is Symmetra's wall ultimate. When we (designers) first talked about it, it seemed pretty simple. Lets just take Reinhardt's shield and scale it way way up, that should be fine right?

Well it turns out... not exactly. There were two major hurdles with this thing.

1) On the gameplay front, a lot of our abilities need to know if they can hit something by checking if the object is just 'in range' of it. Well then it begs the question... 'where' is the shield exactly? For example, we wanted Sombra's EMP to destroy the wall, but it was having trouble finding it unless you were near the 'center' of it, since it was such a wide and flat object.

Gameplay engineering needed to come up with some new tech made just for her wall to allow certain abilities, and other targeting, to understand and be able to hit the wall correctly in different places.

2) On the engine side, having a giant effect cutting through your entire sc...

absolutely. ana, doomfist, sombra are all examples of this...

maestro

Bill hit some good ones. I'll add that another challenge is that we cannot just walk around the office seeing the cool things that everyone is working on or engaging in random conversations about what we can help with. We still have some of those over tele-conferencing, but it isn't as impromptu.

As to your "passion project" question, there are a lot of those on the team. From evolving the gameplay to introducing new, previously unplanned graphics features, to enhancing the effects in our game and even novel ways to reduce memory or load times. Every member of the team has their specific passions and areas of expertise and they often manifest in unplanned ideas that make the game so much better. I spoke about some of this at last BlizzCon, but it is an ongoing thing. We even have a week or two a year where we all think "outside of the box" about things we can add to the game that are awesome.

these are cool ideas!

i think the suddenness of transitioning to working from home was a shock for many of us. we had been tracking the pandemic for months and making preparations, but i don't think the reality had sunk in that we were going to have to close down as well. we have offices in shanghai and seoul that had been shut down, so it was something blizzard had been dealing with for months. but the call to close irvine down (that's where the ow team is) came very quickly.

of all things, team 4 -- aka the ow team -- was in the middle of a move when it happened. most of us don't even know where our office stuff is... in some box somewhere in a new office?

the first few weeks were rough. there were a lot of tech and communication hurdles. i am sure you all have dealt with that as well. we were really lucky to have amazing technical staff on team 4 as well as really great blizzard it staff to make it go more smoothly.

now, we're all adjusting in our own ways. personally, i like ...

Our initial launch was a huge challenge. We wanted to release on all platforms (PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4) in all regions at the same time. We put significant effort into performance profiling to ensure our servers would hold up on launch day. There was a huge amount of work involved between engineering and QA to get through the console certification process for both platforms. It was an exciting time, one I'll never forget, and I'm happy with how well it went!

This is understandably super confusing, I totally agree with you. Its sort of came about this way from a chain of rules that really don't even matter anymore necessarily. But heres how it went:

Junkrat trap is made, it blocks movement abilities. Ok cool, lets playtest it. Oh, its weird on Reaper though... is Wraithform a movement ability? It technically makes you faster but doesn't really feel like a movement skill, and being able to wraith (even if you cant move) would feel a lot better. So we go with that.

Later, Zarya's ult gets the 'no mobility' rule added to it. We just follow Junkrat trap's rules, which means Reaper can now escape grav. Hmm maybe this is fine? Lets roll with it, its consistent.

Moira is made. Fade works very similar to Wraithform, we're consistent where can be with the two of them. However, Fade is clearly much more of a mobility skill than Wraithform... so it kind of breaks down in the junkrat trap/zarya ult case, wh...

Answering from an Art point of view here.. Brigitte Flail - This seems like a straight forward idea, but it turns out making a flail with a extending chain in a 1st/3rd person game can be challenging.

On question 2 - I have seen a lot of crazy bugs, even some from here on this reddit. One that comes to mind was the discovery of 'Depressionwatch' where many of the characters were exported without facial animations. Another OG bug that comes to mind that will always make me laugh was when Widowmaker's butt inflated on reload.

tracer plz

Please don't give Geoff any ideas! :)

Hmm I've always wanted to do a grappler hero...

I had another reply where I mentioned the challenges of Echo, which has, arguably, our most difficult ability from a technical perspective. But, to be honest, we knew that one was going to be challenging going in. However, what I have found is that even with the "simplest" of abilities, we often find that they are harder than we thought. Often this is because we expand on our original ideas as we develop the hero. Other times it just is unanticipated challenges. One example of the latter is Moira. Her animation was very challenging and took a lot of work from our tech art and animation teams to get correct.

As for funniest bug, I don't have one that is popping into my head that is actually funny. There are a lot that seemed funny when on very little sleep, but not so much after a good night's rest! :)

they are all super fun. it's seriously a dream job. most recently, i really liked being involved with sigma. josh and geoff drove the design of the character and qiu was the artist who drew him. but it was a lot of fun to help develop the character. i loved the idea of an absolute genius who is disassociated, who thinks we see what he sees, who thinks we understand physics and the universe the way he does. i loved the idea of a tragic victim who was being used for evil who was not evil himself....

Hmm tbh I hadn't actually considered this until now. From a 'sniper' perspective, we had generally considered them to be more defensive oriented. But she isn't really a sniper, exactly. On just a whim i'd say Offense, but I could be swayed to make her Defense. I mean, this is basically a big part of why we merged them into one category, at some point it becomes fairly arbitrary feeling.

Doomfist Parkour

Edit: Adding a bit to this, here's the top 10 for the past week!

1. 1v1 Arena
2. Zombies
3. Genji
4. Thomas
5. Rein 1v1
6. Scrim
7. AIM TRAINING
8. Duel Arena
9. PRACTICE RANGE 2.0
10. Minigun

1. aaron did a lot of work on paris but we're still not happy with it. horizon is not on the...horizon (oof bad pun)
2. we always encourage players to spend their credits on things they want. there's nothing on the immediate horizon you need to be hoarding these for outside of event loot boxes
3. i'm not an artist but we like exploring alternate versions of heroes such as "Junker D.Va" sometimes
4. for maestro sigma in particular, that actually started with our composers and audio director. adam, derek and scott had all of this amazing music and we were brainstorming ways of getting it to players. we came up with the idea of "albums" that we were going to release (note: plural) and we thought that doing a mini-event around the first album would be really fun. then we thought about which character would make sens...

Several cool questions here, so let's go?

Are there any current plans to continue to improve the player behavior experience for the game?

Funny you ask that, but we're going to make the penalties for leaving competitive games a bit more severe in an upcoming patch. (More details then!) We're ALWAYS looking to improve the player behavior experience, and there's several interesting initiatives for identifying bad player behavior that are currently in the pipes. We'll be able to talk more about them when they get closer to being real.

Have we thought about creating community moderation tools to allow players to review matches for suspected disruptive behavior?

It's been discussed, but we'd rather look into more internal solutions to try and identify disruptive behavior like throwing, feeding, etc. Community involvement is still super important though, as reports players who do bad things helps us tremendously. Please continue to do that, it really helps...

Every day! I'm mostly playing whatever hero I feel like needs to be looked at more, or has recent changed we're testing etc. Though if i'm just picking to try to win, I find myself mostly going for Ashe/Widow/hitscan in general. Or Junkrat, I still have a lot of fun flying around with Junkrat.