Overwatch Dev Tracker

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!

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.

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! :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 al...

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 tan...

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...

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!