Overwatch Dev Tracker

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'...

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!

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.

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

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 so...

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.

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.