Overwatch Dev Tracker

Hey there! Recently we added the ability to specify the server location when creating a custom game. Currently we don't have any plans to expand this to Quick Play or Competitive, but we do see people ask for this occasionally. We have some concerns with how this would be implemented, in particular trying to avoid win trading or match fixing by abusing low population regions.

If you're on PC you can select Americas, Europe, or Asia for your region when you launch Overwatch. That will limit you to servers that are part of that region. Middle East is currently part of the Europe region, you could try to use Americas or Asia to change things up.

Cheers

we read this subreddit all the time. if it's a great idea, it will get visibility

We've certainly seen a lot of requests to reset MMR and SR for competitive play, but there are a lot of negatives associated with actually doing it. For instance, a hot topic amongst the community is Smurfing and how they can disrupt games by being much higher skill than everyone else in the game. Well, resetting everyone's MMR would basically have the effect of turning every Masters and Grandmasters player into a smurf with an incorrect SR. Match quality would be really bad for months, or possibly even longer.

Everyone has streaks of wins and losses, and most active players do hover around the same SR. Honestly, the trick to improving your SR is not actually worrying about your SR, but just playing games with a mind towards improving your play. If you have a favorite hero, pick an aspect of their kit to concentrate on improving. Play some games where you concentrate on more macro-oriented skills like making sure to attack together with your team. Think about the hard ques...

Some thoughts from me:

A passion for games (and Overwatch, in our example) is obviously a huge plus.

Experience is great, whether you gain that through your job or through hobby work outside of your job. That can apply to engineering as well as to experience working in a team. If someone has demos of their work, that goes a long way towards standing out.

For us, familiarity with C, C++, C# is big as is familiarity with some of our content creation packages (like Maya, Photoshop, etc).

And we're always looking for individuals that bring a different viewpoint to our team. We find the best ideas/solutions tend to come from a diverse team working together to solve a challenge or implement a feature.

Hey there, that is also one of my favorite talks! There are a few GDC presentations just a bit after we launched Overwatch, if you haven't seen them all you should check them out! Right now we don't have anything planned for conferences, I think we'll need to see the impacts of covid19 further. Cheers

it's random

Hey there, I can tackle a couple of these!

We haven't seriously considered a public bug tracker. As you call out there are a few benefits that would come from having one, there is a major investment required to manage that system, and process changes for the entire development team. Our development team and QA folks are regularly reviewing bug report forums. It may not seem like issues are noticed but they're almost certainly being tracked.

We don't have a lot to share about OW2 today, but as a general strategy we fix bugs in the earliest version of the game that makes sense. We wouldn't intentionally hold off on a bug fix for OW2 unless there was some major architecture changes required to make the fix.

i think this is a good discussion. but i think a lot of the good points get lost in the echo chamber of the internet. i'll see a good thread, video etc about power creep but then there is a lot of "group think" that happens and you have a bunch of people who think they are agreeing on something, when really they are not.

"power creep is bad!"... "btw buff roadhog, revert rein earthshatter nerf, buff pharah, you should TOTALLY be adding way more new heroes... and they all better do new cool stuff...." ... "oh yeah and power creep is bad!"

personally, i prefer when the conversation is more focused. is time to kill to fast? do we feel like CC is too much? too much/little healing? and then apply all of these to individual heroes....

we've added 11 new heroes to the game since it launched. obviously, the game is going to change when you do that. we just need to evaluate each hero on their own and make adjustments.

my personal feeling is that i would like...

Not really... though as i've mentioned a couple times here already maybe we could have pushed harder to iterate on Symm as a healer instead of a damage dealer. Maybe we can still revisit her as a healer.

This comes up a lot so i'd like to touch on this.

I would love to get the roster to 33% each, that's certainly a goal. That said, I'm worried about going a very long time without any damage hero representation. If you look at the release history, we've been trying to push it towards an even roster without just ignoring damage heroes entirely.

this type of question is very hard to answer because we all now have the benefit of hindsight.

sometimes i wish we had kept offense and defense heroes (rather than merging them into damage) and only allowing offense heroes to be played on attack and defense to be played on defense. i know that idea might sound crazy and stupid but i think it would have allowed us to more "all in" on some "niche" hero designs like Torb, Symmetra and Bastion. much of the issue we face with the hero balance on these heroes is our player expectations that these heroes should be fully viable on all situations, and that really wasn't our intent or vision for the game. we believed that with hero swapping, people would be more willing to adapt to "solve the problem". we're fighting some amount of human psychology and game design, i know.

the sombra arg is another standout... lol

Doomfist could also work, hes kind of a fighting game hero already! He's certainly inspired by fighting games.

That's a great idea and something that we have thought about over the years. Unfortunately, it requires a decent amount of complicated technology changes as our engine and asset pipeline is primarily set up to deliver pre-made content. But it is something that we are continuing to consider.

Actually we've been talking about Tanks, as role, a lot recently. In the past we've had trouble trying to figure out how to make tank heroes like Roadhog compete with big protective tanks like Reinhardt. Lately we've been thinking, what if we just go the other direction? What if Reinhardt was more like Roadhog? What would that feel like for the entire game? Basically, what if all 'main tanks' became 'off tanks'?

This would mean Tanks would be less about pure protection, and more about brawly offense. Barriers would be less prevalent, damage overall would be higher (tanks doing more dmg, and reducing less dmg), which is kind of scary potentially. We've already been experimenting on this front and so far its been pretty fun, though the game does feel significantly different. Players have to play the map angles a lot more aggressively as you can't just rely oin your Tank/barrier for cover.

I'm not sure where these experiments will go but they're pretty intere...

<3

we really like the idea of cross-persistence. it's something we would love to see for overwatch. the technical and business hurdles are immense but we are very passionate about trying to make something like this happen someday.

There were many challenges, here are two specifics.

We had a hard time coming up with a look we liked for the chain. Most flail reference we found had the chains at a fixed distance. It was hard to find reference of something swinging like a flail, but also having an extending/contracting wire/chain. We ended up swinging an XBOX controller around, controlling the distance of the wire with our other hand.

Once we had a target look, getting it to move like that in engine was an animation challenge. We had to come up with a way to break up the animations and models for gameplay, but still get the look we liked from the XBOX controller video reference.

well apparently paris and horizon are the most difficult...

i think bringing blizzard world to life was particularly special for our entire team

Hey there, great question! Localization is an important part of Overwatch and audio is just one part of that effort. When we're discussing new heroes, new maps, and lore, we make an effort to collaborate with our diverse global team early in the process. A unique aspect of localization for us is empowering our regional teams to help select voice actors and provide early feedback when we're working with content that is from their region.

In general we try to have VO in both English and native language, and tend to alternate which we use based on if the hero is on your team or the other team. There are logistical considerations, for example not all voice actors are multi-lingual.

Audio plays a huge role in Overwatch gameplay. Scott Lawlor, our audio director, and the rest of the audio team are extremely passionate about Overwatch. Their hardwork and creativity result in not a great overall audio experience but also nice touches like the piano in Paris!

i'm so sorry this happened to you. please make sure to report all cases of this. it really does do something and we take this very seriously. we have some ideas we would like to explore to minimize the ability for this to happen. in the meantime, i strongly recommend leaving the profanity filter on.