Overwatch Dev Tracker

Try putting them on the left side of your screen for charge, and the right side of your screen for boops.

Our tools are pretty robust so its pretty easy for us to whip up some changes and run a playtest to see how they feel. We've done quite a bit of tests of all kinds of tweaks, some small some big, that come from the community.

For example, we tried Symmetra as a Support hero where her turrets healed instead of dealt damage. This was sort of fun but was kind of frustrating as a Symm player because Overwatch moves so fast. We started trying to tune the turrets to have super high range, or being able to have a ton of them out, etc. It ended up just feeling like a mismatch, but honestly i'd be up for taking another crack at it at some point. Maybe if she had some other primary way to heal and the turrets were just a way to provide auxiliary healing it might have gone better.

Its hard to think of other specific examples off the top of my head right now, but I know there are more things that we've specifically tried out and ended up not doing. There are some other popular...

the tab screen was an almost religious debate during the development of the game. i think many of us feel like there are other options for us to explore. a big fundamental change is more likely for ow2 than the current live game. but in general the team is interested in giving players more/better ways to examine their own performance. again more likely on an ow2 timeframe.

guilds is a feature that we've always been excited about. many of us worked on world of warcraft and specifically worked on the guild system there. so it's something that's near and dear to us. we have some really cool ideas of how something like that could work with overwatch. unfortunately, from a tech and design standpoint, the feature would be an extremely heavy lift (at least to do it right -- the way we'd want to do it). so not on the near horizon but definitely on our wishlist.

Back when we are working in the office we have a hallway dedicated to fan art. It varies from entry level to professional level, and it is all inspiring. I regularly spend time looking at this art and seeing what the community is coming up with. We're always inspired by the community and it's art, but we don't have immediate plans for that kind of contest right now

Ideas like this are what makes workshop so exciting. We've seen some super cool custom games that implement this concept.

our first goal is to make the mode something that everyone enjoys. you can see by today's experimental card that we try various things to iterate on the game -- just some of them don't work.

for ow2 we have some ideas that will allow for more player agency but nothing is set in stone yet so i don't want to commit to any promises.

and in the spirit of being open, i think the criticism of 2cp is fueled a bit by the echo chamber of certain communities, when overall the maps and modes are not as universally hated as some would have you believe.

I think we did do this at BlizzCon just before we shipped where we played some streamers. Back then it was great because we were the best Overwatch players in the world! :) I don't think we would fare as well, these days. But it would be a lot of fun. Fun side story: When we were in the final year or so of dev for Overwatch, we put in some somewhat long hours at the office. As a lark, our QA set up a multi-week tournament across the team to give us a moment to take a break, eat pizza and watch tournament games, shoutcasted by two teammates. The tournament games were SO much fun and drove us to push harder on spectator features and the plans for the league.

the border system will go away with overwatch 2. we want to make sure to recognize your accomplishments but we'll be doing something different for the sequel.

Golden guns are an ever-evolving topic. On some of the more original characters we ran into tech challenges when trying to add gold versions. One thing to know is that we came up with the idea of golden guns after some characters were already made. Example – Torbjörn turret was made to go molten core before we knew about golden guns. When we tried to apply the golden shader it broke molten core. As time goes on, workflows and tech improves, we get more and more flexibility of where we can add gold to a character.

we test the maps a lot. for a very long time. usually if we're patching a map into the live game, we'll do an extended ptr period for testing (same with heroes). for maps that shipped with the game, we tested some of those for years. we don't openly bring in outsiders to test maps early as we have a pretty comprehensive play test and map testing process. sometimes, depending where we're at in a dev cycle, we might bring a map to a trade show (i.e. blizzcon, gamescom etc.) before it goes live.

we've tried all sorts of balancing points, including 6 ticks. it solved some issues but created others. the more ticks, the more the defending team feels obligated to sit on the point....

I play nearly every day. I tend to prefer Zarya, McCree, and Zenyatta. I do a lot of Mystery Heroes with friends I grew up with. They live in Minnesota and I'm in California, Overwatch is one way that I try to keep in touch!

this is something we're passionate about and exploring.

This is actually something that comes up fairly often. In general I like to try to keep 'tech' in the game if we can, but sometimes its some weird bug that can cause a lot of other problems, is super unreliable, or is just straight up overpowered.

For example, the Genji ledge dashing bug was cool but both extremely overpowered and also really inconsistent/buggy feeling (which makes sense I guess, as it was a bug). That one we opted to just remove instead of trying to work out way to implement it as a feature, mostly because Genji already has really strong mobility and we didnt want to add more onto that.

Mercy's glide jump though was something that wasn't really intended but we ended up having to fix for unrelated reasons. When we did that, we went ahead and implemented it as a real feature of the hero so it works a lot more consistently now etc. She also has the big vert super jump which is a lot more tricky to pull off but we haven't really adjusted or changed an...

Great questions, here's an answer for a couple of them!

- An unexpected way covid19 has changed our day to day is the impact it has had on meetings. It took a while for people to become more comfortable in online meetings, but now they tend to be more focused and efficient. It's awesome! The engineer in me loves getting more time to write code.

- As far as tips for breaking into the industry in the current climate, I think it's a bit too early to tell how things will change long term. I hope to see a shift industry wide that is more accommodating for remote work. In general I think you should regularly look at open positions at studios you'd be excited to work at and apply as much as you can. Just experience interviewing will be helpful to land the perfect spot.

we are very excited to explore the overwatch universe in a number of mediums. nothing to announce at this time but we would like this very much.

As a tank player I really like the option to charge or boop with Reinhardt. I believe the internet has recently deemed this 'Flat's cradle'.

i play the game everyday. we have multiple playtests daily plus we play for fun on our own time. i love to play all of the heroes but some i really struggle on (doomfist, sombra, sigma). i play a lot of reinhardt, symmetra, mercy these days. i also love hanzo and mccree, although i'm not so great with them.

Sombra and Genji were the two hardest heroes to make, probably.

Sombra worked very differently and had to go through major changes pretty late in her development (as I posted about earlier), and Genji started out having only his sword for a weapon (he is still refereed to as SwordNinja in our internal files, etc). His main kit initially involved invisibility, wall perching, and having an 'execute' animation where if he got behind you he could stun you and start this long animation which would just instantly kill you if he finished it.

The idea was he could easily pick off people who were not with their team, but otherwise it would be very difficult to use execute. This kit caused all kinds of problems though, especially his sword being his only form of attacking. Once we moved away from invisibility and instead chased the agile ninja fantasy, and made the sword his ultimate, everything started clicking into place.

pizza

proof: https://i.imgur.com/f0IGPu2.png