Overwatch Dev Tracker

Respawn did such a good job with the Ping System in Apex Legends. It works really well.

Back in early development of Overwatch, we actually had a very similar ping system. Ours was inspired from MOBA’s like League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm.

We eventually removed it because of a few issues.

1. With 6 people on the team, it got very spammy if more than a few people were using it
2. The geography of Overwatch maps as well as the engagement distances is fairly constrained. This made pinging upwards challenging and often frustrating. An example is standing at the gate of point A of Temple of Anubis and trying to ping the upper ledge above the gate entering point B. Our engagement distances tend to be in the 10-30 meter range (for perspective it’s about 45 meters all the way across the entire dojo in Hanamura B). In Apex, you have very long engagement distances and very big maps… it makes it easier to ping below you

It would be fun to r...

I think it is a technical limitation of the spectator features.

We don’t currently perceive Genji to be a balance problem.

They have custom crosshairs, we only see the hero default crosshair in spectator view.

When the pros play Overwatch at the Blizzard Arena, it looks just like it does for you and me at home. They don’t see the team coloring of the HUD or the Visual FX. They don’t even see the team uniforms. It’s the spectator functionality and the broadcast that makes the game look that way.

You can use some color blind settings to adjust the way things look for you at home, but it’s not quite like the OWL view.

He’s really more of a mechanic, but if you had to choose between those two, he’s more engineer than scientist.

Well, just speaking for myself here, but I expected 1 to 2 tanks and 1 to 2 supports with more variance. I also expected more hero switching. Naively, I didn’t expect “maining” and “one-tricking” to be so dominant.

We imagined a world where players would be ok with Torbjorn on defense but not playing him on attack. The maining/one-trick mindset led to us having to rework those characters to fit with how the game eventually evolved to be played. I guess what I am saying is we hoped to be able to create more highly situational characters with the thought that players would switch in situations where those characters weren’t as viable.

We like the direction things evolved and in hindsight, it seems obvious that they would evolve that way. It’s not that one direction is good or bad… they’re just different directions and we adapted to what the playerbase was doing, rather than fighting against their instincts.

We actually tried a mode we called “411” because it limited comps to 1 tank, 1 healer and the rest DPS.

It was not fun and we didn’t enjoy it. The way the game is tuned, the importance it placed on the lone tank or lone support was too significant. Also, we’ve all evolved as players since 2016 and we’re much better these days at melting the tank or melting the healer than we used to be. Once your lone tank or healer died, it felt like you were forced to completely regroup with no chance of pulling out a win.

It was a good experiment for us to try and led to a lot of good discussion. But yeah, wasn’t fun…