Aaron Keller, Blizzard Entertainment

As many of you know, two weeks ago, there were a series of changes made to the Overwatch team, as well as other teams across Blizzard. Writing a public blog is difficult in the wake of these events. I want to express gratitude for the absolutely amazing people who worked on our game that are no longer on our team. I want the community to feel informed, and I want to convey our excitement about what is to come in Season 9. To be honest, it’s a lot to balance – but one of the things we’ve been most proud of is how we’ve kept lines of communication open between the team and our community, and we intend to continue that.

In that spirit, yesterday, we shared the exciting changes you are going to experience with Competitive starting in Season 9. I’d like to give a bit more ...

Hello everyone… and happy 2024!!!

We're at the start of the new year, I thought it would be a great idea to talk about our view of 2024.

This Director's Take will be one part of a series where we frame up the year according to a set of values we’re using to develop the game. These values translate into goals and specific additions and changes to the game. There’s a lot of different things coming up this year that I want to share, so think of this as the first in a series of topics to cover.

One of the biggest values of the team is to improve Overwatch's individual and team focused gameplay to meet the needs of our core audience. When I look at the future of Overwatch, a year or two out, I don't see the exact same game that we're playing now, but with a few more heroes and maps added to it. The game should always evolve with new systems and features that serve our players. Some of these features could live just outside of a match, such as a map voti...

Overwatch 2: Invasion launched last week, and it was our biggest season launch ever! The release included work from every section of the Overwatch team, and we’ve been looking forward to sharing what we built with all of you for a long time. We made big additions to the Core PvP game and other features, a new Battle Pass, and a Null Sector theme that we received great feedback early on. We also launched the first chapter of our Story Missions and ran a Co-op event alongside their release. We've heard from many of our core players that the game is in the best state it's ever been, and many have told us that it feels like we're really listening to their feedback and that this season is a culmination of that. It’s so awesome to hear.

Illari, our newest support hero, was introduced this season. Players have given us a lot of positive feedback about her. Our balance goal for the release of Illari was to make sure that she felt strong (but not overpowered!) at launch.  ...

There is a lot coming to the game in Overwatch 2: Invasion. We've talked about the new Story Missions, the Event Mission, our new game mode Flashpoint, the new Hero Progression System, as well as Hero Mastery Missions… and we'll be talking about our newest Support Hero soon. On top of these new additions, there are also a lot of changes coming to our current heroes next season. Nearly half of our heroes are getting balance changes. I won't go over every change in the season here—they'll all be in the patch notes—but I'll go over some of the larger ones.

But two quick bits first.

There was a lesson in the Lifeweaver release where our newest hero was interesting, but just wasn’t strong enough on release, and we don’t want to repeat that.  For Overwatch 2: Invasion, our aim is to have our newest hero be exciting and impactful on day 1. It’s not our intent to release a hero that’s way overpowered, but we’d prefer that people play her because she brings value, ...

Hey all. It's been an emotional week in the world of Overwatch. A few days ago, we talked about our change in approach to PvE in Overwatch 2 and released a high-level roadmap for the year. We're really excited for everything we’ll be launching soon, but much of the discussion this week has been about how we’re cancelling PvE outright, which isn’t accurate, so I want to take some time to discuss some of that with you here.

When we announced Overwatch 2 in 2019, the idea for the game was centered around the PvP game we released last October, and on the PvE side, Story Missions and Hero Missions.

Story Missions focus on fast-paced, co-op gameplay, as well as story, cinematics, and cutscenes that expand the world of Overwatch. Story Missions tell a linear narrative about the heroes of Overwatch reuniting and battling the new Null Sector threat, pushing the story of Overwatch forward for the first time since our original game released. These mi...

Last Director's Take, we talked about the state of Lifeweaver and the changes that we were making to the hero in order to strengthen him. They had a positive effect but didn't do nearly as much as we had hoped. We're going to continue that topic again this week. I'd like to look at what some of those changes accomplished, what we think he's missing, and some possible solutions we're looking at for the hero.

Over the last few weeks, we've made a number of buffs, tweaks, and modifications to Lifeweaver. In short, we modified his control scheme, making it more fluid and intuitive, and we buffed him across several different categories. We upped his healing ammo capacity, tightened the spread on his weapon, and buffed his ult. We saw a lift in his win rate across the game. At the lowest skill tiers, it was hovering around 45% but quickly dropped off at higher skill ratings.

The effects we thought these changes would have were difficult to work through since the...

Lifeweaver came out last week and landed with quite a splash. There was a lot of conversation about his abilities, his background, and let's be honest here, his… hotness. Let's go into detail about where we think he's at, what we're going to do with him going forward, and his effect on our philosophy on heroes and how we release them.

Currently, Lifeweaver is performing in multiple variations in Quickplay while players are learning the new hero. We saw Lifeweaver's win rate climb faster than other heroes when they launched, perhaps due to the surprising piece of data that his win rate is much higher for low-skill players than it is for high-skill players. Lifeweaver is a complex hero, and he has an amazing kit with abilities that can have a high impact in a match. However, these factors can make it harder to balance a hero at launch. Could there be aspects of his kit, like the slow while charging heal, that punish high-skill players? Could the auto-aim on his heal...

Season Four starts in just a few days! Over the past week, we've revealed a lot about what's coming next Tuesday and beyond. There's a lot to look forward to and I’m going to go a little more in depth on some of the pieces that we've already revealed.

Lifeweaver

One of the biggest releases of Season Four is our newest Support hero, Lifeweaver. If you'd like to see more about Lifeweaver, you can find his trailer here. I'll wait while you watch it…  :)

This hero can do quite a few things that are totally new to the game: some, like his Petal Platform, we've been talking about since before the original game shipped! His wildest ability is Life Grip, where Lifeweaver can grab an ally and pull them to his location. It happens almost instantly, without any confirmation fro...

Happy Friday everyone!

Overwatch 2 was released nearly 6 months ago. It's hard to believe that we're wrapping up Season 3, and about to jump into Season 4, and still have a lot of exciting moments ahead. Rather than talk about a specific topic this week, like matchmaking, I thought that we could look back over the past 6 months and talk about how we feel the game is doing and what we've learned over that time. For those that have been with us since day one, this may feel like it’s covering familiar territory.  I appreciate you sticking with me while we recap the last 6 months.

Speaking of talking… one of the biggest complaints we heard from players was that we were not doing a good job communicating about the game. We've been focused on turning this around and have put a lot of energy into giving players information about the game, both in terms of what's coming and what we're thinking. We plan to continue this for the foreseeable future,...

Two weeks ago, we talked about balance and matchmaking in our blog update. Matchmaking has continued to be a big topic in the community, and it's something we've been focused on internally. If it's important to you then it’s important for us to talk about, so I'd like to update you all on what we're seeing and doing.

One note before we begin - I think we're at risk of sounding like a broken record with our communication on matchmaking. "We're working on it and it's getting better" isn't the best message, especially when players are still experiencing bad matches. So, I w...

A few weeks ago, we published the first in this series of updates on the game. It’s crazy how much has happened since then! We launched Season 3, announced a collab with One-Punch Man, and I’m now dating Genji! I feel so lucky…

I wanted to dive into two topics today. Season 3 balance and the matchmaker.

We feel that the start of Season 3 is in a much better state of balance than the start of Season 2. We hear from players that balance is the best it’s been since the launch of OW2, while the game feels fresh based on all the changes made. It’s been great watching that discussion, and to foster it, I’d like to give a bit more details and a bit less commentary.

Let’s look at the support role first. On the positive side, most supports are viable in nearly every skill tier. Brigitte has really popped this season and has the highest win rate for nearly all skill tiers except for Top 500, where Zen takes the lead, with both averaging out to a nearly 55% w...

Hello! We're back with another update. We've put out a loooooot of info in the past week, so I don't have as many concrete details to share today. We're going to talk about a few random topics, including values around collab development.

Let's start the update with a...non-update...related to Season 3 balance. While you're reading this on Friday, this piece was written on Wednesday for us to have the time to localize it globally. We don't have a pulse on the balance for Season 3 yet, as our changes have only been live for a few hours. Our aim is to get balance information out to you all on or before my next update and if it looks like there are big issues with balance our intention would be to fix them before the mid-season patch.

The team is also talking about the Arcade. We feel like there are a few issues with this area of the game. Some of the game modes can have very long queue times. This is exacerbated by the fact that we have challenges that requir...

Hi all! We’re back a little earlier than we had originally planned. Think of this as a bonus Dev Chat!

We’re going to mostly focus on maps and level design this go around.

Off we go!

Map Pools… You were right. We were wrong. Map Pools are going away starting in season 4. We aimed to provide a bit of freshness each season and concentrate the number of maps that people were playing, however player sentiment around map pools was pretty low, the map roster doesn’t have enough maps where we truly need them, and the impact they had on seasonal identity was fairly low. Additionally, the cadence for maps leaving and returning to the pool didn’t align with the time it took to make changes to the maps. Gibraltar was supposed to return in Season 4 but the playtesting and iteration we were doing for the map started calling that deadline into question. There’s the possibility that we bring map pools back in the far future when we have...

Hi everyone!

This piece is aimed at looking at some of the topics that have come up in the community over the course of Season 2. This won‘t be comprehensive enough to look at everything that players are talking about, but our intent is to do this every few weeks, so we will be able to start diving into smaller topics as we go. Also, the goal here is to keep you up to date on what we’re thinking and planning, but not necessarily to be the source for all the reasoning and detail behind those decisions.

So let’s get to it!

The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. There was confusion around players’ real rank and how that translated to their skill level, difficulty forming groups with friends, and a negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar). We will be implementing some changes in S3 and quite a few more in S4 all aimed at creating more clarit...