blizz_jlafleur

The Overwatch team was formed from the ashes of Titan, and much smaller in size. While we learned a lot during that development, it certainly was a blow to our confidence, as any set-back can be. But the one thing we knew we had from the beginning was each other and we bonded together extremely well. Getting that confidence back and making it to the success of the Overwatch announce at BlizzCon was a big hurdle to overcome. Our trust in one-another and the incredibly open and supportive atmosphere we have on the team really enabled us to get over that.

That's disgusting.... ;)

We don't have any plans to remove it. If anything, we'd like it to be able to leverage some of our improved and new features to make it even better. We don't have a full picture of Workshop for launch, at the moment, though.

Great question. As hardware has advanced since the launch of Overwatch, we are extending the OW2 engine with more high-end features. However, we're also working hard to make sure all of our platforms get the best experience, even in PvE. Switch is a little more challenging than some, and we'll have to make some compromises there. For that reason, some of the higher end visual enhancements might not be visible, there. We'll focus on making sure all of the gameplay-related features get in, first, and then accentuate with additional features as much as possible.

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.

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! :)

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.

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.

We've been doing a substantial amount of work in the areas of AI for Overwatch 2... which is probably obvious given that we'll have PvE. :) Much of those improvements should apply across the game, workshop included. But Workshop plans for OW2 are still quite fluid.

Aaron would love it if we could get this in! Unfortunately, that's a really complicated problem for us given how our asset system works. We've tried, and will continue to try, to expand workshop as much as we can to extend custom creation as far as possible. But custom assets is a massive challenge. It's been something we've wanted to give to the community for years, but up to now we just haven't found the right way to deliver it without an unrealistic investment of resources.

I answered this in a question a bit further up, but I'll repost, here, just in case you miss it:

We're pretty excited about the possibilities of cross-play and cross-progression, but we don't have anything to announce, today. However, given the additional complexities of cross-progression, it would probably make most sense to tackle cross-play, first and then explore progression as a potential add-on, if we go this route.

We're pretty excited about the possibilities of cross-play and cross-progression, but we don't have anything to announce, today. However, given the additional complexities of cross-progression, it would probably make most sense to tackle cross-play, first and then explore progression as a potential add-on, if we go this route.

All parts of the team collaborate in the creation of the heroes. Heroes are usually available to play in team playtests months before they will come out. So we all get a look into them in an extremely early state.

The game engine is a good bit more flexible in development than it is in retail, so often the designers have what they need to make something work; we just need to make a pass to control the performance and efficiency of the heroes so that they will function well on all our supported hardware. On occasion, like with Echo, we need to do more significant rewrites of systems so that we can get things within a shipping budget.

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.

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.

The biggest challenge, in that regard, was how we handle the budgets around the heroes and how we handle loading. It was tough, but we found a solution that would work (with some compromises). It should be okay for additional heroes, as well. But the imagination of our hero designers never ceases to amaze me, so perhaps I should knock on wood.

Bill hit some good ones. I'll add that another challenge is that we cannot just walk around the office seeing the cool things that everyone is working on or engaging in random conversations about what we can help with. We still have some of those over tele-conferencing, but it isn't as impromptu.

As to your "passion project" question, there are a lot of those on the team. From evolving the gameplay to introducing new, previously unplanned graphics features, to enhancing the effects in our game and even novel ways to reduce memory or load times. Every member of the team has their specific passions and areas of expertise and they often manifest in unplanned ideas that make the game so much better. I spoke about some of this at last BlizzCon, but it is an ongoing thing. We even have a week or two a year where we all think "outside of the box" about things we can add to the game that are awesome.

Please don't give Geoff any ideas! :)

I had another reply where I mentioned the challenges of Echo, which has, arguably, our most difficult ability from a technical perspective. But, to be honest, we knew that one was going to be challenging going in. However, what I have found is that even with the "simplest" of abilities, we often find that they are harder than we thought. Often this is because we expand on our original ideas as we develop the hero. Other times it just is unanticipated challenges. One example of the latter is Moira. Her animation was very challenging and took a lot of work from our tech art and animation teams to get correct.

As for funniest bug, I don't have one that is popping into my head that is actually funny. There are a lot that seemed funny when on very little sleep, but not so much after a good night's rest! :)

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.