Overwatch Dev Q&A

Fyra Frost - 23-May-2016, 6:59 pm

In a few hours from now, Overwatch will be going live. Over the span of a week Blizzard has released 2 cinematic shorts giving us a glimpse of the background stories of Hanzo and Genji in "Dragons" and Soldier 76 in "Hero". Blizzard has also had several launch events in several places where they also displayed colossal collectibles of Genji, Pharah, and Tracer. And the latest being the Live Q&A session streamed over Facebook. Here are some tidbits from the session:

The Overwatch graphic novel titled "First Strike" is on the way

Animated shorts - There will be more animated shorts in the future. Jeff Kaplan called the first set as "season 1"

Game modes - they prototype a lot of game modes, some of which might not stand on their own and are better suited as brawls. And that game brawls are the perfect testing grounds for new modes, and might make their way into quick play if successful. Another possible outcome would be that they could be part of the map elements like the moving platforms on Volskaya and Route 66.

Game balance - "triangular" balance approach - they would consider the player feedback and compare it with their own feelings towards game balance as well as compare them with the game statistics(hero performance across different skill levels). There might also be slight differences between console and pc versions, an example sited was how aim assist on the console versions interacted with Symmetra's turrets.

Clan/Guild systems - They consider social features as very important and that they are looking into those systems.

Lastly, Jeff Kaplan ended the Q&A session with a call to the community to be nice to one another.