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BlizzCon 2017 Interview: Jeff Kaplan & Bill Warnecke discuss Overwatch, esports, Moira, and more.

Our team had a chance to sit down with Jeff Kaplan, Game Director, and Bill Warnecke, Lead Software Engineer, Reliability. Jeff and Bill are active users on our subreddit (lurking and sometimes posting) and we were able to ask them your questions about Overwatch and working at Blizzard.

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Overwatch's Engine and Console Roots

turikk: I’m going to start off with an engineering question- so people asked. People are really curious about the engine used for Overwatch. Can you guys talk about what language it’s written in? Is there any kind of special scripting?

Bill: One of my favourite parts about working on Overwatch is that we got to do new tech. So our engine is completely in-house, custom built by John Lafleur, our former lead engine programmer, now tech director. It’s been a labour of love. Blizzard games are so different game to game, so when we set out with Overwatch, we’re looking at our requirements and building our engine off of those. It’s written in C++, we have an internal scripting language called statescript; which is how we empowered Jeff to do crazy things in game…

Jeff: PLACE HEALTH PACKS

Bill: … that he probably shouldn’t have done.

Jeff: It’s the other guys who do crazy stuff, I just move the health packs.

Bill: The really magical thing about the engine is that it was built with the goal in mind of working on three separate platforms; PC, Xbox and PS3. The system we built runs on all of those platforms natively, so, if we run a test on PC, we get that coverage on console, which has been huge for us.

turikk: So console was kind of like a day 1 plan?

Jeff: Absolutely.

turikk: Awesome.

Jeff: There’s actually a funny story behind that, and this is super insider. We had not yet signed our development contract with Microsoft or Sony, but we had developed our game from day 1 to be on PlayStation and Xbox. We had the game fully running on PlayStation and, before the actual development contract was out, we had all the top Sony execs around to try and get a deal made. We actually had to hide all the console controllers and PS4 stuff and pretend like it’d be a lot of work for us to get it going on there.

Overwatch PvE Modes

turikk: Every year, we get questions about a PvE mode from a bunch of people. Do you guys have any updates on a permanent PvE mode outside of events?

Jeff: It’s something we’re super interested in. If you look at our team makeup; Scott Mercer, Geoff Goodman, they were two leading designers on WoW who did loads of awesome boss fights. Then we’ve got Mike Heiberg who did loads of StarCraft campaign missions. There’s a huge PvE pedigree on the team and we’re super interested in it, but the thing people sometimes overlook is that our engine is built from the ground up - and it’s brand new. There are a lot of different ‘moving parts’. Even getting the smallest AI to path and move across the map is a big deal for us. We know people want a PvE mode, but when people ask us to make our current modes permanent, we don’t feel they’d be replayable enough. To get to the point where PvE is its own thing, in that regard, is almost like talking about a new game. We’re going to continue doing cool stuff like Junkenstein; but at its core, Overwatch, the game everyone’s playing, is a 6 player action shooter.

Bill: On an engineering note, working with a design team that’s incredibly creative... if we haven’t provided the tools for them to make something happen, it’s a painful experience. When you’re creative and you want things to happen in the game, you need to set yourself up to be able to do that. The current modes are great because they’re compartmentalising the scope of the PvE, which allows us to do the best job possible with the tools we have.

Moira, Creating Content Based On Community Feedback

BoozyPelican: We had some Moira-specific questions, too. One in particular was talking about country of origin. In the process of making a character, how often does nationality come into play? Is it an early character influence, or does it come later in the design?

Jeff: It sort of comes hand in hand. As we come to terms with characters, it becomes more obvious where that character should come from- and we have some locations that we really want to explore. The lore guys working on the comics have been planting the seeds of locations we want to visit. With Moira we narrowed quickly into a couple of different locations, but we were dying to do someone from Ireland. We thought it really fit the character aesthetic- such as her red hair, which we think is gorgeous. There’s another aspect we take a lot of pride in, and that is that Blizzard is an international company. For instance, we actually have a huge international support centre in Cork, Ireland, so we thought it would be cool to give the Blizzard folks overseas something to be proud of. I’m not saying that was the driving factor, but it’s something we’re proud of.

BoozyPelican: Focusing on her origins, how did she come together as a hero? Was she around a long time or was she more reactionary? Lots of people felt like Moira was the team listening to the community. How much outside influence came into it, as opposed to what you guys had ‘in the bank’, so to speak?

Bill: We play the game a lot, and we see the same things players do. When we have a hero in dev and we start to see those threads on reddit, and we’re in sync movement-wise, it feels amazing. That was the case with Moira. We were feeling there was a hole inside OW for a hero like her and, as we developed her, we saw the community asking for her, and that felt so great.

Jeff: We had something similar happen for Horizon and Junkertown, which were in production at the same time and people were asking which would come first. We saw a bunch of threads pop up on Reddit worrying about which map would come first, and we literally had both in production and were like “oh thank God, we picked right”. We want the answer to be “it was completely the community”, but the reality is that we’re not entirely separate to it. We’re people who play the game and get frustrated by the same things others do. When we think of the game, lore, esports, we’re having the same wants and desires as you guys; “Boy I wish we had more healing options”, “wouldn’t you love a map in this part of the world”. So, in a lot of ways, it’s reaffirming that what we want lines up with you guys sometimes.

Mercy, PTR Process

turikk: Mercy. So uhh…

Jeff: WHAT’S THERE TO TALK ABOUT WITH MERCY?

turikk: So we all know Mercy’s had some big changes, including one to her core ability, resurrection. Do you guys find it difficult to make changes to kits that are core parts of the identity?

Jeff: Yes.

turikk: Okay. [studio laughter] Next question!

Jeff: Mercy is a challenge, and great example of that. At this point in Overwatch's age, people are very emotionally attached to the characters, which is what we want. There are times we want to be extremely careful about making change - we always say, in videogames: any change is bad. It doesn’t matter what the change is, any time you change what a player thinks about something it’s bad and scary. In the case of mercy, what we’d run into was the fantasy of what the character exactly was: primary healer, angelic mobility, diving to people to save them with rez as a very defining ability.

The problem with it was that the ‘right way to play’ her had developed into actually stopping healing sometimes. There were certain moments where Mercy would drop off, knowing it was the right thing to do (she could bring you and four of your buddies back in a smart play), but it felt wrong for everybody else. The other thing was that teams could set up awesome Zarya/Pharah combo s- graviton into rocket barrage, only for them to be erased entirely, and that was super frustrating.

turikk: Have you ever thought about removing resurrect altogether?

Jeff: We talk about it because the community talks about it; it comes up threads a lot. But it feels very extreme, and it doesn’t feel like we’re doing our job if we don’t try to balance it first. People complain that we don’t listen to PTR feedback, but we really try to. But I want people to go back and read threads during the period when we first put Valkyrie on the PTR. The two leading things we heard were -- from Mercy mains -- we heard that she was awful now and she’d never be played again, and from non-Mercy mains was that she was a DPS killing machine. That was the level of feedback we got from the PTR. We didn’t get a lot of talk about the resurrect coming back too quickly. It took for us to start watching pro players and playing the game ourselves for us to say “this is out of hand”.

Our goal now on the PTR is to fix it: we have 10 different fixes to try if this one doesn’t work out. We’ve tried a bunch of them internally and feel comfortable enough with this one to put it onto the PTR. This week, even, between BlizzCon rehearsals, we’ve been sitting on the PTR and testing Mercy for balance. We think she’s in a decent place now: it feels great when you’re resurrected and it’s a little less devastating for the other team. If it’s not, though, I hope everybody has faith that we can do another patch- we’re never at the end of testing and trying. We don’t want Mercy to go away, but we don’t want rez to define her.

Bill: One question [I saw] talked about speed of [change] iteration. One source looked at the speed of Lucio changes versus Mercy changes. With Mercy, it’s a lot of watching people play and seeing how that affects a match. With Lucio, the feedback is very quantitative and easy for us to apply. So, it’s easier to get quicker iterations out for Lucio than Mercy, because Mercy has a more overarching balance effect on the game.

SpriteGuy_000: There’s a subreddit called LucioRollouts, and they were impressively particular with how Lucio changes affected how he felt in-game.

Jeff: That’s super helpful, having that level of expertise. I’m jealous that I’m not one of those Lucios. I’m the Lucio who puts his heal song on and stays at the back, wishing his was stanky.

Overwatch League

turikk: Do you guys see more ways of supporting pro teams? Purchasing sprays, skins, etc.?

Jeff: Yeah, we’re super committed to Overwatch League. I hope the World Cup push we did shows our level of investment in and commitment to Overwatch League at a professional level, but also contenders, Overwatch open. World Cup is the coolest thing ever, I can’t wait for the matches to begin… well, to go home later and watch the VOD (haha).

turikk: We're missing the semifinals right now!

Jeff: I see a lot of people angry at the Overwatch team, telling us not to waste time on it. We think some of the esports stuff we’re doing can be cool for everyone; if everyone can get cool new skins, that’s great! There are also things people haven’t even been talking about yet: team colouring might take us a while, but it’ll also help us do some new colour-blind stuff we couldn’t do before. We can make it best for all players.

turikk: Like going to the moon: not everyone’s going to go, but the effects are definitely going to trickle down.

Jeff: Yeah!

turikk: Will it upset you to have Houston beat LA yet again? [editor's note: Houston, turikk's hometown, recently defeated LA in the 2017 World Series of Baseball]

Bill: YES.

Jeff: We were smart with the Overwatch League, we’re doubling up the odds of LA winning any title.

Flash Forward Events

turikk: Someone asked whether we’d ever see a flash forward event into the future of the Overwatch world.

Jeff: That is a killer idea, that’s super awesome.

turikk: Okay, that’s the best answer we’re getting!

Lore On Standby

BoozyPelican: Another question I saw was asking about how much lore was stored in the bank? Do you create a little bit every so often just before releasing it? How much is put together well in advance?

Jeff: Mixed. Look at the animated shorts, those take months. I’m trying to think back to when we started the Reinhardt short, but it’s been months. All of the shorts are driving somewhere. I often see the fans saying “the shorts aren’t going anywhere”, but let’s back up for a moment. You didn’t know what exactly happened between Balderich and Reinhardt, and you need to know. It’s cool to watch the OR-15s etc., but there’s also a specific moment happening for Reinhardt in that short. Brigitte is telling him “you’re too old, it doesn’t matter what Winston says, you can’t do this”. We’ve realised that older, more mature RH still feels his call of duty, because of what happened with Balderich.

We know all the pipeline for the next few months. We have it basically figured out for years, but we leave ourselves an agility to react to whatever people are into. Sometimes they ask about a character from a comic, they think they’re super cool - people have noticed Maximillian and the queen in Junkertown, what’s the plan with those? Those aren’t just accidental, we didn’t just create random characters to figure out later! Moira was in the Masquerade comic, and everyone was wondering who that evil dude was, and we were sitting in the office saying THAT’S YOUR NEXT HERO! So we have a lot of it figured out, but we love to play off of what people are reacting to, as well.

Blizzard World Deathmatch, Korean Shouting

turikk: Question from discord: any plans for Blizzard World for deathmatch?

Jeff: That would be awesome, deatchmatch has been super fun. Do you want to talk about it, Bill?

Bill: I love deathmatch, it brought something to the game we totally didn’t expect. It’s been interesting to see how it played out on Chateau vs other maps that were made in a different style. Experimenting with it something we do a lot as a team. I don’t think we have a specific aim to try it, but anything could happen.

Shouting in the background

Jeff: Do we need to creatively come up with an excuse for what happened over there?

Bill: Maybe we just invite them in.

SpriteGuy_000: Are they watching the finals? I heard Korean.

Jeff: When you interview with Korean press, they ask you to do the most ridiculous things ever, and I’m glad the rest of the world hasn’t caught up with that.

Balance on Console

turikk: Any balance changes for Pharah/Mercy on console?

Jeff: No, we often get questions like that and it’s really challenging for us. People often ask when we’re going to change Ana on console. We talk about it a lot - about when we should make balance changes separately for console and PC. But oftentimes, when we hear questions like this, the bigger picture is asking whether we need to make changes to Ana on all platforms. We take one step at a time - we think there’s a problem with Ana, for instance, on every platform. So, let’s tweak her on all platforms first, and if there’s still problems on console, we’ll take a look at console. Of course, before we do something like instantly tuning her balance on her, we look at things like aim assist on her shot. There are additional axes available to us on console, that aren’t big scary balance changes like upping her damage or healing rates.

Custom Game SR Filter

turikk: Skill rating filter for custom games?

Jeff: Awesome question, love the idea, it’s just a killer idea we should implement. [Looks to Bill] We’ve talked about it before!

World of Warcraft Classic

[editor's note: Jeff Kaplan was a quest designer on early World of Warcraft before climbing the ranks to become Game Director. He stepped down in early 2009 to work on the "unannounced MMO" that would later be known as Project Titan.]

turikk: Bonus question, you having worked on WoW, what do you think about WoW classic?

Jeff: I think classic is a great idea. I have great nostalgia for what the game was. I think people need to be careful about what they think the magic was versus what it actually was. I don’t think what made the classic servers great was the shitty quests. I’m allowed to say that because I wrote all of them. [studio laughter]

turikk: You'll have to answer for Stranglethorn Vale again.

Jeff: ...and then they deleted them all in Cataclysm, that was the "hey-Jeff’s-off-the-team" update! [studio laughter]

I don't think it was my old crappy quests that made World of Warcraft great. What I think made old World of Warcraft great was the sense of community: that there wasn't dungeon finder. People don’t know this, but the server concurrency was a lot smaller than it is today, purely because of technology we couldn’t fit as many people on a server. When the game first launched, there were no server transfers, we didn't have server coalescing. There are a lot of systems in place now that I think actually make WoW a better game, that contributed to there being a small the community... people are going to be in shock at some things that were in classic WoW. Think about flying your griffin ... you had to go stop-by-stop, clicking each link. You couldn't go grab a beer while you flew across the world.

Everyone: Unarmed skill! UBRS! Onyxia Cloak!

Jeff: Remembering that the auction house wasn’t linked, so the server communally had to decide "I guess it's Ironforge and Orgrimmar, sorry other cities I guess we're never going to go to you". I think it’s really cool, and I think there’s more to do in that direction, but to me, I think the cool nostalgia is - getting back to - how do we create that the sense of small community within a larger game. It’s not so much about giving me Burning Crusade or vanilla exactly -- I think it’s a red herring that people have latched onto too hard. It’s the community, not the game.

BoozyPelican: The technological limits actually helped the community, in a way. You could become infamous on a server, there were names, and you could be known for causing trouble -- people would know what you're known for.

Jeff: Oh yeah…

BoozyPelican: The technology wasn’t so seamless, you couldn’t smoothly transfer servers, and that really shaped the community.

Jeff: I think there’s actually a huge lesson here that applies to all games. All of game design is a tradeoff. Oftentimes, people look at design decisions in black and white; it’s right or wrong, you’re dumb for not doing this, and why aren't you listening to us, it should be this way. But it’s actually full of subtlety and nuance in every single design decision. I think it's less about black and white or what’s right or wrong, people mostly just think about what they’re gaining. But the thing players really need to think about is what asking for certain changes forces them to give up.

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Special thanks to Blizzard for providing Media passes for our team to attend and interview developers, and also for their continued support of this subreddit and our community. Also thanks to everyone who submitted questions on Reddit and in Discord.

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