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I've heard that the French perfected scrambled eggs (via my eggs-tensive research on the internet), and so I think it'd be Widowmaker.

the most immediate priority is a balance patch aimed at the double shield meta. this will show up on the experimental card in the next few weeks.

we don't have any reworks immediately imminent for any hero, although we are discussing some.

2cp is more of an ongoing exploration for us. we've tried many, many things and have yet to be satisfied with any of the results.

paris has gotten some attempts at a rework but we weren't pleased with our results, so we paused. we haven't started looking at horizon again yet.

soon

well there are about 200 pros and 50 million casuals.... but we both know you're not asking for that percentage breakdown =]

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we listen to everyone's feedback. it's all important. when it comes to balance, we primarily balance the game around owl, gm/masters.

pizza

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proof: https://i.imgur.com/f0IGPu2.png

we are very excited to explore the overwatch universe in a number of mediums. nothing to announce at this time but we would like this very much.

i play the game everyday. we have multiple playtests daily plus we play for fun on our own time. i love to play all of the heroes but some i really struggle on (doomfist, sombra, sigma). i play a lot of reinhardt, symmetra, mercy these days. i also love hanzo and mccree, although i'm not so great with them.

i think this is a good discussion. but i think a lot of the good points get lost in the echo chamber of the internet. i'll see a good thread, video etc about power creep but then there is a lot of "group think" that happens and you have a bunch of people who think they are agreeing on something, when really they are not.

"power creep is bad!"... "btw buff roadhog, revert rein earthshatter nerf, buff pharah, you should TOTALLY be adding way more new heroes... and they all better do new cool stuff...." ... "oh yeah and power creep is bad!"

personally, i prefer when the conversation is more focused. is time to kill to fast? do we feel like CC is too much? too much/little healing? and then apply all of these to individual heroes....

we've added 11 new heroes to the game since it launched. obviously, the game is going to change when you do that. we just need to evaluate each hero on their own and make adjustments.

my personal feeling is that i would like to see less barriers and cc and see the game trend slightly more in the fps direction than the moba direction

this type of question is very hard to answer because we all now have the benefit of hindsight.

sometimes i wish we had kept offense and defense heroes (rather than merging them into damage) and only allowing offense heroes to be played on attack and defense to be played on defense. i know that idea might sound crazy and stupid but i think it would have allowed us to more "all in" on some "niche" hero designs like Torb, Symmetra and Bastion. much of the issue we face with the hero balance on these heroes is our player expectations that these heroes should be fully viable on all situations, and that really wasn't our intent or vision for the game. we believed that with hero swapping, people would be more willing to adapt to "solve the problem". we're fighting some amount of human psychology and game design, i know.

the sombra arg is another standout... lol

Great questions, here's an answer for a couple of them!

- An unexpected way covid19 has changed our day to day is the impact it has had on meetings. It took a while for people to become more comfortable in online meetings, but now they tend to be more focused and efficient. It's awesome! The engineer in me loves getting more time to write code.

- As far as tips for breaking into the industry in the current climate, I think it's a bit too early to tell how things will change long term. I hope to see a shift industry wide that is more accommodating for remote work. In general I think you should regularly look at open positions at studios you'd be excited to work at and apply as much as you can. Just experience interviewing will be helpful to land the perfect spot.

this is something we're passionate about and exploring.

I play nearly every day. I tend to prefer Zarya, McCree, and Zenyatta. I do a lot of Mystery Heroes with friends I grew up with. They live in Minnesota and I'm in California, Overwatch is one way that I try to keep in touch!

we've tried all sorts of balancing points, including 6 ticks. it solved some issues but created others. the more ticks, the more the defending team feels obligated to sit on the point....

our first goal is to make the mode something that everyone enjoys. you can see by today's experimental card that we try various things to iterate on the game -- just some of them don't work.

for ow2 we have some ideas that will allow for more player agency but nothing is set in stone yet so i don't want to commit to any promises.

and in the spirit of being open, i think the criticism of 2cp is fueled a bit by the echo chamber of certain communities, when overall the maps and modes are not as universally hated as some would have you believe.

the border system will go away with overwatch 2. we want to make sure to recognize your accomplishments but we'll be doing something different for the sequel.

we test the maps a lot. for a very long time. usually if we're patching a map into the live game, we'll do an extended ptr period for testing (same with heroes). for maps that shipped with the game, we tested some of those for years. we don't openly bring in outsiders to test maps early as we have a pretty comprehensive play test and map testing process. sometimes, depending where we're at in a dev cycle, we might bring a map to a trade show (i.e. blizzcon, gamescom etc.) before it goes live.

Ideas like this are what makes workshop so exciting. We've seen some super cool custom games that implement this concept.

the tab screen was an almost religious debate during the development of the game. i think many of us feel like there are other options for us to explore. a big fundamental change is more likely for ow2 than the current live game. but in general the team is interested in giving players more/better ways to examine their own performance. again more likely on an ow2 timeframe.

guilds is a feature that we've always been excited about. many of us worked on world of warcraft and specifically worked on the guild system there. so it's something that's near and dear to us. we have some really cool ideas of how something like that could work with overwatch. unfortunately, from a tech and design standpoint, the feature would be an extremely heavy lift (at least to do it right -- the way we'd want to do it). so not on the near horizon but definitely on our wishlist.

i think everyone on the development team would be extremely excited to do these sorts of things. they usually get bogged down by business/legal types....

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but yeah, if they left it up to the dev team we'd be all over it

Hey there, I can tackle a couple of these!

We haven't seriously considered a public bug tracker. As you call out there are a few benefits that would come from having one, there is a major investment required to manage that system, and process changes for the entire development team. Our development team and QA folks are regularly reviewing bug report forums. It may not seem like issues are noticed but they're almost certainly being tracked.

We don't have a lot to share about OW2 today, but as a general strategy we fix bugs in the earliest version of the game that makes sense. We wouldn't intentionally hold off on a bug fix for OW2 unless there was some major architecture changes required to make the fix.

it's random

Doomfist Parkour

they are all super fun. it's seriously a dream job. most recently, i really liked being involved with sigma. josh and geoff drove the design of the character and qiu was the artist who drew him. but it was a lot of fun to help develop the character. i loved the idea of an absolute genius who is disassociated, who thinks we see what he sees, who thinks we understand physics and the universe the way he does. i loved the idea of a tragic victim who was being used for evil who was not evil himself....

1. aaron did a lot of work on paris but we're still not happy with it. horizon is not on the...horizon (oof bad pun)
2. we always encourage players to spend their credits on things they want. there's nothing on the immediate horizon you need to be hoarding these for outside of event loot boxes
3. i'm not an artist but we like exploring alternate versions of heroes such as "Junker D.Va" sometimes
4. for maestro sigma in particular, that actually started with our composers and audio director. adam, derek and scott had all of this amazing music and we were brainstorming ways of getting it to players. we came up with the idea of "albums" that we were going to release (note: plural) and we thought that doing a mini-event around the first album would be really fun. then we thought about which character would make sense to have a musical skin (obviously lucio was discussed). our animation department had done the amazing conductor emote which was going to be a normal event unlock. we decided to use the emote, create a conductor skin and then release them both to promote the album. super fun process.
5. we've definitely thought about a solo queue but at this time we don't feel like it's necessary or best for overwatch. also, if i were to show you the statistics, you would see that it's an extremely rare case for solo players to be matchmade into group situations larger than 2
6. it's not that i think the system is problematic, it's just not very cool/interesting. we just feel like there are other opportunities
7. haha glad you liked. i have a ton. would be happy to share. for now, if anyone wants to see, just look on youtube for the overwatch archives panel with myself and arnold tsang

tracer plz

Remote support is challenging. Our team regularly works together to support each other, we have chat channels for help, and people utilize that regularly for support. While engineers are often helping the team out with connectivity issues, it really has been a team wide effort to band together and solve problems.

thank you so much for saying that. warms my heart. but i always remind people: overwatch is made by a whole team of amazing developers... i am just one tiny and equal part of that. but thank you.

Our initial launch was a huge challenge. We wanted to release on all platforms (PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4) in all regions at the same time. We put significant effort into performance profiling to ensure our servers would hold up on launch day. There was a huge amount of work involved between engineering and QA to get through the console certification process for both platforms. It was an exciting time, one I'll never forget, and I'm happy with how well it went!

i think the suddenness of transitioning to working from home was a shock for many of us. we had been tracking the pandemic for months and making preparations, but i don't think the reality had sunk in that we were going to have to close down as well. we have offices in shanghai and seoul that had been shut down, so it was something blizzard had been dealing with for months. but the call to close irvine down (that's where the ow team is) came very quickly.

of all things, team 4 -- aka the ow team -- was in the middle of a move when it happened. most of us don't even know where our office stuff is... in some box somewhere in a new office?

the first few weeks were rough. there were a lot of tech and communication hurdles. i am sure you all have dealt with that as well. we were really lucky to have amazing technical staff on team 4 as well as really great blizzard it staff to make it go more smoothly.

now, we're all adjusting in our own ways. personally, i like working from home. in particular i like being around my wife for more of the week -- it's really nice. but i miss the team like crazy. some members of the team feel really isolated. it really depends on the person. i'm worried as hell about everyone and hope everyone is staying safe and healthy.

as for the game, i honestly think some parts are moving faster and some are moving slower... overall, i don't think we're losing time and maybe have even gained some? but that's my biased view and others on the team might feel differently. as game director, i am extremely pleased with the progress on both games in the work from home situation.

absolutely. ana, doomfist, sombra are all examples of this...

maestro

these are cool ideas!

Hey there! Recently we added the ability to specify the server location when creating a custom game. Currently we don't have any plans to expand this to Quick Play or Competitive, but we do see people ask for this occasionally. We have some concerns with how this would be implemented, in particular trying to avoid win trading or match fixing by abusing low population regions.

If you're on PC you can select Americas, Europe, or Asia for your region when you launch Overwatch. That will limit you to servers that are part of that region. Middle East is currently part of the Europe region, you could try to use Americas or Asia to change things up.

Cheers

Hey there, that is also one of my favorite talks! There are a few GDC presentations just a bit after we launched Overwatch, if you haven't seen them all you should check them out! Right now we don't have anything planned for conferences, I think we'll need to see the impacts of covid19 further. Cheers

i just chalk it up to the way gamers talk and communicate.

as a culture (meaning gamers), we use a lot of "mean" language: broken, lazy, cancer etc....

i've just learned to filter that type of communication and focus on whether or not there is an issue. i can get sensitive and hurt... or i can just, you know, do my job.

we read this subreddit all the time. if it's a great idea, it will get visibility

Hey there, we've definitely worked through audio occlusion bugs in the past, but unfortunately there's not a single problem that solves all of the issues. Any time you encounter this if you can post detail on our bug report forums it really helps us dig into that specific issue.

Hey there, great question! Localization is an important part of Overwatch and audio is just one part of that effort. When we're discussing new heroes, new maps, and lore, we make an effort to collaborate with our diverse global team early in the process. A unique aspect of localization for us is empowering our regional teams to help select voice actors and provide early feedback when we're working with content that is from their region.

In general we try to have VO in both English and native language, and tend to alternate which we use based on if the hero is on your team or the other team. There are logistical considerations, for example not all voice actors are multi-lingual.

Audio plays a huge role in Overwatch gameplay. Scott Lawlor, our audio director, and the rest of the audio team are extremely passionate about Overwatch. Their hardwork and creativity result in not a great overall audio experience but also nice touches like the piano in Paris!

we really like the idea of cross-persistence. it's something we would love to see for overwatch. the technical and business hurdles are immense but we are very passionate about trying to make something like this happen someday.

well apparently paris and horizon are the most difficult...

i think bringing blizzard world to life was particularly special for our entire team

i'm so sorry this happened to you. please make sure to report all cases of this. it really does do something and we take this very seriously. we have some ideas we would like to explore to minimize the ability for this to happen. in the meantime, i strongly recommend leaving the profanity filter on.

we're in a really great place to move forward right now. over the past year we were lucky enough to get jeff chamberlain to become our new creative director. jeff was the director of our original announcement piece for overwatch back in 2014 (as well as some amazing blizzard cinematics over the years -- WOTLK intro for example). we've also added some really amazing narrative designers and are partnering with our story and franchise development group (they make the animated shorts, origins movies, comics, statues etc) at an insanely intense level. there are some very cool lore developments coming.

Hey there, the matchmaker COULD be aware of the level of a player but it isn't something that we currently take into account when matchmaking.

The reason we don't specifically take level into account is because it's an indicator of time played on a specific account and not the skill level at which someone performs. While it is true the more you play the more skill you're likely to gain, it's also true that skill gain will be reflected in the matchmaking values as well.

Cheers

we've tried a number of things over the years:

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• changed the capture points to work like control points (meaning KOTH points)
• added defenders spawn rooms closer to point a
• added a "middle" capture point between a and b
• moved the defenders spawn point back on b
• made it so that capture happens regardless of if defenders were on the point

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those are just a few off the top of my head. lots of level design changes.

Hey there, this is a good question. The matchmaking system gains confidence in its evaluation of your skill as you play more games.

we have many years of lore planned for the overwatch universe. there are so many aspects that we're excited about -- far reaching plot lines and individual character arcs. there are also a lot of heroes, places and world groups we want to tell more stories about. we're also excited about telling stories in new ways and using new mediums.

yes the summer games are returning this year. information is coming very soon

the same team that works on and made overwatch is also making overwatch 2. we did find the need to grow the team quite a bit in order to do both and also because overwatch 2 is a much larger game than overwatch. the team that shipped the original game was approximately 70 developers. the team is closer to around 160-170 now. it's a very tricky balance and often very stressful working on two projects at once. the reason we chose to do things the way we did is because we wanted to maintain consistency of vision and direction over the game and the franchise and not make things feel too splintered. for an individual developer, they usually have a clear task that's either for the live game or overwatch 2. but we often find ourselves context switching between the two games.

creating new heroes is a lot of fun. our process is interesting in that new heroes can come from story (76, ana), design (pharah) or art (winston). we really inspire each other with ideas and we'll add different heroes for different reasons. we're always talking about "what does the game need right now"