What are your first thoughts when you hear someone saying "This hero is bad", "This hero is broken" or the like?
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.
How will Achievements in Overwatch be addressed as the game’s balance continues to evolve? Will we eventually have a reliable way of obtaining ultra-rare achievements like Cratered, Rapid Discord and Window of Opportunity one day? Or will achievement hunters be left to fight the insane odds in Quick Play and Competitive games forever?
I understand this question only matters for a niche group of players, but as someone who likes to achievement hunt games to completion, I’m super interested in any opportunity to make getting those sprays depend less on luck and more on skill!
Making adjustments to achievements is extremely tricky, and we have to do it on a case by case basis. We've had to change a few due to some heroes getting larger reworks where an achievement became literally unobtainable, but making very difficult to earn achievements easier can feel bad for those who have put in the time and energy to earn them.
Not a dev but I’m assuming scatter arrow fits the first question
Scatter arrow was pretty straight forward, and then used simple geometry.
Is it going to be increasingly difficult to make her ult work with all new heroes or did you get it to a spot where it'll be easy to just insert new heroes into her ult
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.
Was there any hero abilities that you thought would be easy to implement, but ended up causing major issues, or maybe caused you to completely scrapped the ability? My other question is what is the funniest bug you ever came across during development?
The one that immediately comes to mind is Symmetra's wall ultimate. When we (designers) first talked about it, it seemed pretty simple. Lets just take Reinhardt's shield and scale it way way up, that should be fine right?
Well it turns out... not exactly. There were two major hurdles with this thing.
1) On the gameplay front, a lot of our abilities need to know if they can hit something by checking if the object is just 'in range' of it. Well then it begs the question... 'where' is the shield exactly? For example, we wanted Sombra's EMP to destroy the wall, but it was having trouble finding it unless you were near the 'center' of it, since it was such a wide and flat object.
Gameplay engineering needed to come up with some new tech made just for her wall to allow certain abilities, and other targeting, to understand and be able to hit the wall correctly in different places.
2) On the engine side, having a giant effect cutting through your entire screen, that has transparency to ...
Read moreDo characters that exist in the story (like Mauga, sanjay, dae-hyun) have a chance at being heroes in the future?
absolutely. ana, doomfist, sombra are all examples of this...
Can you give Sigma shoes please, or even socks
maestro
What is an unexpected way Covid impacted your workflow? Do you see it impacting the industry in the future with working from home more?
The workshop was a passion project of a few developers; are there similar projects that are currently being worked on, or some that didn't make the cut?
Who do you personally find the best designed hero in the roster?
And for a bit of a personal question; Do you have any tips on how to break into the industry in the current climate? I recently graduated and it is an awkward time, with some companies just not hiring. Have some priorities for new hires shifted? (Something like a bigger emphasis on independancy to proof you can work from home).
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.
Read moreHave alternative in-game UI's ever been considered as rewards? Or new customizable weapon sounds that only the player can hear?
these are cool ideas!
How has work progress been impacted by the overlooming global pandemic and subsequent social distancing and cancellations? Has work been slowed down significantly, and how has a typical work day changed as a result?
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 pa...
Read moreMy last one, I promise: what's been your biggest challenge with Overwatch to date?
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!
why is tracer unable to recall out of grav when reaper and moira can fade out, while those abilities are on a shorter cooldown? not being able to blink out is understandable
This is understandably super confusing, I totally agree with you. Its sort of came about this way from a chain of rules that really don't even matter anymore necessarily. But heres how it went:
Junkrat trap is made, it blocks movement abilities. Ok cool, lets playtest it. Oh, its weird on Reaper though... is Wraithform a movement ability? It technically makes you faster but doesn't really feel like a movement skill, and being able to wraith (even if you cant move) would feel a lot better. So we go with that.
Later, Zarya's ult gets the 'no mobility' rule added to it. We just follow Junkrat trap's rules, which means Reaper can now escape grav. Hmm maybe this is fine? Lets roll with it, its consistent.
Moira is made. Fade works very similar to Wraithform, we're consistent where can be with the two of them. However, Fade is clearly much more of a mobility skill than Wraithform... so it kind of breaks down in the junkrat trap/zarya ult case, which is where we are now.
This is somethin...
Read moreWas there any hero abilities that you thought would be easy to implement, but ended up causing major issues, or maybe caused you to completely scrapped the ability? My other question is what is the funniest bug you ever came across during development?
Answering from an Art point of view here.. Brigitte Flail - This seems like a straight forward idea, but it turns out making a flail with a extending chain in a 1st/3rd person game can be challenging.
On question 2 - I have seen a lot of crazy bugs, even some from here on this reddit. One that comes to mind was the discovery of 'Depressionwatch' where many of the characters were exported without facial animations. Another OG bug that comes to mind that will always make me laugh was when Widowmaker's butt inflated on reload.
If there was an Overwatch representative for Super Smash Bros who would be the most well fit for it
tracer plz
What about wrecking ball's grapple? Did you ever try to implement it in a way where it can't go through other objects and be entangled?
Please don't give Geoff any ideas! :)
Will Jeff Kaplan be a playable hero in Overwatch 2?
Hmm I've always wanted to do a grappler hero...
Was there any hero abilities that you thought would be easy to implement, but ended up causing major issues, or maybe caused you to completely scrapped the ability? My other question is what is the funniest bug you ever came across during development?
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! :)
Read moreWho was the most fun hero to develop/design?
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....
Settle an argument I had with a friend. In an alternate timeline where Offense and Defense did NOT get merged into the Damage role, would Ashe have released as an Offense or Defense hero?
Hmm tbh I hadn't actually considered this until now. From a 'sniper' perspective, we had generally considered them to be more defensive oriented. But she isn't really a sniper, exactly. On just a whim i'd say Offense, but I could be swayed to make her Defense. I mean, this is basically a big part of why we merged them into one category, at some point it becomes fairly arbitrary feeling.
To anybody: what is your favorite player-made Workshop mode?
Doomfist Parkour
Edit: Adding a bit to this, here's the top 10 for the past week!