Post Script

The final months of a game’s development are a tiring period, but Overwatch creative director Jeff Kaplan isn’t exactly resting up. In addition to monitoring the reams of player feedback Blizzard has amassed since launch, he, like us, has had a few too many late nights playing the thing. Here, he reflects on the relative merits of a passionate community, the key decisions that led to the creation of a very different online FPS, and where it might be headed in the future. You’ve made an online shooter with no deathmatch, no scoreboards and no gear game. Was it a conscious decision to make something that rejected genre standards, or did it just happen organically? It was very conscious. We wanted to, on one hand, embrace what we thought was special and magical about the FPS. It’s not like it was an untapped genre: some of the greatest games of all time have been FPSes. But at the same time we wanted to bring something new to the genre. Otherwise, why make a game? If we didn’t have something new to say, we shouldn’t do it.

There were some things we really wanted to look at. In particular we wanted to make a game about heroes, not classes. We felt tantamount to it all was that you would work together. To get the right team vibe going, there were certain decisions that needed to be made, in terms of game modes and user interface, that led to where we’re at now with Overwatch.

It’s been amazing to see so much praise about things like the decision to not display a K:D ratio, or the fact that we excluded Team Deathmatch. Because when we first announced the game, very few people got to play it, and there was immediate demand for those things. There was this moment where we needed to prove it to players. Let us give you the game and play it, and hopefully you’ll understand. I think there’s a collective understanding now of why we made those decisions. Yet there are still calls for a deathmatch mode. Surely you’ve gone too far down the road to put one in now? Yes and no. We don’t feel like deathmatch is about what Overwatch is about. I always cite characters like Mercy or Lucio: they don’t really have a place if we create a game mode that’s just about killing other players. But we’re trying to create a lot of exploration space, and there are two elements we’re open to providing players with – I don’t know how to phrase this – almost their own creativity outlet. There’s the Weekly Brawl, where we feel we can break all the rules and try a bunch of stuff. If we ever stumble across something that’s amazing, it could become a core part of the game. The other place is our custom game feature – [perhaps] we could give players a deathmatch mode in custom games.

But when it comes to the core game, there’s a vision that makes Overwatch tick. And while it might not seem like it on the surface, there are certain things that work very well for the heroes and the gameplay, and there are certain things that work directly against them. We see that most often when people bring up new game modes. What differences are you seeing between the way the game is played on console and PC? It’s too early to tell. We had a much longer beta period on PC than on console, so it’s hard to look at the stats right now. The thing we keep our eye on most on console is aim assist. That’s very tricky to tune – there’s a sweet spot to where the game feels good; it becomes more of an expression of what you were trying to do as a player, versus feeling too strong and like it’s playing the game for you. We ran a thorough internal beta, and did a lot of consulting with our sister companies who have a lot of experience on console.

The other thing we keep an eye out for on console – and on PC as well, but we have a special caution for the console versions – is anything that’s AI-driven that shoots at you. We expect them to be effective, but we don’t want to see a drastic difference in effectiveness in Torbjörn’s turret on console versus on PC. We’re not seeing anything like that currently, but if we do we’ll tune the game differently. We’re not bull-headed about it; we’ll make the right calls for the different platforms. You’re bombarded with feedback from all angles. How do you make sense of it all? There’s a feedback triangle for the health of a game. At the top is the loud player voice, which comes to us in various ways: emails, Reddit, forums, social media. But we can triangulate that with our own feelings – as players as well as devs – and actual data. It’s wrong to assume any one of those things is absolutely correct; we like to use those three to balance against each other.

For example, right now players are saying they feel McCree is overpowered. Rather than immediately change him, we put it through its paces. How do we feel about him, as the Overwatch team? Then let’s look at the statistics to see how he’s doing in the game itself. It’s not like all three of those things need to say the same thing, but it’s good to have a system of checks and balances so we’re not rashly making decisions based on the loudest voice. We’re not going, like, “Oh my god, this Reddit thread got upvoted 2,000 times and it says ‘Remove Genji from the game’.” We’re not removing Genji from the game! But you would be doing yourself a disservice as a game developer if you weren’t constantly listening to community feedback. It’s the most valuable thing we have.

“We wanted to make a game about heroes, not classes. We felt tantamount to it all was that you would work together”