JEFFREY KAPLAN
From what we’ve seen so far – a single mission set in rollerblading healer Lucio’s hometown, Rio de Janeiro – that passion comes through. The closest thing we can compare it to is a Destiny Strike: you’ve got a team of four predetermined heroes pushing through a map that gives you a series of objectives. And a lot of cannon fodder. Using your now-customisable abilities, some tight communication and a lot of firepower, you can wrap one of these missions up in about half an hour.
The level design is unlike anything we’ve seen in Overwatch before, too. Previously, we’ve had maps that lean on one colour profile in order to create a harmonious, non-confusing background. Maps are made with ‘washes’ of colour – making the bright, well-defined character silhouettes pop over the top. Temple Of Anubis, for example, is all about gold: you’ve got gold relics, golden sands, golden sunlight on stone. When you’ve got to keep track of 11 other players at any one time, these maps are perfect: sightlines, vantage points and bottlenecks all work as they’re designed to, and there’s some visual flavour there to make them interesting, even on your 700th skirmish on that map.
But the new maps for Story mode are easily twice as big as anything that’s appeared in Overwatch before. They are still connected by one central theme, but are zoned off to better control rhythm and pace. That ‘colour wash’ the design team loves so much is still present, but you might get five different kinds of wash in one map instead of one. It weaves a story together – subconsciously communicating progression, danger, respite, unease.
These missions play well, but they’re nothing new. It’s nice to get to play Overwatch in a cooperative way outside one of the game’s seasonal modes, sure, but these missions aren’t going to change the world. It’s the characterisation in them that make them worth playing. One of the most delightful design touches in Overwatch has always been the context-based character interactions – Torbjörn and Reinhardt bantering with each other in the spawn room before the start of each round, cyborg ninja Genji thanking Mercy for bringing him back to life “again” if a
teammate uses her Resurrect ability on him during play – that helped flesh out certain relationships and story beats. Overwatch 2’ s story missions make the absolute most of the idea. Watching Brazilian DJ-cum-freedom fighter Lucio seeing his favourite record store get blown up as you fight to save Rio de Janeiro is surprisingly motivating. Listening to the still-uncertain Mei discover her confidence as she finds her feet as part of the core Overwatch team is heartwarming. Hearing Tracer spout silly Britishisms as she formulates a plan of attack – it all weaves together to give a more complete idea of what Overwatch is, of what function these characters serve in this world.
Blizzard has even gone into the engine to make this more subtle kind of storytelling work in-game. Jeff Kaplan – director of what is now the Overwatch series – tells us the engine has been retooled so the development team can focus on intimate storytelling, on making the characters’ faces more expressive. It’s all getting very Disney, and that works wonders for a game that prides itself on its characters.
“A lot of what we wanted to do was to be able to get those really close-up, emotional reactions from characters in the Story missions,” explains Lafleur. “We’ve never really had the chance to do that before. Now, all the new tech and art we’ve put in has been to ensure that it’s possible to tell a story with a character, with their face.”
There’s a cinematic at the end of the Rio de Janeiro level designed almost exclusively to show this off. The Overwatch team shuts down a Null Sector dropship that’s been pumping Omnic (again, read: robot) forces into the city. A very ‘third act’-feeling escape plays out, seeing Tracer, Reinhardt and Mei escape the clutches of the enemy. But Mei, still plagued by selfdoubt about her worth in a legendary, world-saving outfit like Overwatch, watches as Lucio gets caught in the blast and the ship goes down. Her mouth wobbles, her eyes grow wide, she calls out in distress. It’s over in a flash, but it leaves an impact. It’s clear Blizzard has invested a lot in the new facial animations, in the new geometry and rigging that’s been overhauled to make the characters’ eyes more expressive.
THE NEW MAPS ARE EASILY TWICE AS BIG AS ANYTHING THAT’ S APPEARED IN OVER WATCH BEFORE
IT’S CLEAR BLIZZARD HAS INVESTED A LOT IN THE NEW FACIAL ANIMATIONS, IN THE NEW GEOMETRY
“We don’t do technology for technology’s sake. That’s a Blizzard motto,” Lafleur says. “Rarely will we do a technical demo unless we feel it’s going to serve the game. But there’s a lot of things we’ve changed for Overwatch 2 – shadows and lighting are far more dynamic, screen space and occlusion is much better defined than it was before and so on. But everything we’ve changed has been done to serve the game, and to serve the story we’re trying to tell.”
That said, Blizzard is very much aware that you can’t just crowbar any old story into a game worldfamous for its PvP and have people lap it up. If anything, the audience is going to be more critical of the story than ever. Marvel, DC and the comics culture heavyweights have normalised these highstakes, action-led narratives in cinema, but making an interactive story where the world is in danger and only you can save it? That requires a rather different approach. Overwatch is known, after all, for its tight and endlessly replayable multiplayer action. You wouldn’t want a bloated and predictable story to undermine that.
“One thing that’s important to us is that we don’t let the story drive the game to a point where it won’t be fun for the player,” Lafleur says. “The first thing about all of our games is that the gameplay has to be fun. We were very careful to make sure that, as we crafted the story, every element of it would make for an interesting mission or interesting gameplay for the players. You can’t just tell a typical story when you’re thinking like that – that won’t make for a very good game. But it’s something we’re used to doing at Blizzard, and the help of Story And Franchise has been great for that.”
Every new chapter comes with new characters, at least in the Overwatch world. The game launched with just 21 heroes – we’ve seen that roster swell by ten more in three years. You can rest assured that more will come with Overwatch 2 (Sojourn, the first black woman in the game, has been confirmed; fanfavourite flying android Echo, meanwhile, turned up in an Overwatch 2 animated short, and from Kaplan’s past comments seems all but set to become a playable character in the sequel). In fact, Blizzard tells us that
it wants the multiplayer meta to be ‘in chaos’ when the new game launches – the studio wants the competitive scene to be in as much disarray as it was when Blizzard first added D.Va, Mei and Genji into the beta back in the day.
Aside from the pair of aforementioned Overwatch allies, who else can we expect to join in on the action? Nothing is confirmed yet, but it sounds as though Blizzard isn’t ruling out more outlandish designs. “Every so often, we’ll do this thing where we’ll get everyone on the team to just go ‘Crazy hero ideas – let’s go!’” Lafleur laughs. “Everyone will do a thumbnail of what the hero might be, what their abilities might be, and once – just entirely in jest – someone even came up with a hero that was a pizza. So we get some crazy ideas out of these sessions.
“We do it because it’s a great time to burn off steam, but we do get some great ideas out of these meetings. We still have some of these ideas, actually, that are back-burnered.”
Perhaps Overwatch’s most out-there character so far was born out of one of these meetings. Wrecking
Ball – piloted by an overgrown hamster called Hammond – was a blue-sky long-shot character at one point, but Blizzard found a way to make it work in the tight gears of Overwatch meta. “Anything is possible for these heroes,” Lafleur acknowledges. “What drives us to them is simply, ‘What is their story, and what is the message we’re trying to get across with them? What could their abilities be?’ When those three things go together and we have a nice story that everyone engages with, suddenly it gels and we can start making plans to put it into the game. But there’s little pieces of all kinds of things we play around with.”
Whatever new heroes are going to land in Overwatch 2 will no doubt complement the freshly redesigned roster, too. Arnold Tsang, assistant art director on Overwatch 2, tells us that even though the sequel is designed to redefine Overwatch, the heroes still need to be identifiable – after all, players have spent hundreds of hours knowing exactly where to shoot these character models. Blizzard doesn’t want to invalidate years of fine-tuned muscle memory.
“It’s important to us that our characters are immediately recognisable to everyone,” Humphreys explains. “People know and love these characters, and we want to make sure they maintain the relationship they’ve had with them so far. We talk a lot internally about drawing inspiration from other sources – just look at the superhero characters over the years.
“Jeff Kaplan has talked about Batman, but I’m more of a Marvel person, so I prefer to think about Iron Man, right? He’s had a lot of looks over the years, across the comics, the Marvel movies and whatever else. But every time you look at him, you know that’s Iron Man – there’s never any confusion. But as a fan, there’s a lot of excitement and attachment in seeing how that character has evolved over the years. And that’s something we’re excited to do with our heroes as well. We want the visual appearance to represent not only the upgrades from a technical standpoint – what they’ve done to their armour and so on – but also the progression of time in the story.”
It’s the little details that make Overwatch’s subtle storytelling so noteworthy. Reinhardt – the big German tank who’s best described as an ‘engine-powered knight’ – had the number ‘08’ painted onto his armour in the first game. In the sequel, thanks to the talents of Swedish support character and adept engineer Brigitte, he’s upgraded, now sporting ‘09’ on his suit.
But there’s more to the story. Back in Project Titan (the game Overwatch used to be before Blizzard retooled it), there was a huge character called Juggernaut. By the time the development team got to the eighth design iteration of Juggernaut, Blizzard took the character concepts from Titan and slotted them into a prototype version of Overwatch. Juggernaut became Reinhardt on his eighth pass, and that number on his shoulder was a homage to that. Now Brigitte gets to carry that legacy forward.
Elsewhere, you’ll see characters such as Bastion and Torbjörn – who didn’t pick up Winston’s recall request to rejoin Overwatch – and they’re a lot more casual in appearance than they were back in the first
game. Bastion, for some reason, has even taken Torbjörn’s cap – a preposterous-looking thing for a robot with a barely recognisable face to do. And yet it’s a decision that’s charming, unique, and oozing with character.
These little human touches, this talent for delivering narrative through these tiny blink-and-you’ll-miss it details, is pure Overwatch. And it ties into this feeling that this is a game about human characters – even the nonhuman ones – growing and living cheerfully in a world on the brink of collapse (a metaphor that’s distressingly apposite for 2019). Overwatch’s latent optimism was easy to miss in the first game – it was just a bunch of cartoon characters shooting each other, after all – but here, as the camera swings to focus on this living world and its intrepid heroes, Blizzard seems ready to reinforce the game’s optimism and make it stand out from the grimdark drudgery of so much else that’s brooding in the big-budget shooter market.
“At a character level, everyone in Overwatch has something to bring to the team, and that really
"AT A CHARACTER LEVEL, EVERYONE IN OVER WATCH HAS SOMETHING TO BRING TO THE TEAM”
resonates with me,” Humphreys says. “Making these compelling, interesting heroes that are all very different from each other and that all have something to say… that’s a very positive message as we’re looking out across the world and thinking about how we can bridge divides.”
In the wake of recent controversies surrounding Blizzard’s harsh reaction to a pro-Hong Kong Hearthstone player, and continued gaffes at board level regarding player expression and censorship, it’s refreshing to see that the game’s developers themselves are still grounded and hopeful – committed to the utopian spirit the game is built on. Every member of staff we ask about Overwatch 2 is genuinely emotional, with multiple staffers telling us they cried during the game’s reveal at the BlizzCon 2019 opening ceremony. “This is a bright hopeful world, this is a world that need heroes, and this is a world that sees everything for what it could be… and not for what it is right now,” says Humphreys. “I am so excited to work on something that’s telling that story.”
Jeffrey Kaplan started his Blizzard career in 2002 as a quest designer on MMORPG World Of Warcraft; nowadays, he’s vice president of Blizzard Entertainment, and lead designer on the Overwatch series. Here, the public face of the biggest hero shooter on the planet – known as Papa Jeff to his many fans – explains the need for a sequel, ponders what an Overwatch endgame might look like, and prepares to reclaim the storytelling torch from the game’s playerbase.
What’s your definition of a sequel, and how does Overwatch 2 fit it?
A sequel is a brand-new game, with new gameplay and features as well as an evolution of the game world.
Overwatch 2 is clearly a sequel by my definition. We’ve more than doubled the team size from the original game to make Overwatch 2. The game will feature a brand-new core game mode called Push, plus multiple new maps for this mode. We’ll be introducing a full suite of new PvP maps to the game – what you would expect from a sequel to any shooter – including multiple new maps for every existing game mode currently in the game, as well as Push.
We’re introducing full-featured PvE (not just our simple seasonal content of the past) that will include a complete ‘story experience’ with a full set of story missions pushing the narrative of
Overwatch forward through gameplay for the first time. We’re also working on a highly replayable cooperative feature we call Hero Missions that will be powered by a progression system that will allow each hero to level up and gain new powers. We will also be introducing multiple new heroes. The engine is getting a lot of great updates as well, and at BlizzCon we showed off the new hero looks and brand-new user interface. Overwatch 2
is an order of magnitude larger than the original game, and therefore we consider it a sequel.
How far do you think the definition of a sequel has changed in the game industry in recent times?
The definition – until this point – has not changed. In terms of shooters, you get a new campaign, new multiplayer maps, new progression and unlocks. And that’s what a sequel is. All of your progress is reset and people playing the old version of the game are left behind until they purchase the new one. This is exactly what we’re hoping to change.
What were your biggest learnings from the first game?
Luckily, all Blizzard games are run as live services. Many of us on the team drew knowledge and inspiration from other games – I worked for six-anda-half years on World Of Warcraft. When it came time to plan our live content, I suggested seasonal events because of the way that they made the world feel in WOW. The seasonal events turned out to be one of our most popular pieces of content we added. The biggest lesson for any live service game is always the same: update the game as frequently as you possibly can.
A sequel is an opportunity for developers to make some serious overhauls to their game. Is there anything you’re glad to have the chance to rebuild now?
We’ve already committed to redoing the look of the original game’s heroes. We’re completely redoing the game’s user interface. We are experimenting with more radical changes for PvP internally – but I don’t want to commit to any of those yet. Also, as we proved with the Role Queue system, if we feel like something is an overall huge improvement to the current game and does not require significant technical changes (ie the engine visual upgrades) we would consider just changing the current game and not waiting for the sequel.
To what extent would replayable singleplayer endgame content would suit Overwatch 2? Is its inclusion something you and the team have considered?
We’re definitely going to explore what endgame means for Hero Missions. We have many experienced developers who created endgame content for World Of Warcraft and Diablo on our team. This is one of the challenges we’re very eager to start working on.
Is there any part of you that’s nervous about the team taking more of a hand in story missions? Some would argue community-created lore ended up being a standout aspect of the first game.
Absolutely. The community often criticises us for ‘lack of story’, but I can’t help but feel that part of their affinity for our characters exists because of the stories they have imagined for them. Once we – Blizzard – tell you the story, it’s going to be hard for that to live up to ‘your version’ of the character.
It’s going to be tricky, for sure.
What’s the team’s vision for
Overwatch? How has it changed over the years – and how far will this sequel get you towards realising it? Our vision for Overwatch has always been to create inspiring heroes, to embrace inclusivity, to reward teamwork and to inspire our players towards a bright and hopeful future. We’ve always thought of Overwatch as a universe, not just a single game. The original game was the first expression of Overwatch, but we dream of what other forms of media could feature Overwatch. Movies? An animated series? What other game types would everyone love to see in the Overwatch universe? We hope that the characters of Overwatch exist far into the future and are expressed in ways that we can’t even imagine today.