Q: So one of the questions we get every year, but how do you feel about player-made content in Overwatch - in terms of skins, maps, and possibly heroes?
A (Jeff Kaplan): Actually we love player created content, and when I say “we”, I mean Blizzard. We love to look back at the Starcraft 2 Editor, the Warcraft 3 Editor - I mean DOTA wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the Warcraft 3 Editor, the World of Warcraft XML and LUA scripting - these are all examples of where we really embrace the community making stuff. With Overwatch it’s been really challenging for us because our mindset as a developer team is “Yeah, we want the community to be able to engage and make things”. The custom game editor is so liberal and lets you change so many things about the characters.
The challenging part for us has been that Overwatch is built on a brand new engine, and so literally everything that we do, we have to do from scratch. So someone will say “Why isn’t there a Map Editor?” Obviously the team that’s working on the game has the ability to edit maps, but to make something like that public facing and synced so that they can test their maps and have access to all the assets is a pretty complex and complicated process. We would like to do more.
One of the ideas that we have is separate from a Map Editor, a couple of our engineers - a guy named “Dan” and a guy named “Keith” experimented with (we have a kind of free week, where everyone just kind of works on what they want), and they messed around with the ability to allow players to script their own custom game modes through a very basic set of scripting language within the UI for it. That’s something we thought was extremely successful and we’d love to figure out a way to bring that to players. So it’s something that we’re always exploring - it’s really really hard, and not on the immediate horizon because it’s just a big undertaking for us.
After reading this interview I would like to know if there is a game editor coming for Overwatch?, maybe sometime next year. I do not mean a map editor I mean game editor as in developer levels of customization options like there is for the Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 editors. The current custom games settings are ok but they don’t have near enough customization options and what you can customize is all done with sliders and no actual specific number changes. It would also be great to include abilities removed from the game in the editor so players can use them in custom games if they want.