May 24th Reddit AMA - All developer responses here!

Q: Aaron said recently that they were looking to announce something big for OW1. What is a rough estimate on when we can hear news about this new feature?

Aaron Keller: We have several exciting things coming to Overwatch. As far as rough estimates go - one large feature will be announced somewhere in the timeframe between soon and really soon.

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Q: I’d love to hear from Geoff/Scott how the underlying philosophy of how OW has changed over the years and into OW2. How have (if at all) the objectives for what you want players to feel in game changed going into this next “era” of sorts for OW?

Geoff Goodman: For OW1, most of the philosophy changes have been small tactical changes throughout the game’s life, rather than large sweeping changes. The biggest sweeping changes to philosophy were when we went to single hero limit, and then later to role lock.

At its heart, the game has always been about super over-the-top heroes, that are simple to understand but have a lot of depth in gameplay, especially when combined with other heroes on your team. When making new heroes, or changing old ones, its a constant fight for us internally to try and make sure the heroes are simple and focused from a gameplay perspective. This has been gotten harder over time as we add new heroes and push to keep every hero feeling unique at the same time.

For OW2, this core philosophy is still the same, but we’re looking at some of these things in somewhat of a new light. We’re still pushing hard to keep heroes simple and deep, but there are some specifics we’ve changed such as more aggressive tank play which can change how we make Tank heroes.

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soon™

well yeah…but youre not going to have the line if theres no shield gen :sweat_smile:

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Q: Are you going to make more/better pre-made A.I.s for the workshop in OW2 or are you just going to remove the pre-made A.I.s ?

John LaFleur: We’ve been doing a substantial amount of work in the areas of AI for Overwatch 2… which is probably obvious given that we’ll have PvE. :slight_smile: Much of those improvements should apply across the game, workshop included. But Workshop plans for OW2 are still quite fluid.

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Q: Hello on behalf of all symmetra players why has she been getting ignored in terms of legendary event skins? It’s been more than two years we are starving:(

David Kang: I promise you an awesome Symetra skin is on its way!

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i can hear them…fingers feverishly tapping…1000 different sym legendary skin threads currently in the making

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for the summer games even prehaps?

thanks for doing this man, reddit’s layout is so damn annoying to navigate

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with something like this its a lot easier if you just open up tabs for the people in the AMA (theyre linked in the topic)…a lot easier to see their responses that way…pretty sure thats what wyomings doing

Turns head 180 as if I just heard the call of my people

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Q: I’m just gonna get few of the things that grind my gears in one go. You could call those “miniscule”, but all easy things to change.

Are you plannin to revamp the endorsements system where the decay doesn’t trigger simply because you’re on a losing streak and get no votes? Increasing the maximum level to 50 or so with much much more votes needed for really high levels, but also they don’t decay unless you don’t play the game for a week or so?

Any alternative ways to getting golden guns like points for wins in QP (even some 2-3 per win) or a currency price (like 30k currency for a gun)?

Scott Mercer: We are planning to do an update on the endorsements system in the future, so it’s great hearing your feedback on this. To clarify one element on the system, you won’t really decay if you don’t play for a week or so. You naturally decay a certain amount when you play a game based on your current endorsement level, with higher endorsement levels decaying faster and requiring you to earn more endorsements per game. That’s what makes higher endorsement levels harder to get.

As far as golden guns, we have no plans for providing them as rewards outside of earning them in competitive play.

Q: Is there a chance for Mei to become a tank so she can keep her freeze mechanic in some way?

Goeff Goodman: Possibly, that’s still on the list to play around with.

For what its worth, she can still freeze with her ultimate.

Q: After the announcement of 5v5, a lot of people have been bugged by this change.

Will there be other gamemodes that are 6v6 for those who prefer it, and if it’s possible to say, which gamemodes?

Goeff Goodman: Honestly we’re not sure yet. We’d like to have it exist in some form, but I’d say balancing the game for both 5v5 (1 tank) and 6v6 (2 tanks) is unlikely, so the 6v6 mode would most likely be an arcade mode or something like that if we can do it at all.

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Well thank God Mei still has freeze on her ultimate that would be a damn shame otherwise…

give me the random skin one wyoming…in bold pls

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A follow up question about Cross Play and Progression:

Q: How would it be more difficult than crossplay… for crossplay you have to do a lot of server tweaking and networking get around that could take well over a year to set up. Cross progression all you’d have to do is link your psn,xbox live, and switch account to your blizzard account, write some code to catalog each skin they have unlocked on each platform, and have each skin that is unlocked be unlocked on their blizzard account, and when the game loads in on another platform the servers recognize your unlocked skins via your blizzard account.

John LaFleur: The difficultly centers around how we track entitlements and policy concerns with platform manufacturers. There are also a lot of technical concerns, but most are manageable with a good amount of work. It’s all feasible, just a LOT more ducks to get in a row. And, unfortunately, the more groups involved, the more complicated something becomes. And cross-progression just gets more complicated, in that regard.

My question i’ve asked now is:

Are you considering an Unranked Mode in the near future? It would be good to keep those who warf up for Ranked and those who just want to enjoy the game casually separated with the introduction of a mode like that.

isn’t unranked just quickplay?

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Q: Why does the Recall animated short play whenever we boot up Overwatch on console? Is this an oversight or intentional to hide some loading screens? Could we maybe get the option to not have it play?

Bill Warnecke: The animated short will play on all versions, but on PC we only play it once. We track if it was shown in the settings and on console versions this is before the user logs in and we don’t have access to any saved setting information at that time. We intentionally show the movie this early because we’re loading core assets during this time.

We agree it’d be nice to be able to skip it, I spoke with our lead engine programmer a bit just now and it’s something we’ll look at, though I can’t promise we’ll be able to do it (because it would require moving where it plays, and reviewing asset loading times).

Cheers!

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Im thinking about a mode with Competitive ruleset but not affecting the SR