We got a new bit of information on the Overwatch 2 cinematics that will be included in the story missions on the forums from none other than Jeff Kaplan himself. November 2019 Blizzard had a playable “demo” version of Overwatch 2 at Blizzcon (see ohnickel play-through video below for reference). During this demo of the story mode there were cinematic (cut-scenes) before and after the mission that advanced the story / lore of the Overwatch universe (post zero hour).
Durring Blizzcon Jeff stated that the demo map ends on a cliffhanger but “spoiler alert” Lucio doesn’t die. In a forum post he extended this comment…
Jeff Kaplan: “Both the introduction and outro that we showed at Blizzcon were not the final pieces. The planned introduction is a little bit longer. The planned outro (which is still in development and we were reviewing yesterday) is much longer and not intended to be a cliff hanger. Spoiler alert: Lucio doesn’t die. For Blizzcon, we could only final so many shots… so we did an abbreviated cliffhanger for the demo. The final piece is much longer and shows Lucio’s rescue as well as “more awesome story stuff†that sets up the next mission. We appreciate the feedback and glad you’re asking for more and not less ;]”
WyomingMyst (asked): Jeff, will every mission in Overwatch 2 have an intro and outro?
Yes. not all will be the same lengths or carry the same level of importance… but for now, the plan is yes, intro/outro for all story missions
We have a lot to look forward to with the release of Overwatch 2. Hopefully Activision / Blizzard will follow suit of many other game companies (example: CD Projekt delays Cyberpunk 2099 for 4 months for more play testing) and holds back the release until it is 1000% ready, instead of pulling a UbiSoft and release it because they need money. Anyone that follows Blizzard knows they will release it when they are ready which is why we got no definitive date on release yet. Stay tuned here for all the latest Overwatch 2 details.
A new patch is now live on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Read below to learn more about the latest changes.
LUNAR NEW YEAR 2020
Get ready to celebrate the Year of the Rat!
This year, we’re celebrating Lunar New Year with new seasonal items including legendary skins like Face Changer Sombra, Mask Dancer Moira, Samul Nori Lúcio, and Opera Brigitte. Experience the third competitive season of our Capture the Flag mode, in addition to a brand new game mode called Blitz CTF.
Unsure of which role you want to play? Now, party members who queue for any game mode with Role Queue enabled can select multiple roles, indicating what they’re willing to play in the next game.
Your other party members’ role choices and Competitive Play skill ratings may affect which roles you are eligible to choose, or which role you can play. For example, if you selected all three roles (Tank, Damage, Healing) to indicate your willingness to play any of them, and then two other party members choose Support, you will not get to play Support in the next game.
Custom Game Options
The Lobby section of Custom Game Settings has a new option “Data Center Preferenceâ€Â. This option provides the game creator with more control over where the game will be hosted. The default “Best Available†choice automatically provides the creator with the best quality connection available to them. We only suggest choosing a specific datacenter if no single datacenter can simultaneously provide the best connection to all players. This is usually only the case when the players participating in the custom game are located in different geographic regions of the world.
Spectate and Replay Updates
Added a new hotkey, “Spectate toggle 3P camera side”, which changes the shoulder you’re looking over for the player you’re spectating while using the simple third-person spectator camera option
Added a new hotkey, “Toggle normal / simple 3P spectator camera”, which toggles between the two third-person camera modes while spectating
Updated the death camera to quickly shift from where you were looking to where your killer is, to make it easier to see if you were killed by someone behind you or to your side
Updated the simple third-person spectator camera position for several heroes to have them cover less of the screen
Fixed an issue that caused zooming in and out while in the simple third-person camera to appear choppy
Transitioning into or out of first person no longer causes the camera to clip inside the hero’s head
Fixed several camera smoothness and popping issues
HERO UPDATES
Baptiste
Immortality Field
Maximum duration reduced from 8 to 5 seconds
Cooldown increased from 20 to 25 seconds
Amplification Matrix
Ultimate cost increased by 20%
Developer Comment: Immortality Field ended up being too powerful when placed in locations that were safe from enemy fire, such as around corners. Reducing its uptime will help address this case while remaining strong at saving teammates out in the open.
Mei
Endothermic Blaster (Primary Fire)
Slowing effect now reduces enemy movement speed from 20-70%, down from 30-90%
Slowing effect duration reduced from 1.5 to 1.0 second
Developer Comment: The slowing effect of Mei’s primary fire can sometimes feel too difficult to escape. Lowering the amount it slows by and the duration it lasts for will make it easier to react to. The time required to completely freeze a target remains the same.
D.Va
Boosters
Cooldown decreased from 5 to 3 seconds
Developer Comment: The lower cooldown on her mobility will enable D.Va to more readily swap between playing offensively and defensively.
Orisa
Fortify
Damage reduction reduced from 50% to 40%
Developer Comment: Orisa has been a little too difficult to deal with while Fortify is active, so we’re reducing the amount of damage reduction to give enemies more effective damage during this time.
Hanzo
Storm Bow (Primary Fire)
Maximum projectile speed reduced from 125 to 110
Developer Comment: The increased projectile speed Hanzo received in his rework ended up making his arrows too good at longer ranges. Decreasing the speed will reduce his sniping capability while still keeping him strong at mid-range.
Doomfist
Rising Uppercut
Recovery time increased from 0.2 to 0.35 seconds
Developer Comment: Rising Uppercut followed immediately by his primary fire is a little too effective of a combo on its own, so we’re increasing the time enemies have to react to it.
BUG FIXES
General
Fixed a bug that caused toggle crouch to work inconsistently when high precision mouse input is enabled
Fixed a bug that caused a small number of games containing very high-skill players to have greatly reduced SR gains and losses
Workshop
Fixed an issue preventing Go To Assemble Heroes from working in Assault and Hybrid
Fixed an issue preventing Sombra Dummy Bots from being able to hack health packs
Maps
Temple of Anubis
Fixed a bug where some heroes could get stuck behind one of the rocks outside of point B
Eichenwalde
Fixed a bug that could cause Wrecking Ball to become temporarily stuck when using his Piledriver in a specific location
Fixed a location where Doomfist could get stuck
Junkertown
Fixed a bug that allowed some players to stand on a wall near the final checkpoint
Fixed a bug that allowed Sombra’s Translocator and Baptiste’s Immortality Field to land in an unintended place between the stairs and wall near point A
Dorado
Fixed a bug that caused the ivy growing on the wall between points A and B to block projectiles
Rialto
Fixed a bug that could cause Winston and Sigma to become stuck between the wall, bridge, and gondola outside of Point A
Watchpoint: Gibraltar
Fixed a bug that caused Baptiste’s Immortality Field to disappear when thrown in a specific spot outside of the first Attacker’s spawn
Heroes
Baptiste
Fixed a bug that could cause Immortality Field to not deploy or get destroyed while deploying in some situations
Mercy
Fixed a bug that caused Mercy’s gold staff and pistol to disappear while using Valkyrie when viewing in 3rd person
Tracer
Fixed a bug allowing players to swap heroes while using Recall
Sigma
Fixed a bug that could cause Sigma’s shield to fail to deploy
Symmetra
Fixed a bug where destroying Symmetra’s teleporter during construction briefly allowed her to make another without going on cooldown
Just when you thought it was safe to play 2-2-2 Jeff Kaplan drops a bomb on the fourms about internal play testing a new competitive format on everyone.
You can read his whole post below or click the blue link.
Wow, it was super weird to stumble on this thread.
In early December, we were brainstorming ways to shorten DPS queue times and the idea was proposed to try changing the role queue team composition to be 1 Tank, 3 Damage, and 2 Support. Our matchmaking engineers did some modeling around queue times, expected behaviors etc. and all indications pointed to an overall positive improvement to all queue times under a scenario like that.
From a design perspective we were reluctant for a number of reasons. Before implementing 2/2/2 role queue, we had done experiments with the team compositions being 1 Tank, 1 Support and 4 damage. The playtests under a 4-1-1 comp were terrible. The problem was the solo support. As a solo support, you felt unable to keep the rest of the team alive. Added to that, at all times, you had 5 very aggressive players prioritizing you as the target every time. As soon as the support player on one side died, the entire team would fall like a house of cards.
So when the idea of trying 3-2-1 came up, we were hesitant because of our poor playtests with 4-1-1. But we did something interesting in December and I am really proud of the team for sticking with it.
Internally, for the past two months, we changed the game to be based on 3-2-1 composition. When we queue for our playtests, we only get 1 Tank per team for each match. We decided to “live with it†for December and January because we felt like the easy and natural thing for us all to do, is just say, “hey this is different and here are all the problems with it†and dismiss the system. But by forcing the team to try it out and live with it for so long, it’s challenged us to try to solve some of the problems that have surfaced.
And there are a number of challenges.
First, there is the issue of what players have come to call “off tanksâ€Â. The biggest issues center around D.Va, Zarya and Roadhog. The current playstyle of those tanks (if you’re adhering to various metas that have existed) is to pair them with other “main tanksâ€Â. Obviously, if we were to change the distribution of roles from 2-2-2 to 3-2-1 it would require some balance changes. But possibly more than that. Roadhog is a great example. Is the correct thing to do for Roadhog under that design to try to make him more “main tanky†or is the correct thing to do to simply move him to the Damage role and balance him as a damage character? We’ve tried both in our months of testing. If you were to come and play Roadhog today with us in our 3-2-1 experiment, he’s moved from the Tank to the Damage category, he only has 400 health, Take a Breather only heals and does not do damage reduction and there were a bunch of DPS changes to his scrap gun. Now, don’t freak out. We’re not doing this for 2-2-2… I am only sharing the design experiment that’s going on here. Maybe a better direction for Roadhog under 3-2-1 is some sort of team damage reduction ability? How do you take what is essentially an “off tank†and make him a “main tankâ€Â? That is what we would have to explore with any of these tank characters. Since the Tank roster is already one of the more limited character selections, we’re obviously not crazy about removing choice from Tank players. And if our stated goal is to improve queue times, did going to 1 tank actually remove a bunch of otherwise tank players from the queue? Or were some of these “tank†players actually damage players who wanted a faster queue time so they picked Roadhog? Obviously, complicated questions and it is even more complicated to be confident in an answer.
The other fear around a 3-2-1 comp is the importance it places on the Tank player. In our playtesting, this has manifested itself in two notable ways. 1) Some players feel a lot of pressure to choose the “correct†tank. If there is only one tank, the team has a very strong opinion about who that tank should be. Another fear around this issue is that metas will be even more limited as players tend to take the “path of least resistance†towards their hero choices. If Reinhardt is deemed meta, do we only see Rein from now on? Are we all mad at our tank player if they play the hamster? 2) Some tank players felt a tremendous anxiety about their performance in the match. They felt like being the lone tank put a lot of pressure on them and if they died, it was a really big deal. Some of our tank/support players who would occasionally play tank stopped playing tank during 3-2-1 and only gravitated toward support because they felt intimidated to be “the main tank†and have so much focus on their play. Conversely, there are a number of main tank players on the team who actually enjoy the added spotlight. Traditionally in video games there are different personas that are attracted to roles in games: Tank, Support, Damage etc. We saw this in WoW and we see it in OW. While these are stereotypes (and you have to be really careful assuming too much here), there are many Tank players who love being the “lone tank†and carrying the team to glory. Watching this play out in our weird, internal experiment has been fascinating.
Our support players have given mixed feedback on the experiment as well. On the negative side, people feel bad when the lone tank dies. On the positive side, many support mains have commented that they feel like they have more freedom to focus on other players and not just “try to keep the big bags of hitpoints alive all matchâ€Â. In general, these matches are more chaotic and (I’ll touch on this later) feel “more FPS-yâ€Â. The result is good or bad, depending on the type of player you are. For some of our support players, this makes matches more exciting. EVERYONE is taking a lot more damage under 3-2-1. for some support players, the chaos causes negative anxiety and they prefer just healing tanks.
The damage experience has been overall positive. For one, for those of us (like me) who usually queue for all 3 roles, we’re often pleasantly surprised to actually get to play Damage. Also, many on the team have cited that with 3 damage dealers they feel far less pressure than they do in the current live game with only 2 damage. The compositions have been very interesting. For example, you can have a 2 sniper comp (maybe Widow and Hanzo) AND have a flanker (Genji/Tracer). It’s really opened up the game. If you’re evaluating plusses and minuses, it adds to the chaos, makes the game play more like a traditional FPS (less barriers/damage mitigation going on) but also detracts a bit from teamplay.
Speaking of Teamplay, one of our testers who did not like the experiment made a comment that he felt like 3-2-1 detracted from teamplay too much. I found this fascinating because in 2013/2014 every decision we made was to embrace/encourage/force teamplay at all costs. We put so much effort into putting the focus on team victory/defeat rather than individual performance. But in 2020, I feel like the over-emphasis on teamplay (while great for hyper competitive players and situations such as OWL), causes a lot of psychological pressure for your average player just looking to blow off steam in a video game. I guess what I am saying is, that in 2020, feeling like you can deviate from teamplay a little bit in OW and have some success feels like a good thing, not a bad thing to me. The other analogy I’ve used (and I know you all hate my sports analogies) is that OW – in it’s current evolved form – feels like a football game (American) to me where every match is 4th down on the goal line. The amount of team synergy and execution required to pull off a victory is exciting… but also a little intense. There is something nice about a more loose/skirmishy version of the game – but again, it’s all opinion and perspective. Not everyone on my team agrees with me and that’s a good thing.
The other odd thing about testing this, is that when we started, everyone treated it like this was “one of Jeff’s crazy experiments†and was a super different, challenging (and possibly stupid) idea. I tried to calm people down by reminding them that MOST of the matches in OW history since launch up until the release of role queue, were actually played with one tank… or less. After a few of the early playtests in December, I remember one developer giving feedback that “the game felt like old school Overwatch… like when we first launched.†I tried to point out that the reason they felt that way is because we used to play the game this way all the time… it’s shouldn’t be that surprising or different. Let’s all remember, the surprising thing back then was actually having two tanks…
So it’s been a really interesting and fun experiment. We’re not really confident that it’s the correct thing for the game. It solves a lot of problems but it also introduces a lot of problems (like most things in the world of game design). I am really proud of the OW team for experimenting with it for the past two months. We’re really conflicted on it so it was cool to see you bring up the idea. We’d love to hear your thoughts on and opinions on it. We’ve also been brainstorming if there is a way to bring this experiment to the community somehow (either through the PTR or the live game somehow). We don’t want to freak people out though. Usually when stuff hits the PTR, we intend for it to go live (or some version of it). But this is much more of an early experiment more than anything else.
I’m curious if that ever extended to testing 2/3/2?
exceeding 12 players per match would cause significant technical challenges (we’re highly optimized towards 12 right now). experimenting with less than 12 is more realistic. it’s not that we cannot do it… it’s that the cost would be extremely high.
That’s it. What do you think will this “save the game†or just cause more grief and confusion?
A video compilation of movies and television explaining Overwatch over the years.
Theses are just a few I had posted to youtube over the years. Do you have a favorite video where someone explained Overwatch with another video post it in the comments below.