Development of Overwatch
This game would have featured several different character classes, upwards of fifty, which Kaplan thought would be difficult but remained a core concept of Crossroads.
[6] Creative director Chris Metzen noted that to avoid the same failure that Titan became, their group had to rethink how Blizzard's more successful games had come about, ignoring the scale and business opportunity of the result and instead understand what tools and skills they had already to build from.
[8] At the same time, multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games were starting to take off, which required players to cooperate with others to successfully win the match.
On starting Overwatch with a smaller group, they all wanted to come together and support each other to make their next game a success, "a redemption story for us as people and as craftsmen".
[13] They used Tracer and a single map based on the Temple of Anubis, to test how well the core mechanics played, according to assistant game director Aaron Keller.
[14] They added three more Heroes—Widowmaker, Reaper, and Pharah, all of whom had been developed from Crossroads classes[6]—to start polishing the gameplay mechanics, which even at this stage Keller stated that it compared very closely with what the released game would present.
[8] Keller noted that as the cast approached 15 characters, the team started to worry that there were too many for players to learn and may dilute the experience, but they strived to assure both uniqueness and balance across the slate of Heroes.
This inspired them to forego plans to release Overwatch as a free-to-play model with microtransactions or with paid downloadable content but instead make it a single-purchase title.
[14] The game's engine was developed from scratch within Blizzard as to target a wide range of personal computers, including laptops that use integrated graphics processors.
Thus they would either find matches reduced to players selecting the speediest characters, or having to put so many restrictions in place that the result game no longer felt like Overwatch.
[3] Citing a desire to keep its game styles "simple", and because it contradicted its emphasis on accomplishing goals as a team rather than trying to achieve large numbers of kills, Overwatch does not contain a traditional deathmatch mode.
[5] Kaplan noted that Dorado, set in Mexico, was inspired by a photograph they found while searching for images of colorful Mexican towns, but only later realized that the photo was that of Manarola, Italy.
[9][43] The need for a diverse cast was important to the developers, as some of Blizzard's previous games had been criticized before for missing this mark; Metzen explained that even his daughter had asked him why all the female characters from Warcraft seemed to be only wearing swimsuits.
"[44] Kaplan explained that the industry was "clearly in an age where gaming is for everybody," going on to say that "increasingly, people want to feel represented, from all walks of life, boys and girls, everybody.
"[47] Additional lore released in January 2019 revealed that Soldier: 76 had been in a same-sex relationship earlier in this life, making him the second LGBT character on the roster.
For example, one of the first planned updates was to change the strength of Cassidy's alternate fire "Fan the Hammer" ability, which could do a great deal of damage to most targets.
Blizzard felt this attack should be lethal to most of the Heroes but should not be able to take out Tank-based characters in a single shot, and reduced the damage to address this.
Kaplan referred to the negative feedback received after the grouped introduction of the final three characters—Genji, Mei, and D.Va—during the closed beta period, which if repeated could be "disruptive" to the game's community.
According to Keith Miron and Dan Reed, software and gameplay engineers for Blizzard, the development team knew they wanted to explore options for players in custom games.
The work was put on hold until late 2018, following another hack-a-thon event where they fleshed out more game ideas and scripting to support it, at which point it was determined to make this a feature of Overwatch.
[73] Blizzard has said it is committed to maintaining a competitive landscape for the game and will take proactive steps to prevent cheating through hacks and other tricks.
[82] The Role Queue was introduced on the PTR in July 2019, and a short 2-week competitive season was held in August 2019 to test the system across all platforms before its full planned release in September 2019.
Blizzard released a performance optimization patch for the Xbox Series X/S version on March 9, 2020, that allowed players to run the game at up to 120 frames per second on supported monitors.
[94] In the week prior to release, Blizzard arranged to have three giant-sized boxes (approximately 15 feet (4.6 m) tall) of various Overwatch heroes, as if being sold as packaged action figures, put on display across the globe at Hollywood, Paris, and Busan, South Korea.
[98] After planning the design of the sculptures in January 2016, teams across the world, including Droga5, Scicon, Stratasys and Egads, raced to print, finish and assemble the works in time for the game's release.
[100] Overwatch was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One platforms on May 24, 2016, with the game servers coming online at 00:00 BST that day.
[106] Blizzard has expressed interest in supporting cross-platform play between console systems in the future, though has no plans for Windows-supported cross-play due to the precision advantage of keyboard and mouse controls over controller-based ones.
[110] Blizzard opted to cancel First Strike in November 2016, with Chu stating that since the announcement of the graphic novel, Overwatch's narrative development has gone in a somewhat different direction, changing out these origin stories would work.
[117][118][119][120] Tracer debuted as a playable character in the video game Heroes of the Storm in its April 2016 update, nearly a month prior to the release of Overwatch.
[125] Good Smile Company announced they will produce Nendoroid figurines of various Overwatch characters in 2017 and onward, starting with Tracer, and followed by Mercy and Mei.
