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Showing posts from June, 2020

My hopes on Overwatch 2 - Engine changes

More of a wish list of what I'm hoping will happen in Overwatch 2. Sure, we all know PvE is the biggest feature.  It's going to expand the lore and story of all the heroes we know and love.  While that's nice what i'm really looking forward to are some fundamental changes to the backend of Overwatch.   I'm heavily basing what I'm looking for based on that we know OW2 does not use a new game engine, but a heavily upgraded on. First and foremost, new workshop features.  With the upgraded engine comes new code but this time Blizzard understands that the workshop exists.  Any system that is being changed should be created with options to modify it through the workshop.  This means that the new system they talk about that handles eyes,skin, and other features could have been created with options in-mind for the workshop.  Currently in the workshop you're unable to use assets such as models nor can you change these assets at all.  Outside of models and oth

on Hero design, Risk, Reward, Skill.

The video discussing this post can be found here This one has been a long time coming.  For decades before Overwatch I've always half-joked about skill, noobs, pros and generally have held a bit of an elitist view on video games.  As I've gotten older and study game design more I've refined it into an understanding of skill, when something requires too much and when something requires too little.  Please stick around because this is going to be a longer post that covers some parts of game design and some of balance, I promise it all comes together, eventually. I want to start off with a statistic from Jaffe Alex's discussion "Cursed Problems". "Players are said to believe a game is fair if they win 70% of the time " Keep this in mind when we talk about balance and how the community perceives it, whenever someone talks about "balance" 70% win rate is what they probably wanting.  Right now the big complaint in OW is Genji, who is s

[Archive] Hero Bans - What needs to happen

I'll be posting some of these types of blogs randomly.  An "Archive" post is a post where I started an idea and never got around to finishing it OR in this case Blizzard has removed hero pools and this article has no bearing on the current game.  To make sure everyone knows that the ideas are not completely finished and not up to the "quality" of my normal posts i'll label it as an archive. More rumors are coming up about large scale changes.  The primary talking point is around hero bans.  I believe there are arguments for and against it, ill focus on the points that have me worried the most.  I'm going to try to avoid discussion on how the voting will happen, that discussion talks about UI and other time consuming topics. I find banning heroes in OW more comparable to banning items in MOBAs rather than heroes.  This is because Blizzard removed multiple balance points with the design of OW.  In a MOBA you can pick almost any hero and depending on wh