Last Wednesday, students from the University of Southern California had the privilege of welcoming Jeff Kaplan, director of Overwatch and Overwatch 2 and vice president of Blizzard Entertainment. They were able to ask him some questions to which he answered, both on his inspirations and on the future of the game.
Game information
Overwatch 2
One of the most important information in this interview is about future events in Overwatch 2. In the new version of the game, many changes will be made as some will disappear while others will replace them.
With reference to Sid Meier's third-party rule, the goal for Overwatch and especially Overwatch 2 is to have:
- 1/3 of new events
- 1/3 of old identical events
- 1/3 of old improved events
PTR
About the PTR, Jeff revealed several pieces of information.
- Only a few players are present on the PTR. The maximum reached was 60,000 at the time role lock was tested.
- At times, there are not enough players on the PTR to play a game.
- Players seem to stay very little on the PTR, about 6 minutes on average.
- A change seems to be expected for Hanzo.
- On the PTR, a majority of players join a game to test changes on certain characters, leaving the looped games if they cannot test the character they want. The problem is that the environment is not conducive to data collection.
- In some regions, half of the Overwatch players are console players. That's why the PTR cannot reflect the balancing for them.
General information
- All Overwatch heroes must be considered as individuals. This includes omniacs, but also Orisa who owns a dog!
- Jeff Kaplan found inspiration in Ernest Hemingway and Vladimir Nabokov but also in William Shakespeare.
- For Tracer, Sound Design focused on the positive reinforcement of gameplay through sound.
- In Jeff's words: "people think that if they have the statistics, they can balance but balance is art, not science. it's more than that."
Jeff Kaplan, Vice President of Blizzard Entertainment recently participated in 110 Rapid-Fire Questions for Game Informer, an interview with many quick questions on all types of topics. The Overwatch director took the opportunity to give some details about the future of the game.
