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00:07Again, happy to be doing another one of these developer updates.
00:11We thought we'd take a different angle this time
00:13and talk a little bit about
00:16what's coming up after the holiday break for us,
00:19and a little bit of why
00:21what we're doing is going to be relevant.
00:24So, just to back up a little bit,
00:26we've heard a lot of requests
00:28for some sort of progression or reward system in the game,
00:31and it's something we're very eager to get to,
00:34and sort of the irony, some of you know this, some of you don't,
00:36but the irony is that
00:38we've actually had two progression and reward systems
00:41in Overwatch already,
00:43and we've cut them completely.
00:45They were total failures.
00:46So, I thought one of the things that might be interesting
00:49is to tell you guys a little bit about what we did in the past,
00:52and why it failed,
00:53so you'll know when we get to our new system next year
00:57why we sort of went in the direction that we did.
00:59So, the first system that we tried was really interesting.
01:02it was very similar to like a WoW talent system,
01:07or Heroes of the Storm talent system,
01:09where you would customize your hero.
01:11So, what would happen is, you would play somebody,
01:13let's say like Reaper, and level Reaper up,
01:16and as you leveled up, we would unlock different abilities for you to take,
01:20and then you'd go into combat,
01:21and you'd be able to do different things with Reaper.
01:23so, one of the examples we had is,
01:26when he went into Wraith form,
01:28he would heal to full.
01:31So, I know some of you are probably shocked,
01:33like, wow, that sounds super powerful,
01:35and broken, and imbalanced,
01:36and like I said, we scrapped the system for that reason.
01:41Basically, what we were learning about Overwatch early on was,
01:45as much as everybody has this fantasy of,
01:47I want to customize my character in terms of gameplay,
01:51Overwatch plays and moves very quickly,
01:53and there's a lot of information to sort of take into account.
01:58If you look at a game like Heroes of the Storm,
02:01sometimes, you know,
02:02you only have to worry about five heroes at once,
02:04knowing what they do, or who they are,
02:06and what their abilities are.
02:08Or, in a worst case scenario,
02:10in a game like Heroes of the Storm,
02:11you only really have to know ten heroes max,
02:14what's going on.
02:15In Overwatch, you have to have every hero
02:18that could possibly be in the game in your mind,
02:21in a much faster match length.
02:24So, suddenly having two different Reapers on the battlefield,
02:28and maybe one is healing to full when he does Wraith form,
02:31and the other has double distance with his shotguns,
02:35was very confusing for players,
02:38and very overwhelming.
02:39So, we scrapped the system.
02:40We also felt that just player power in general,
02:44through a progression system,
02:45especially when there was some time investment involved,
02:49was not good for the competitive nature of Overwatch.
02:52So, that was system number one that failed,
02:55and we took out.
02:56We talked about it a little bit at BlizzCon in 2014,
02:59for those of you that remember.
03:01Then we went down another path,
03:03and when I describe this to you,
03:05you're going to say in hindsight,
03:06like, of course, that's obvious,
03:08you know, you guys should have never put it in there
03:10in the first place,
03:11but it wasn't really obvious to us
03:13until we had put the system in and felt it.
03:15So, the second system we explored
03:17had nothing to do with player power.
03:19We wanted to focus entirely on cosmetic rewards,
03:23which I'll touch on a little bit later,
03:25but what we did was we created a system
03:28where each hero had a level.
03:31There was like a level per hero,
03:33and the more you played matches,
03:35the more you would level up,
03:37and wins were worth more EXP than losses,
03:39and there was, you know, certain ways to gain more EXP.
03:42And as you leveled up a hero,
03:44like let's take Tracer for example,
03:46maybe at level two you would unlock some cosmetic stuff,
03:50and then at level three you'd unlock more,
03:52and so on,
03:53and the heroes capped out at level 20 in this system.
03:56It was cool and it was fun,
03:58but we had this live in the Blizzard Alpha
04:02where all of the employees of Blizzard
04:04were playing the game,
04:05and immediately it went south on us very quickly,
04:08so we would have these cases of,
04:10you know, you'd be playing on Temple of Anubis,
04:12and your team is pinned down in the Sandcrawler,
04:16you know, you can't even get out of the Sandcrawler,
04:18and you'd look over at one of your teammates,
04:21and they're playing Bastion, you know,
04:22they're sieged up inside the spawn room,
04:25shooting out the door,
04:26and, you know, very politely you'd tell the person,
04:28you know, hey dude,
04:29maybe we should switch to a classic
04:31and get through the choke,
04:33and that person would,
04:35they'd even be really reasonable about like,
04:36yeah, you're totally right,
04:38it's not right for the team that I'm on Bastion right now,
04:40but I'm so close to my next unlock,
04:42I don't want to switch off.
04:44So, the system turned out to be,
04:47I would describe it as a minor disaster.
04:50The cool part that came out of it was,
04:53we came up with a lot of really compelling cosmetic stuff,
04:58that like we had really good rewards for it,
05:00that the Blizzard employees were very excited about.
05:03and I'm going to leave some of those a little bit of a mystery for you,
05:06because I'd rather you see them in person.
05:09Some of them, there's already been hints out on the internet,
05:11like people, you know, data mined the build,
05:14and they saw stuff like our sprays,
05:16which I think are really cool.
05:18There are these awesome emblems that you can unlock,
05:20and, you know, you can put them actually in the 3D space,
05:23in the level, sort of show off things that you had done.
05:26So, those were part of the system,
05:29but we had a lot of other really, really cool stuff as part of that.
05:32But, we realized that the system was encouraging the wrong behavior.
05:36In a game that's about fluid team composition and hero swapping,
05:43that a system that overly rewarded you sticking on one character
05:47was just bad and wrong.
05:49So, what we want to do when we've now taken the game down,
05:53it's no longer up, the beta's going to come back,
05:57hopefully mid-January to late January.
06:00If the game's not in a state that we're happy with,
06:03it might take even longer than that.
06:05We might spill into February, if needed.
06:08But, what we want to do is introduce a new progression system
06:12that doesn't overly reward people hanging on one hero.
06:16Like, sometimes it's okay to reward that behavior.
06:18We know that there's a lot of you who have your main,
06:21and you really enjoy playing that one character,
06:24and we don't want you to feel bad or wrong about doing that either.
06:27But, we also don't want to overly reward that type of thing
06:31with a progression or reward system.
06:33I had a really interesting conversation with Tom Chilton,
06:37who is the game director on World of Warcraft,
06:39and he made some awesome points
06:41when talking about progression in Overwatch.
06:44We were talking about World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch,
06:49and Tom sort of said, you know, in games like World of Warcraft
06:54and Diablo, in a lot of ways those games are about progression.
06:59You know, whether it be through the character leveling,
07:01the character power, or the item acquisition,
07:04it's the main motivating factor.
07:07But, unless your game is inherently about progression,
07:11you want to be careful to make sure not to overly focus players
07:15on progression as the end-all, be-all,
07:18and that's how we feel about Overwatch.
07:19We feel like we would like the progression system
07:23to be light, cosmetic, and almost the way of the game,
07:27thanking you for your time in it, saying like,
07:30hey, it's cool, we know you've invested some time in Overwatch,
07:32so we want to give you these light rewards
07:35that don't overly skew the way that you play the game
07:39in one way or another.
07:41Your motivation for playing Overwatch should be that
07:43it's a fun, competitive, multiplayer shooter,
07:46not that you're trying to get more powerful
07:48or acquire a bunch of items.
07:50So, we're probably going to take a different route
07:52with the Overwatch progression system when we get back to it.
07:56We're going to use the time off.
07:57We already have ideas of what we want to try,
08:00and we're going to use the time between now and end of January
08:04to explore a bunch of stuff internally again,
08:07because we'll learn a lot very quickly,
08:09just trying ideas out in the game,
08:12seeing how they come to fruition,
08:14and then if we feel really good about them,
08:17then we'll bring the beta back up
08:19and we'll introduce this system to you guys.
08:21So, I look forward to hopefully next time
08:24talking in more specifics about what we are doing,
08:27but I thought it would be helpful for you to understand
08:32why we're exploring these different routes with progression
08:35and what sort of went wrong in the past,
08:37so when you see the new system, you understand how we got there.
08:42Anyway, thanks as always for all the feedback and comments.
08:45We'd love to hear what you guys think about rewards,
08:49what you guys think about progression systems,
08:51and we really hope that you guys have a great winter break,
08:54and we'll see you soon, probably in January.
09:04We'll see you soon.
09:06We'll see you soon.
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