You've prided yourself on incredible best moments, delivered load after load, threw enemies out of the battlefield, and enchanted your teammates with your dancing - what has not been in Overwatch in these amazing four years! The development team also put a lot of energy and emotion into our common dream of a bright future in which everyone can be heroes: soldiers, adventurers, scientists and just cranks. Years of work spent on development, design and programming have brought together millions of players from all over the world and created a community united by many close ties and fond memories.
In honor of the fourth anniversary of the game, members of the development team shared vivid memories and fun moments that have accumulated during the creation and existence of Overwatch.
Dylan Jones, Lead Technical Character Artist:
Long ago, while trying to figure out how Brigitte's flail should function, a colleague and I held a brainstorming session. We already had an animation concept, but it didn't quite match the flail mechanics we used in our internal testing. The designer liked the way the flail moves on the server, and now we needed to finalize the animation. Eventually, I grabbed the wired Xbox controller and swung it around, using my other hand to tug on the wire so I could catch it again. In the end, we realized that Brigitte's flail should move more like a ball on a string than like a real flail, and this helped to deal with the animation.
I'll tell you another story: One day we got an email from someone who didn't quite understand what character designers were doing and thought that the concepts for all the characters were drawn by Jeff Goodman, our lead character designer. Goodman was amused, and in response, he drew Tracer in the style of "stick-stick-cucumber" for fun. I developed this idea and made a look based on the incomparable Goodman concept:
Timothy Ford, junior technical director:
Before Hanzo, there were no heroes in the game who could climb walls. This video shows you what the new mechanic looks like before we fine-tune the animation and motion dynamics and add visual and audio effects. It is very important to make the game mechanics work and attractive enough before bringing in our talented artists to give it a finished look. This is Hanzo at an early stage of development: I remember we used the animation of the Reaper's body, and there was only one pose for all the first-person animations.
In this video, Lead Hero Designer Jeff Goodman and I run through an early version of The Temple of Anubis. Simulating wall-running in realistic rooms where all the walls are straight is much easier than on the Overwatch battlegrounds, where there are almost no walls at right angles to the floor and ceiling. It looks great, but working on the mechanics of moving along the walls was not easy. The opportunity to evaluate the work of the algorithms on a more or less typical battlefield in terms of geometry was very valuable to me. Here you can see the wall running in the prototype stage; since then it has been significantly improved. In the end, we divided the movement on the walls into two types: vertical (like the Shimada brothers) and horizontal (like Lucio). The gameplay engineers, which I myself belong to, are responsible for developing the mechanics that our many heroes bring to the game. As we explain to those unfamiliar with our work, "game engineers are the ones who make Mario jump." We can say that Overwatch is thirty-two games in one at once, because with each hero we solved completely new tasks. For gameplay engineers, Overwatch is a godsend.
Kat Lee, Testing Analyst :
I remember the first day at my new workplace with particular warmth. I was happy to be hired, but I was nervous before meeting colleagues. So, the first question that Jeff Kaplan asked me was about my cat. It was then that I immediately realized that it would be great! I also love to remember how in 2019, before the winter holidays, the entire Overwatch team gathered in a restaurant. The DJ had a great karaoke. I will never forget how we all sang the theme from Pokémon together.
Jeff Kaplan, Game Director:
The idea for the new game came from the fourth team (which the community knows as the Overwatch team) in the summer of 2013. There was a lot of uncertainty around, but we decided we wanted to create a new Blizzard universe. We were attracted by the image of a bright, optimistic world of the future, full of unforgettable and terribly likeable characters that we would like to be like ourselves. From the beginning, we planned to bring the new game to BlizzCon in 2014. We were able to complete all the tasks on time and, moreover, by some miracle, we did not leak information: no one suspected that a new game was being developed at Blizzard. It seems that our company has never been able to keep a secret so reliably. I remember standing backstage with Chris Metzen and waiting for our turn to step onto the main stage and ta
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