I asked Fabien to help us understand how he came up with the idea that has now reshaped how the team creates maps, and to walk us through his design process.įabien: Overwatch is set in a bright and colorful world, and much of the character of the game is expressed through its maps. Although the feature is developed and refined inside the Overwatch 2’s engine and tools, the core idea stems from the mind of our talented lighting artist, Fabien. The new technology we added to the engine is called Environment States, and it has quickly become our favorite workflow for map creation and design. To assist me in this endeavor, I have enlisted the help of two other developers from the Overwatch team: Bruce Wilkie and Fabien Christin. Since we recently finished working on a new piece of technology for Overwatch 2, we thought it would be a great opportunity to give the community a sneak peek of what goes into creating improvements for a game engine. Hi, everyone! My name is Marco Alamia, and I am a software engineer on the Overwatch team. The Overwatch 2 engineering team takes us through environment states in Overwatch 2 and how the scenarios make the game feel different every time you play. Still, it might feel to many that some fun aspect has been lost, as they are doing these balance changes mainly with e-sport in mind. Will it work for the better? Hard to say, we don't know yet how other heroes are going to be rebalanced.

They are redesigning those heroes to be more shooty, with tanks gone and some stuff on existing maps being moved around, so they are going to feature more cover opportunities. It's possible they still haven't decided on anything, almost 2 years and there is still nothing about progression in PvE, whether loot boxes are going to stay or not etc.Īs for these changes, it appears game is losing a bit of it's MOBA aspect. Unless something changed? Looks like there wasn't any solid confirmation recently. To my understanding, there won't be a separate client, just a huge update. The above character changes are going to also be added to Overwatch 1 and it's going to be hard to pay 'sequel price', IE 39.99-59,99, for what could easily be a small DLC or expansion. I'm still waiting to see the price tag and if anything more than PVE content and skins is being added in unique to OW2.

Overwatch 2 release date