Jeff Kaplan reveals what Overwatch developers are currently working on
Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan has responded to suggestions of ‘developer silence’ from the game’s community, listing the different projects his team is working on right now.
The Overwatch Game Director took to their website’s forum on December 10 to talk fans through the activity of developers during the holiday period.
Kaplan pointed out that his team doesn’t like being perceived as silent and that it is not their intention to do so, as they have been trying to connect as much as they can with content creators.
He posted on a Blizzard forum: “We don’t like being silent… That’s not our intention. We’ve been trying to show up more on various streams (we have our creator’s residency now here at Blizzard where streamers hang out with us) plus we did a bunch of streams at Blizzcon. Maybe you missed those?”
The American video game designer also said that the Overwatch developer are in a “heads down” mode at the moment, but believes that they’re in a “better spot than these forums will have you believe”.
Overwatch’s Lead Designer Geoff Goodman recently denied they were working on a hero ban.Based in the United States, the team has taken advantage of the slow week for thanksgiving as much of the team were travelling around that holiday.
However, it did allow developers a chance to work on their own projects, which has yielded some “pretty cool results” according to Kaplan.
“We explored new game modes, new features and new engine tech. it was all really rough but some of the prototypes will actually turn into features someday.”
Even though game modes are currently being prototyped, we’ve been told not to expect them in the near future, while there is a lot more top secret stuff that the developers are working on but can’t talk about right now.
To conclude, Kaplan posted the following list:
roughly, this is a sample of some of what we’re working on:
–top secret stuff i’m not allowed to talk about
–hero balance (i actually think we’re in a better spot than these forums will have you believe)
–quality of life features (UI updates etc)
–new hero prototyping and development
–new game mode prototyping (don’t expect to see these soon)
–feature development
–ongoing event support (skins etc.)
–more top secret stuff i’m not allowed to talk about
–top secret stuff i’m not supposed to talk about