As part of the fifth anniversary of Overwatch, the team took to Reddit in an AMA answering the community’s questions about virtually everything. This included the current state of the game, its history, in addition to recent announcements.
Participants in the AMA included several members from the team such as:
- Game Director – Aaron Keller (u/blizz_akeller)
- Principal Game Designer – Scott Mercer (u/blizz_smercer)
- Lead Hero Designer – Geoff Goodman (u/blizz_geoffgoodman)
- Technical Director – John Lafleur (u/blizz_jlafleur)
- Lead Software Engineer – Bill Warnecke (u/billwarnecke)
- Character Art Director – Arnold Tsang (u/Blizz_steamboy33)
- Senior Concept Artist - David Kang (u/blizz_DKANG)
- Community Manager – Josh Nash (u/blizz_jnash)
Understandably, Overwatch 2 was featured in several questions from the community. One such question asked about cross-platform progression across PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch. Technical Director, John Lafleur, noted that while they remain excited about cross-progression, they have nothing new to share at this time.
Another question revolved a ping system and if Blizzard has any plans to implement one. Ping systems are great ways to nonverbally communicate in such games like Apex Legends, Valorant, and more. To that end, Game Director Aaron Keller responded,
“We've definitely considered this. In fact we have a protoype of it running internally right now. We don't make a habit of promising things to players until they are actually announced and I'm not going to break that tradition right now (I'm sure I'll blow it at some other point in this AMA), but it is something that we are excited about as a team and are working through issues currently.”
The full AMA is pretty interesting if you want to sift though the various questions and just general discourse from the community.
In recent Blizzard news, a report from IGN shed some additional light into the high-profile departures at Blizzard. This includes former Overwatch Game Director, Jeff Kaplan. Additionally, it was recently revealed that Overwatch 2 squad size will be decreased to 5 instead of 6, which means each team will have one fewer tank.
