10 years is a long time for anything, but for a live service game it's a milestone that very few are able to cross. Overwatch made it over the line earlier this year, and has since been able to do something of a victory lap because after all the highs and the lows, Overwatch is in the best place it's ever been.
"It doesn't feel like 10 years to me," game director Aaron Keller tells me. "Although, I could probably answer that question in a few ways. There's probably a year or two that might have felt like five or six years in the middle of this process, but there's always so much to be doing on the team and for the game." But Keller reiterates the good old adage "if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.
"Our team is filled with people that are not just passionate about making games, they're passionate about Overwatch itself, our heroes and the world in which they reside. So when you get to go into the office and talk about that all day, the time can fly by pretty quickly."
Alec Dawson, associate game director, joined before the launch of Overwatch 2 but also feels as if these last four years have flown by "in a blink of an eye … It's wild that when we started the year, we had these silhouettes of heroes that we didn't even know what they were going to be, what they were going to look like, and now we do," Dawson adds. "Sometimes it just goes by much quicker than you think it's going to."
Overwatch has undergone many metamorphoses, some good, others not so good. We had the early golden years, then we had GOATS, then a plethora of some of the best game cinematics ever, then we had early Brigitte taking a literal hammer to the game's balance.
After something of a content drought, excitement was renewed with the announcement of Overwatch 2, and while this did offer a lot of good changes like more heroes, content, and focused team fights in 5v5, it failed to meet the requirements of a sequel, and that's without the disappointment surrounding PvE.
There was a time when I thought that was it for Overwatch, that PvE and Overwatch 2 would be all anyone would ever talk about. But I've never been happier to be proven wrong, because all these years later Overwatch is going from strength to strength experimenting with things like perks and Stadium, tweaking the user experience with map voting and hero bans, and changing to a new annual content release format.
"I don't think we could honestly say we knew it would go this far," Keller says. "I believe that there's always been something special about Overwatch. There's something special about the world. This optimistic, hopeful take on the future. I do think that there's something special about the gameplay—it's so crisp and clean—and there's moments you have in Overwatch that you just don't really get to have in other games."
I've said it before but the current success that Team 4 is seeing didn't just happen overnight. It's been a long road, one marked with deliberate decisions and remedies taken by its devs. The passion the devs have exhibited, the humility to admit when things aren't working, and keeping player's best interests at the forefront are why the game is in such a good state today.
What promises have Team 4 kept over the last 10 years?
"That's a big question. There's been a lot of moments, especially over the last few years where I feel like we've really turned this game around and given it a lot of positive momentum going towards the future. One of the things that we've been saying a lot over the last year or two is we want to make the game our players want to play."
"There's a sharper focus on the core experience of Overwatch, heroes coming in, looking at some of our gameplay systems, but also it's the promises of listening, the promise that we're going to be caretakers of the game and the experience, right? Our players were telling us that they wanted the narrative to be back in focus, part of the centerpiece of the game. They were telling us that they wanted us to focus back on the core experience, and I think that's really one of the most important promises that we have to live up to—making sure that we're listening and we're doing things that our players are asking for. But also doing them differently so we surprise them too. Just making sure that they can have confidence in the direction of the game itself."
"I love that. That's such a good answer, Alec, because it's like another thing that we say which is that, in order for people to play the game in the present, they need to have confidence in its future. For a live service game like this, for many of our players, this is their main hobby. It's a lifestyle game for these people, and they have to know that Overwatch is in good hands. They have to know that we are always going to be trying to improve this experience for them, or else they can really lose trust in that experience. Once they've lost that trust—and I think we can speak from experience here—it is very, very difficult to get it back."
"Something we like to say internally sometimes is 'Reasons to stay. Reasons to come back'. We have these moments throughout the year, especially at the start of the year, which are reasons to come back to the game. There's this big reset, a bunch of content, a bunch of new things. It's very shiny. Because we only get so many chances, so many shots to gain that attention from players and have them come back. So when they do, we want to make sure that experience has leveled up, right? So it's really important that not only there's these big moments, but in between, the game is just getting better and better."
Next up
Moving on from its tenth anniversary year, Overwatch has a new seasonal cadence which has not only worked to spark excitement, but as Keller sees it, has bolstered the "belief that Overwatch is really going in a good direction." There's a steady flow of quality-of-life changes to its UI as we saw last season with new heal, burn, and team indicators. Team 4 has given players more freedom when it comes to picking Drives, and the narrative story is back to being central to Overwatch's experience.
There's obviously going to be a steady flow of new content and characters, but Dawson has also confirmed that map reworks and tweaks will be "something we want to continue doing". Informed by map voting and community feedback the team will ensure that reworks "can stand on its own" not only fixing problems but gunning for a better overall experience: "I think our next rework does a pretty good job of that."
"We're really far into development on Season 1 for 2027," Keller reveals. "We're talking about what Season 1 is going to look like in 2028, and getting started on that. We want it to feel like not just one big moment but that the game is fresh for players and that we are getting players to look at it through new eyes again—we want to do it in a different way each year."
But while Team 4 gets stuck into planning content for the years to come, Dawson stresses that their overall mission will stay the same: "As much as the industry has changed, games have changed, genres, etc. Overwatch is still home for so many people. It's a really big responsibility that we take to heart of making sure that Overwatch can be a part of those people's lives as long as possible.
"To make sure they have the game and the heroes that they can relate to, make sure that they can play with their friends, and just keep having that place where they feel like, okay, this is where I want to be. This is where I want to spend my time. This is where I want to make memories. Hopefully, we can keep carrying that into the future as well."
