Jeff Kaplan is tackling the real, gritty questions while showing off his new multiplayer action-survival FPS game The Legend of California. And what is the realest, grittest question an ex-Blizzard dev could answer? No, not that one. It's actually about Tracer's butt.

To the few of you who are fortunate enough to not have a clue what I'm talking about right now, look away now and spare what remaining braincells you have left. The size of Tracer's butt was actually a huge deal 10 years ago, around the release of OG Overwatch.

Some players were outraged by the fact that Blizzard seemingly 'nerfed' the size of Tracer's rump. In reality, Team 4 actually just changed one of her poses after a couple of players said it looked a bit weird. That's it, that's the whole controversy.

While it's become something of a joke in the community now, with I hope not a lot of people retaining any genuine anger over the situation, it has plagued Overwatch throughout its entire existence: 10 years later Jeff Kaplan, the ex-director of Overwatch is still being haunted by the question.

But Kaplan has set the record straight (yet again) in a reply: "We actually didn't nerf Tracer's butt, it stayed exactly the same." Before congratulating himself for an excellent reply, "That was a good repost I just had." Thanks for letting us know Jeff, now get back to having fun riding around in your new Cowboy game.

Some players still aren't fully convinced that Kaplan is telling the truth, but that's not really a massive surprise seeing how important butt size continues to be in Overwatch. Just last year a bunch of players got themselves into a bit of a tizzy about Widowmaker's Cammy skin for this exact reason. What can I say, only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and people getting upset about butt size in Overwatch.

Much of the current videogame landscape can be traced back to systems and design decisions either first conceived or formalized in World of Warcraft. From the universal RPGification of game mechanics to live service gameplay loops to incremental gearscore advancement, videogames as we know them look like they do in large part because of WoW.

If former Blizzard vice president and game designer Jeff Kaplan had his way during WoW's development, however, the games industry might have followed altogether different paths. In a 10-hour stream of his new studio's upcoming frontier survival game, The Legend of California, Kaplan said that in its early days, he envisioned it as a first-person game and tried to get others at Blizzard to do the same.

"I really wanted WoW to be first-person," Kaplan said. "I argued a lot for that."

Kaplan acknowledged that there are "a lot of arguments" in favor of WoW's third-person perspective, like the benefit of having a full view of your character. But Kaplan explained that his preference was defined by EverQuest, which enabled his entry into game development when his rants about its game design earned him a reputation with his Blizzard employee guildmates.

"EQ was all first-person, and weirdly, because it was first-person, I saw my guildmates up close way more. And I feel like I saw and appreciated the character art way more," Kaplan said. "I wasn't seeing myself, but I knew other people were seeing me that close, so in EQ I actually cared what my character looked like more than I did in WoW."

As a thought experiment, imagining the world where WoW was first-person quickly spirals out into some fascinating directions. Would a first-person WoW have had the same level of landmark success? How would its systems and mechanics be different to account for the player's different sense of—and relationship with—the MMO's spaces? And what strange ways would its influence have spiraled out into the wider games industry if the WoW clones of the late 2000s and early 2010s had the same first-person perspective?

Would we all have gotten sick of first-person MMOs in the same way we abandoned the action bar? Would that timeline's Destiny be a third-person juggernaut that would then shape industry standards in its own image?

Those implications are staggering to consider, but I've saved the most profound for last: Would Blizzard's pauldrons have been so huge if you had to spend hours trying to look around them in first person?

Last week, former Blizzard vice president and game designer Jeff Kaplan made his first public appearance since leaving the World of Warcraft and Overwatch developer in 2021, revealing his independent game studio, Kintsugiyama, and its upcoming frontier survival game, The Legend of California.

Days later, Kaplan continued that momentum with a casual 10-hour stream of a pre-alpha Legend of California build. While showing off the work Kintsugiyama has done so far, Kaplan flexed some of the newfound PR freedom he enjoyed in his recent retelling of his departure from Blizzard, speaking bluntly about his distaste for the dysfunction and hostility in discussions surrounding recent game launches.

"I understand voicing your opinion," Kaplan said as the stream entered its ninth hour. "But like, if a game comes out and you don't want to play it and you've never played it, shut the fuck up. No one cares. We don't need to hear that you weren't into it."

Kaplan, who owes his career in game development in part to his own, often-harsh shitposting about EverQuest design decisions, acknowledged that he's "given it out at times." But crucially, he said, his circa 2000 EQ1 design takedowns were at least motivated by having played the game in the first place. In contrast, he says the "nerd baby rage" from online hatemongers isn't even worth acknowledging, "because you're so off the deep end that it's not even worth listening to you."

"There are certain forums or Reddits or whatever where it's just like, yeah, that one's on ignore from now on. They're not actually productive in any way," Kaplan said. "It's just who can get the most points by being outraged. I'm bored with it."

Tim Ford, Kaplan's fellow former Blizzard dev and Kintsugiyama co-founder, echoed his opinion, saying that "it's not impressive" to be as awful as possible about something that isn't to your liking.

"It's not difficult to shit on something," Ford said on-stream. "Apparently, it takes a ton of courage to say, 'Hey, I actually like this thing. I don't care that you don't like it. I like it.'"

Unnecessary roughness in internet discourse isn't a new phenomenon by any means, but we're now living alongside a media ecosystem that thrives on loudly, insistently, and often preemptively declaring that a game is dead and irredeemable instead of, you know, ignoring something you're not interested in. While no single game developer's frustration will do much to change it, it's nice to know when your exhaustion is shared.

Kaplan, however, mused that he might have been a little too freewheeling with his language.

"I'm probably going to get in trouble for everything I just said, but I'm at that point in my life and career that I just don't care anymore," Kaplan said. "The closest I come to a midlife crisis is giving zero fucks."

Before the rise of Overwatch there was the fall of Titan, a cancelled Blizzard MMO which was stripped for parts and used to craft the foundation of the team-shooter we all know today. Ex-Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan had been working on Titan and was the driving force behind redirecting the team to something new. It ended up with success but the interim certainly sounds like an ordeal, with the team given just six weeks to come up with and pitch a new game.

"It was supposed to be the greatest time ever if you think about it, because you're a game developer at Blizzard and you get to come up with a new idea," Kaplan says in an interview with Lex Fridman. "So that sounds awesome, to everybody at Blizzard to other game developers it sounds great. But we were probably the most demoralised we'd ever been in our careers, at least I was. I didn't know if I was going to be fired, if that was the end of my career at that point. So that was a very serious dire environment that this was happening in."

The situation certainly doesn't scream creative freedom. But Kaplan and the team didn't just have the pressure of the pitches to deal with: if Blizzard were to greenlight this next project and keep the majority of the team together then the next idea had to have two things.

"We were given two criteria that we had to hit for these pitches," Kaplan explains. "The first one was that we had to ship in two years, and that is a very ambitious timeframe for any game, but for a Blizzard game it's kind of insane. The second is even more ambitious and crazy: [it was that] whatever we pitched had to have the potential to have World of Warcraft-like revenue.

"At that point there was one game that had World of Warcraft-like revenue, which was World of Warcraft. So immediately I just threw out the revenue thing because it's all just monopoly money to me, game money, it's insane and I just don't think about it, that's someone else's problem. But I did want to be as realistic as I could be about the schedule."

So the team got together and began work on coming up with three pitches that they could bring to the Blizzard higher-ups: Overwatch, a StarCraft MMO, and Crossworlds, "a Chris Metzen vision for a universe". It was described as a planet at the edge of the universe which was essentially a spaceport full of freakish aliens and "people from all walks of life". But mind you, it wasn't the full Titan team working on these pitches, which was originally around 140 people.

After Titan got cancelled, people got sent off to work on other Blizzard games like Hearthstone or WoW. Kaplan and co had 'temp-loans' people who came to work with the team for a short period of time, but the brainstorming team was really quite small: "There was a very small creative group that had to come up with these pitches and given six weeks and we just sort of arbitrarily decided let's spend two weeks on each pitch."

"The ground rule that I led with is you have to be all-in for the two weeks on the pitch," Kaplan continues. "We have to live and breathe and want it more than anything. And I kind of warned everyone that at the end of these two weeks you're going to think this is the only game idea and you're not going to be invested in the next, but we're going to throw it out as soon as we finish it and do the next one."

In the end a conversation about what class would or could be added to Crossworlds inspired Kaplan to utilise old Titan concept art, to help come up with many of the original ideas for Overwatch heroes. "I started taking some of the old Titan characters that we had designed. We had a class called the Jumper, and the Jumper could teleport forward and rewind time and come back, and the Jumper used dual-wield pistols"—(I think you can guess where Kaplan is going with this)—"which was at the time designed after my dual G18's from Modern Warfare 2, it was my favourite loadout, I was just cribbing Infinity Ward, that's where Tracer's guns came from."

Instead of using it as a basis of a class, Kaplan asked what if this was just one person, who would that be and what would they look like? Thus Tracer was born. "Some of the pragmatic part of that was [that] I knew that Geoff Goodman was going to be on this team, and I knew that Arnold Tsang was going to be on this team, and it's a play to your strengths moment." Ultimately, the idea of Overwatch was the most realistic one this team of devs could pull off in two years, and that they did.

Even though he's not on the cover art, Overwatch's tank hero Reinhardt is as synonymous with the hero shooter as Tracer. He was one of the original heroes to launch with the game and has remained incredibly popular as time has gone on.

"Reinhardt was actually my main," former game director Jeff Kaplan told Lex Fridman in a recent interview. "So I played the most of Reinhardt."

Kaplan said Reinhardt was an "amazing [former lead hero designer] Geoff Goodman design." He was conceptualized as a big armored protector character, so players would understand what to do immediately: "As soon as you give somebody a shield, they know what to do. They go into protector mode."

But to make Reinhardt work in a team-based game with six-player teams, his shield was designed so that allies could shoot through it. "The shield has since been copied by like every hero shooter since, and even non-hero shooters," Kaplan added—and he's right, it absolutely has.

"It's really interesting where the charge ability came from," he explained. "I was playing a ton of Left 4 Dead 2. You could play in versus mode where you could be one of the enemy zombie guys, and there was an enemy boss zombie called The Charger who had that charge ability. And I thought the reason that ability was so cool is because it's a commitment, once you press the button you're a runaway train. Watching Reinhardt's charge to their deaths is hilarious and it's what separates a great Rein from a shitty one."

Anyone who has ever watched an esports match of Overwatch with two Reinhardt's duking it out will know how much thinking actually goes into a hero who has a relatively simple kit. The charge is both a movement ability and a way to pin an enemy against a wall and kill 'em in a single move. But the risk skyrockets when you're against another Reinhardt who can do the exact same thing to you if you miss. Reinhardt vs. Reinhardt battles are the best example of the rock-paper-scissors gameplay that defined Overwatch.

Kaplan said he appreciates heroes when they're not overcomplicated. He brought up the cowboy Cassidy as an example of one of his favorites from the original roster: "It's a very simple hero, but the simplicity is what I like best in design." Like Reinhardt, Cassidy does a few things well and is pretty easy to understand within 30 seconds of playing him. You shoot your gun, you roll away from danger, and you hit the High Noon button when the enemy team least expects it.

I am not surprised that Kaplan was a Reinhardt player because it speaks to the kind of heroes Overwatch launched with 10 years ago. None of them were particularly complex because the real complexity was in the interactions between all of them on the battlefield. I've never been a Reinhardt player myself, but I've always respected how focused he is as a hero while still living up to the fantasy of the stalwart knight on the frontlines.

Matchmaking in Overwatch, the boulder to my Sisyphus. This is something that haunts me and every other poor sod still clambering to get out of Elo-hell. It may at times seem like a horrid place to be but ex-Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan still assures players that it was the best it could be.

"The matchmaking systems are some of the most complex design engineering tasks you're ever going to tackle, and they're thankless," Kaplan says in an interview with Lex Fridman. "There's gotta be winners and there's gotta be losers."

The biggest complaint of Overwatch's matchmaking is that it directs players towards a 50/50 win-loss. I'm serious, look at any Overwatch account: Unless they're top 500 smurfs or unspeakably bad, the win-loss is going to be closer to 50/50 than you'd even think was possible.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. Usually when you've hit that point of six wins followed by six losses it means you're about where you should be on the Elo ladder. But it's a frustrating reality to grapple with nevertheless.

I started this season with a generational run, after placement matches I won 12 games in a row. All my teams worked together well, our comps had the right synergy, communication was on point, and it made for some of the best games of Overwatch I've played in a while. And then the fall.

I should've known it was coming, it can't last forever, but it doesn't mean it hurts any less. I'm currently on a six game loss streak and counting. I actually stopped myself from doing any more comp for my well-being last night, knowing full well that I have even further to fall.

"We would study it all the time when people would complain," Kaplan continues. "You see a Reddit post and somebody would say 'I had a six game losing streak, this is so fucked, it's the worst matchmaker ever'... I love Reddit. But we would look up that person's account, we'd do that all the time, I love looking at people's accounts and seeing what happened. And it's like, yeah you had a six game losing streak, but he had an eight game win streak before that. There was no post about "how awesome is this", and the human psychology doesn't allow for that.

"It's very hard because most people, and they're not being disingenuous, like if you ask a gamer what do you want they'll go 'I just want a fair match, just make it even'," Kaplan adds. "But the reality of what they want is they want a match where they're slightly better than the other guy. They want it to feel like it was close but then win. And you can't architect that, it's a zero-sum situation."

I don't envy anyone who has to deal with hero balancing and matchmaking. And to be fair, by and large Overwatch does it as well as it can. And hey, the loss streaks can't be that bad because I'm still playing after 10 years, which is certainly not proof of any other underlying problems.

The original World of Warcraft—no bells, no frills, no expansions—was a very special videogame. It was also occasionally insufferably annoying. Part of the reason it was so successful is because it was less annoying than the competition at the time, sure, but it also had some real stinkers when it came to quest design.

One of those stinkers is The Green Hills of Stranglethorn, a quest that tasks you to find a bunch of randomly-dropped pages at the behest of one Hemet Nesingwary. It is a major pain in the ass. Jeff Kaplan, who designed the thing during his stint at Blizzard, explains why to Lex Fridman in an interview this week.

"[The quest] holds a lot of emotional value for me because amongst WoW players back in the day it was unanimously hated as one of the sh*ttiest, most annoying quests," Kaplan explains. "But it holds a really special place in my heart, because first of all it was one of the few times I just wrote a short story that's actually in the game. It's me paying homage to Hemingway."

It was also, as he colourfully puts it, "the typical hubris of a junior game designer who thinks he's clever but is actually a dipsh*t. That's The Green Hills of Stranglethorn summed up."

The problem was, per Kaplan, that it was an "ant farm" quest—which is a conceptual term used to describe a designer playing god: "You're the game designer who's playing god and players are the ants in your ant farm and you want to see what they're gonna do (which is not the correct way to be a good multiplayer designer), but I hadn't learnt that yet.

"[It] was an ant farm design of 'I'm gonna write this (honestly probably pretty sh*tty story, I haven't read it since 2003 so god only knows if it's any good) … I wrote the story, and then I divided it up into all these different pages." Out of curiosity, I read it—it's a fun little Hemingway send up, nothing wrong with it. Probably not worth the quest, though.

See, there were a lot of problems with the mechanics of the quest itself—the pages didn't stack, and you could find multiple of the same ones, leading to a ton of inventory bloat and, if you were trying to do the quest on your own, complete and utter surrender to the RNG gods.

There were four pages per chapter, and you needed to collect all four chapters, leading to a total of 16 individual items that could clutter up your inventory even if you didn't have duplicates. Sure, you could compress the pages into chapters once you got all four of them, but—it sucked, is what I'm saying.

"It was kind of like that McDonalds Monopoly game where you have to have all the pieces or else you're not gonna win … I don't think that idea in a vacuum is horrible, but where this really fell apart was that the interface of World of Warcraft wasn't really set up [for it]."

"Players had very limited bag space. And as they're fighting in Stranglethorn Vale, I'm just sh*tting up their inventory with all these pages. They only needed so many! You might be unlucky and get like, three page fives, that're just junk in your inventory.

"That was my fantasy as a designer of like—and then they're gonna be social and meet each other and players are gonna be appreciative of each other! Eventually no-one did the quest, they just were super annoyed and went to the Auction House."

On the plus side, Kaplan says that "it not only became a way from me to learn from my mistakes—but because I was very open with the fact that I didn't think it was good, and that the quest had failed, it opened the door for us at Blizzard to be critical of our own work." Hey! Swings and roundabouts. At least it's not a 19-quest long chain about bees.

One of the biggest issues I've had since Overwatch first launched 10 years ago has always been just how much coordination the game demands from five or six complete strangers. For better and worse you live and die by your team, a feature that ex-Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan seems to regret.

"One of my hindsight regrets about Overwatch, and I think we did the right thing in the moment, I wouldn't go back and redo it, but if I was making a hero shooter from scratch today, I would make it less team-focused," Kaplan says in an interview with Lex Fridman.

"If I was to redo it today or for any aspiring hero-shooter makers out there I would actually downplay the team factor and try to put more focus on individual contribution. Because that's just how people play, they're selfish. And I don't mean that in a bad way it's just that human nature that they can't help."

The issue with Overwatch and its team-centric fights is that the whole match is decided on each team's weakest link. Very rarely is an Overwatch match lost because entire teams are mismatched, it's usually just who has the least worst teammate.

You can't carry as easily in Overwatch as you can in games like CS2 or Valorant, where all you need is one god who can tear through the enemy pack. Because in Overwatch if your tank player is the weak link you won't be able to hold the line or capitalise on free space. If your support is the weak link then you won't be able to stay alive long enough to make meaningful plays against the opposite team, and if your DPS is the weak link then no elims or damage for you.

This often means players need to massively compensate for whoever can't hold their weight, adding another layer of needless stress to manage. Stress which the other team isn't worrying about.

"We put all of our eggs in you noticing if the team won or lost and we downplayed your individual contribution as much as possible," Kaplan continues. "There wasn't a scoreboard, there was a medal system—but the medal system in my opinion was not good because the losing team got medals and the winning team got medals and the losing team would weaponise it against their teammates."

Another drawback of having such a huge reliance on teamwork in Overwatch is that a game can also be massively determined by who has the better comms. Once you start queuing with a duo or above you'll start to encounter better organised teams, ones that coordinate dives, peel, and even, god-forbid, time their ults.

Team 4 has made it easier for solos or split teams to compete with the coordination of voice comms over the years. Features like the ping mechanic can alert teamates to the whereabouts of enemy players, signalling to others when you need someone to peel or hunt a low-health enemy down. But nothing can compare to the real thing.

This isn't to say teamwork in Overwatch is something that sucks all the time. I've certainly had plenty of well-coordinated moments with strangers in my games where we all just enter a flow state and work together seamlessly, but that's sadly a much rarer occurrence than having a 2-8 Genji who spams need healing from half way across the map.

The factions of World of Warcraft don't mean as much nowadays—which isn't necessarily a bad thing. MMOs are having a tough enough time without splitting their playerbase and, furthermore, Azeroth has faced so many cosmic threats that continuing the faction war nonsense while the world's about to end would be comically stupid.

But there was a time where it meant a whole lot, forming a part of the original game's identity—and given the importance of faction warfare in the original RTS, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a huge part of WoW's development from the early days, too.

As revealed in a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast by Jeff Kaplan, former vice president of Blizzard, you'd be wrong—it was something the development team had been bickering about for ages:

"The Horde/Alliance decision was really controversial," explains Kaplan, "Because in Everquest it was mixed … [Rob Pardo] and I came from Everquest, where we felt like this was a horrible decision [Allen Adham] was making. And we argued."

At the time, Kaplan was a quest designer, but he was very tight-knit with the head honchos at Blizzard, working closely with Chris Metzen, too, describing himself as a "medium between Chris Metzen and our level designers and our environmental artists" back in 2009.

Kaplan tells Fridman that "Allen, Bob Fitch and I would have lunch every single day, and we would just talk about WoW and the core design of WoW … We would fight over the Horde/Alliance split and if it was a good idea or not."

See, Allen—who was one of the progenitors of WoW, but retired before its release—played a bunch of Dark Age of Camelot: "The magic of that game was that you had three factions, and he liked the fact you were instantly on a team, you weren't a loner in the world, and whether you liked it or not you had people on your side."

In DAoC, you had three realms you could join, Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia. Basically a choice between Arthurian knights, druidic elves, and Vikings. What's even more staggering about the fact that inspiration was allegedly controversial is the assertion Kaplan makes that it wasn't even locked in until around one year before release.

"Some time before beta, Allen retired … I think it was nine months to a year before WoW shipped, which is kinda nuts, Rob takes over as lead designer in Allen's stead. And to Rob's credit the first thing he did was go: Allen's a smart guy, the fact he was fighting so hard for Horde/Alliance? We gotta do it."

One of the structural cornerstones of World of Warcraft, something that—as Kaplan mentions earlier in the interview—prompted longtime WoW players to get tattoos, wasn't a concrete part of development until nine to 12 months before release.

Granted, I'm sure Kaplan just means the split—given the Warcraft lore Blizzard was pulling from, I'd imagine the various zones and capital cities were already far along in development at the time. Even MMOs like Everquest still had race-specific zones to help sell that fantasy, but still: We've come a long way.

Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan was the public face of Overwatch before he left Activision Blizzard in 2021. If you were interested in videogames between 2014 and 2021, it's likely you'll recognise his face. In a new interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, Kaplan details for the first time how and why he left Activision Blizzard, and it's not pretty.

The way Kaplan explains it, the good ship Overwatch started to buckle when unreasonable expectations were placed on the Overwatch League, a hugely hyped esports league founded in 2017 and closed in 2024.

"Where it got away from us is that there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much," Kaplan said. "It got overmarketed to the people buying the teams. They went on this roadshow where they had a deck—and you can put anything in a deck, and sell anything—and they were pretty much selling the Brooklyn Bridge, that Overwatch League was going to be more popular than the NFL."

It got to a point where commitments made to Overwatch League and its "billionaire investors" started to interfere with work on Overwatch itself, or at least, the part of it the public played. This included the development of Twitch integration, spectator camera control, as well as skins in the form of team uniforms. In other words, the money people kept promising features that soaked up development resources.

"And so all your plans [for Overwatch content] at that point kinda go out the window," Kaplan said. "You're not working on new world events, you're not focused on Overwatch 2, you're just treading water."

Kaplan also describes how when Activision Blizzard wasn't able to meet certain investor expectations with Overwatch League, the onus would be placed on the dev team to make good. "I don't know how to phrase this in a way that's not damning, but there was too much focus on 'let's make lots of money really fast' and a lot of people got drawn into it," Kaplan said.

Eventually it wasn't just Activision and Blizzard who had financial stakes in Overwatch, but many other investors, all of whom started to express their opinion.

"Originally the business model was going to be that they [Overwatch League] were going to do in-person events, and there's going to be big ticket sales and merch and all of that. I think, really quickly, everybody learned we can't do in-game events when we have a London team and a Shanghai team… like, how does this work? So that fell apart super quickly. The merch was good but it wasn't going to be making NFL money, whatever insanity people thought that was going to be.

"So everybody [the investors] quickly defaulted back to, 'hey, didn't Overwatch make 500 million dollars just in the live game last year?' What can we sell, and what can you give us? That pressure comes onto the [dev] team, and [add to that] the pressure to ship Overwatch 2, and then all the care and love that we had for the live game and the live service—like let's make events, new heroes, new maps—we're losing all these resources."

Kaplan says that in 2016 and 2017, he felt in control of Overwatch and the direction of the game, alongside the product director Ray Gresko. "It felt like we were running Overwatch and we were very, very successful and doing a good job, and I think the fans were happy," he said. Overwatch League, despite the good intentions behind it, "ended up being an albatross".

In the end, after enduring the difficulties of managing Overwatch League expectations with development on the core game itself, Kaplan was sent over the edge by an exquisitely cruel meeting with the company's then CFO.

"What ultimately broke me and my Blizzard career was I got called into the CFO's office and he sits me down and he says—he gives me a date which at the time was 2020 and was going to slip to 2021, but at the time it was 2020—and he said: 'Overwatch has to make [redacted] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [redacted]' and then he says to me 'if it doesn't do [redacted] we're going to lay off 1,000 people, and that's going to be on you.' And that was the biggest fuck you moment I've had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition."

The redacted figures are due to a confidentiality agreement signed by Kaplan.

"As someone who's worked on a lot of games, made a lot of games, you get in these meetings where they're like 'Fortnite has 1400 people working on it, so if we just hire 1400 people and make it free-to-play, we'll make that money, right?' I had believed that I would never work in any place but Blizzard, I loved it, it was a part of who I was, and I thought that I was a part of it. And I literally thought I'd retire from the place. I never thought the day would come, but that was it. Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there."

Dennis Durkin was CFO of Activision Blizzard from 2019 to May 2021; Armin Zerza held the role from then until 2025. Kaplan's departure was announced on April 20, 2021.

I've reached out to Activision Blizzard for comment.

After releasing in 2023 without many key advertised features, including a long-promised PvE mode, Overwatch 2 was eventually renamed Overwatch earlier this year.

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of Edge magazine. We have republished it in 2021 to add context to the news of Kaplan's departure from Blizzard.

During the early 2000s, Jeff Kaplan spent a full third of his life in EverQuest. He played the game at the highest level as an officer in one of North America’s most prominent guilds, Legacy Of Steel. When not in Norrath he pitched novels and short stories to publishers and tinkered with the Half-Life map editor WorldCraft.

One day, in EverQuest, a fellow officer asked if he could try Kaplan's maps. Later, the same guildmate invited him to lunch in Irvine, California, at a game development studio called Blizzard, which Kaplan had never heard of—he didn’t play strategy games. The guildmate was the Blizzard designer Rob Pardo; studio co-founder Alan Adham was also a member. A series of lunches over six months eventually revealed themselves to be job interviews. This RTS studio had an idea for making an MMOG, but it needed an MMOG player's expertise to make it happen.

Kaplan's subsequent career at Blizzard has seen him become design lead on World Of Warcraft, the world’s most successful massively multiplayer RPG. He oversaw design on the aborted MMOG Titan before, in the aftermath of that project's collapse, spearheading work on the phenomenal—and phenomenally popular—Overwatch.

Here's the story of Kaplan's Blizzard career, in his words:

World of Warcraft

Developer/publisher: Blizzard
Format: PC
Release: 2004

I joined in May of 2002, which is the period when they were wrapping up Warcraft 3 and then starting on the E3 build of World Of Warcraft. It was a big deal. WoW was going to be at E3 and needed a good showing.

They hired me along with another designer who was going to be on quests named Pat Nagle. Pat and I started from scratch with how a quest should work. We started out more from a creative place: what are the sorts of quests that we want to do in a game, what are those stories, how can we have that type of gameplay? We worked with the programmers to get the tools made so we could create content and then we split up—he started with Elwynn and I started with Westfall. We said, "OK, here we go, you take this zone, I'll take that zone, we'll see where we're at."

Elwynn was our first team-wide playtest. We were kind of shocked, because coming from EverQuest, ironically you barely did any quests in that game. Our assumption was that we’d give you a quest, you’d go do the quest, and you'd discover a new area of spawns—like, "Here's where Hogger is, and oh look there’s all these gnolls here, I think I'll kill gnolls for a couple of hours."

We put the team through the playtest and first thing after that everybody is up in arms. "I ran out of quests! Did something break?" Alan, Pat and I had this realisation: "Oh fuck, we're going to have to quest this whole thing out." We literally had to rethink the project at that moment. Our old estimates for how many quests we thought we were going to do versus how many quests we ended up doing were radically off.

When I think about the effect that WoW had on MMOs... I almost think it's broader than that. One, MMOs can be for everyone. MMOs are not just for crazy-hardcore people who are willing to spend one third of their life on this activity. The other, and I guess this goes hand in hand, is that it's not OK for a game to totally lack direction for players who seek it. A lot of players just need something, some sort of direction, or they're going to check out from the game. 

In terms of WoW being a success, this is going to sound super weird 11 or 12 years after it all happened, but we had huge insecurity about the game. Every interview we'd do, the question we kept getting asked was—it wasn't phrased quite this way, but: "What business do you have making an MMO? You guys make RTSes."

Back in that time period the two games that MMO players were most excited about were EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies. Everyone believed [Galaxies] was going to rule the universe because it was the two things that I know I was most excited about in life, which was Star Wars and MMOs. I remember the year that we showed World Of Warcraft at E3, we were fully playable—you could run around, go to Scarlet Monastery, do all that stuff—and for Star Wars Galaxies they had literally only shown a movie and the movie was winning Best Of E3 awards. Our morale was super low. I think the only one who had confidence was Alan.

It was around that time period that EverQuest announced that they had passed 400,000 subscribers. I was thinking we'd be lucky if we got half that, a quarter of that, and Alan Adham stood up and said, "We're going to have one million subscribers, that's how good I think this game is going to be, that's how much I believe in you guys."

I remember looking at Alan. I held him in the highest admiration because he was my first boss, he was one of my mentors, he had hired me, he had founded Blizzard. In that moment I looked at him and thought, "Wow, he's batshit crazy."

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

Developer/publisher: Blizzard
Format: PC
Release: 2007

I'm not sure how many people know this, but we shipped World Of Warcraft with 60 developers. Sixty people made that game. It's something that to this day I’m very proud of, [but] after we launched, because it was such a difficult crunch and such a difficult development cycle, we lost about 20 developers.

We had all of WoW's success to support from a live standpoint, and we had no animators. All of our animators had quit. There's this one patch where we introduced four green dragons. It was literally because we had a dragon model and getting colour shift on it was trivial and we had no one to work on the game at that point. The team was devastated and demoralised. We were pulling boxes from the retail channel so you couldn't even buy WoW. You launch this game and then you're like, "Pull the boxes back! We can't support them on the servers!"

We had hired some new people. I remember we hired this one server programmer whose name was Brian Gibson-Winge. We're having a team meeting and I remember everyone talking, like, "What are we doing? Nothing we're doing is good." Brian was the brand-new guy in the room, and he stands up and says, "Hey guys, I know I'm the new guy and I probably shouldn't speak up, but what’s wrong with you? You made World Of Warcraft and this is the most awesome fucking game in the world." Suddenly, as we started hiring more people like Brian, the team got reinvigorated. There was a huge turning point going from vanilla WoW into The Burning Crusade, and it was because of the influx of new people who really inspired the team. That and the first BlizzCon were a big morale boost for us.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Developer/publisher: Blizzard
Format: PC
Release: 2008

The team since Wrath Of The Lich King has done amazing things—I think the best expansion they have ever made is Legion. But at that time, there was something very special about Lich King. When we reflected on The Burning Crusade we realised that we had a story that was probably a little bit too convoluted for most people to understand. There's probably five factions of Blood Elves. As lead designer on the game I didn’t even know which Blood Elves were which at a certain point.

The other thing that was really amiss in Burning Crusade was that we had one of the most compelling characters in Illidan, but we only let players interact with Illidan in the Black Temple. Such a small percentage of our players got to do that content because it was tuned to be so hardcore, and it was so inaccessible. The massive lesson coming from The Burning Crusade into Wrath Of The Lich King was, if you have this front-of-the-box compelling character like Illidan or Arthas, give it to people! Let people interact with it. It's no mistake that the first second that you log into Wrath Of The Lich King, especially if you make a Death Knight, who's standing in front of you? It's Arthas.

Also, we had Alex Afrasiabi, who was probably the most famous EverQuest player of all time. We hired him during vanilla WoW, but I feel like Alex's curve was really starting to peak with Wrath Of The Lich King. We put Alex in charge of all quest design for that expansion. Alex was the one who made that Death Knight starting experience, which I think at the time and maybe to this day is one of the greatest storytelling quest experiences in the game. It made everybody question what we had done before.

Titan

Developer/publisher: Blizzard
Format: Unannounced
Release: Cancelled

I moved over from WoW to Titan the week Wrath Of The Lich King shipped. It was November of 2008. I remember it well because we have this tradition at Blizzard when we ship a game: we do a champagne toast out in front of the orc statue that's at the studio. The Wrath Of The Lich King champagne toast was memorable for three reasons. One was because it was Wrath Of The Lich King, and we were very proud of it. Two, it was my birthday. Three, it was the day that Barack Obama was elected for his first term. I remember being quite drunk when I found out that Obama had won the election. I was like, "Wow, that's awesome!" Then I passed out a few hours later. Very shortly after that, like the next day, I moved over to what is now called Team 4 to work on Titan.

Things started off great. There was an enthusiasm and an ambition to the project that made it very alluring for a lot of us. For the first year that I was on the project, from 2009, it was just a lot of brainstorming, a lot of excited false starts were happening, a lot of technology exploration. It was somewhere at the end of 2009 that the red flags started going off for me. "This doesn't feel like we're making the right type of project." That just increased as the years went on.

The week before Diablo 3 shipped they moved Ray [Gresko, production director] onto Titan to help save the project, so he didn't even get to enjoy the launch with his team. We were pulled into this meeting and told, "Hey, you're production director, you're game director; you guys need to try and save this project." Ray said we should get lunch and we took the lead producer Matt Hawley with us. Ray sits down across from Matt and I and says, "Tell me what I need to know about Titan." Matt looks at me, and I look at Ray, and I say, "Well, we need to shut it down."

Ray was taken aback. He said, "Well, they brought me on this project to save it. You have to respect the fact that I can't just shut it down." Six months passed and during that six months we replaced some of the leadership on the team. We now had a new tech director, a guy called Mike Elliott, because the technology on Titan was just a mess, nothing worked, and we brought Mike over to help. Ray, Mike and I were in a one-on-one with the three of us; I don’t know how it's a one-on-one with three people, but that's what we call them. We were in this meeting and Ray had his moment where he said, "Oh god, you and Matt were right, we need to shut it down, it's just not going to happen." And Mike says: "Wait! I was just brought onto the project to save it! We can’t shut it down!" So we went another six months and then it was after another one of those one-on-ones where we said, "It's time to go to studio leadership and tell them that it's not going to happen."

I don't think most people realise this, but Blizzard has cancelled more games than we've made. When you're making a new game at Blizzard it's more likely that your game's going to get cancelled than it's going to see the light of day. Now I don't think that any developer working on a game believes that you're the one—I think we all think that we're special.

Something that was unique about Titan was that it's not usually the team that says, "This is not going to happen." It's a very daunting thing to do. You’re basically saying, "We failed to do our jobs." You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know if they're going to say, "Thanks for your time here, be on your way." That, and most projects go on for that length of time—ultimately, I did six years [on the Titan project].

We knew in about April of 2013 that we were going to shut the project down, but very few people knew. Only the top leadership of Activision knew: Bobby [Kotick] knew, Mike Morhaime, Frank Pearce, myself, Ray Gresko, Rob Pardo, Mike Elliott. The rest of the team didn't know. We were trying to work on a contingency plan because we had a 140-person team. We wanted to be careful in that moment that we didn't devastate a lot of people, make people feel that they'd wasted their careers.

The initial plan was that we would come up with a new game concept, and then we would inform the team at the end of May that we were shutting Titan down—however, there was this new game that we were going to make instead. That plan, as I say it now, sounds so naïve. I have to pretend that we're still making Titan during the day, and at night and on the weekends I'm going home and I'm putting these pitch decks together for different game concepts. I'm absolutely fucking panicked.

Instead we came up with a plan to inform the team that we were shutting the project down. Luckily the studio was in dire need of help on our other projects, so it was the perfect time to have a lot of developers free up. Of the 60 remaining developers, the vast majority were engineers and programmers. We had built a new engine for Titan, but the engine was a mess, and we said, "Do whatever we have to do so this work isn't totally wasted." Then a very small group of us, about ten, were given the assignment over a six-week period to come up with game pitches. If we came up with something compelling, the team would go on to make that. If we didn't, the remainder of us would be redistributed to the other projects. We were in this weird mourning period, but we suddenly had to be the most creative [we'd ever been] in our lives.

Overwatch

Developer/publisher: Blizzard
Format: PC, PS4, Xbox One
Release: 2016

At first we really thought that we were the MMO team. The first idea we worked on was an MMO that was not in the Warcraft universe, but was in one of the other Blizzard universes—[you have] tonnes of questions about what that might be, I imagine. The second idea we worked on was another MMO concept that was not in an existing universe, and not in the Titan universe—it was a brand-new MMO concept. It was hard because we were really scoping everything back. Whereas Titan had been the most ambitious MMO I've ever seen, we were doing these other MMO pitches with one hand tied behind our back, knowing the time period we were given was not realistic to make an MMO. A lot of us had MMO experience, knew exactly what it took, and we knew, like, there's no way this was going to happen.

We were having a class discussion—it was going to be a class-based MMO—and our class designer, a guy called Geoff Goodman, said, “I wish instead of having six classes or nine classes, we could have dozens of classes. But what if our classes had fewer things that they did and were more specialised?” It really just lit the lightbulb for me. I went back to my desk after that and I was really inspired by what Geoff had wanted to do, but I was actually thinking to myself, "I don’t think that’s an MMO."

I was fascinated with the shooter concept. The thing that worked the most on Titan, because Titan had shooting as its combat model, was its PvP shooting. The two things I loved most in gaming were MMOs and shooters. I started thinking about a more tightly scoped game using that Geoff Goodman concept of dozens of classes with abilities.

I started pulling a bunch of Arnold Tsang concept art of characters for Titan. We had this class called the Jumper in Titan that had Blink, and Recall, and Pulse Bomb, and about 30 other abilities, but I always felt like Blink, Recall and Pulse Bomb—and the Pulse Pistols—were the coolest part. Suddenly it was like, "Well, what if the Jumper uses this art and has only these abilities, and what if it’s a person—instead of this nameless, faceless class, these are actual characters?" Had that pitch deck and the rest of the team was working on MMO number two, and Ray Gresko came by and looks over my shoulder. I show it to Ray and he’s instantly like, “Oh my god, that’s what we should do.”

So we took the deck and we grabbed [Chris] Metzen and he lit up right away. Especially when he started to think about how it's not a generic sniper, it's Widowmaker, who was turned against her husband in this cold-blooded assassination attempt. That was so much more compelling to him than these generic classes. He had the same reaction Ray had, and Matt Hawley our producer was overhearing our conversation and said to me, "You need to pitch this to the team tomorrow morning."

Matt's the one who forced the game to get named Overwatch. We were taking the deck to the team, and the deck had a very not-good name for a shooter. Matt's like, "There's nothing less inspiring than what you have that deck named right now. You have to come up with a name for it." And I said, "I want to call it Overwatch." Overwatch was always a world group in Titan, but it was totally different—but all of us loved the name. So there was a moment of rebirth that we could actually call this new game Overwatch, and we pitched to the team and almost unanimously they said, "Yes, we want to make this game."

Being an individual developer on Team 4, it was like a whole new era when we started Overwatch. That was very good. The problem was that we needed to get the game concept approved by Blizzard and by Activision. The year was 2013 and we had just failed enormously at creating Blizzard's next MMO. It was supposed to be this MMO shooter. Then we come back and we’re sitting in the boardroom with the top Activision executives—Thomas Tippl, Dennis Durkin, Bobby Kotick—and what do we pitch to them, the guys who have enormous success with the Call Of Duty series? We walk into the pitch meeting with a shooter. They were super polite and super nice to us, but you could sense this undercurrent of, "Oh god, of all things, what are you idiots doing?"

The saving grace was a picture that Arnold Tsang had drawn—an early version of the character lineup. We're pitching and there's a lot of hard questions coming at us and Bobby [Kotick] just stops the meeting and says, "Go back two slides." I'm thinking, "Oh, fuck, what was two slides ago?" We go back and it's that Arnold Tsang picture. The room just got quiet and you could see the wheels turning in Bobby's head. He just said, "I've never seen art like this, I've never seen characters like this." It was the only positive thing that was said in the Overwatch pitch meeting—how Bobby emotionally reacted to the art. What that bought us was that we had until March to put together a core combat demo of the game.

The demo we made was Temple Of Anubis, fully artified and lit in our engine, which now actually worked, and we had Reaper, Widowmaker, Pharah and Tracer. And it was just the funnest thing we had ever played. The Blizzard guys loved it, the Activision guys came and because they're shooter fans, they were screaming and yelling with joy. It was just the most positive, off-to-the-races moment ever.

The next step after that demo was Blizzcon 2014, which was intended to be our announce. Ray [Gresko] was the inspirational leader on the team who believed in us more than anything, and he said to us, "I want us to become one of those Blizzard stories one day"; the team that gets cancelled one year and announces a project at BlizzCon the following year. Ray had such an amazing plan to get us to that BlizzCon.

We knew we were going to face a couple of issues. One was that we had to publicly cancel Titan. Then I started focusing on how we could announce the game, what content we should have that would make people believe in the game and not be disappointed by the concept.

What I was worried about was a couple of things. One, we weren't making an MMO. Two, Blizzard was making a shooter and we weren't a shooter company. Three, I thought people would think we were overly derivative of either various MOBA games, or games like Team Fortress 2.

Every time we tried to pitch the game to somebody they were skeptical, but every time they played the core combat demo they were like, "Oh my god, this is awesome." So I put together this content plan that was to have three maps, because I wanted to show that the game actually existed and wasn't just this smoke-and-mirrors E3 demo. The big push was for 12 heroes. The reason for that number was that I wanted to very cleanly clear the nine classes from Team Fortress.

I felt that if we had nine or fewer classes during our announce, players would naturally map every one of our heroes to a Team Fortress 2 class. Which is funny because when the announce actually happened, the fans who read about it online immediately jumped to that conclusion. What was awesome is that the fans that attended the show played so much of Overwatch there that they became our strongest advocates. "Guys, I know there's obvious inspiration from games like Team Fortress but they're doing something different. This is a very different experience."

Nothing to me was more rewarding than that moment at BlizzCon 2014 when Chris announced the game and then it was just there on the show floor and everyone was playing it. I forgot how important that was, not only to me personally but to everybody on my team as well. "This is the reason we do this, because of those guys out there playing the game right now."

The team today is in an awesome place. I think we had a little bit of a rocky start to becoming a live-service team, but the team has really hit its stride now. They feed off the live game, they feed off the community, and they really are ready for some of the next big challenges that we want to do. They're always inspired by not what's going on now, but thinking about what Overwatch could be someday: where we could take it.

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of Edge magazine. In 2019, Overwatch 2 was announced. In April 2021, Kaplan left Blizzard.

Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan, one of the highest-profile figures at Blizzard Entertainment who's well known to many fans as “Papa Jeff,” has left the company.

"It was truly the honor of a lifetime to have the opportunity to create worlds and heroes for such a passionate audience," Kaplan wrote in his farewell message. "I want to express my deep appreciation to everyone at Blizzard who supported our games, our game teams and our players. But I want to say a special thanks to the wonderful game developers that shared in the journey of creation with me."

"Never accept the world as it appears to be. Always dare to see it for what it could be. I hope you do the same."

Kaplan was at Blizzard for 19 years (here's the whole story, as he told it in 2017), and prior to Overwatch also worked as a designer and director on World of Warcraft and several expansions. He became known as the face of Overwatch through the regular community update videos posted to YouTube, but his best work—in video, at least—surely occurred in the annual Overwatch Yule Log specials, in which he would sit stone still in front of a blazing fire and Christmas tree, staring blankly into the camera while occasionally sipping from an Overwatch coffee mug.

Kaplan’s role on Overwatch will be assumed by Aaron Keller, currently the assistant game director.

"Jeff’s been a great leader, mentor, and friend, and he knows how much we’re going to miss him. I’ve been lucky to work alongside him and the rest of the Overwatch team for many years in building something that continues to inspire people all around the world, and I’m honored to carry the torch forward," Keller said in his own message.

"While I have no pretenses about filling Jeff’s shoes, I’m excited to step into the game director role and continue to be part of a team that’s putting all of its heart, talent, and focus into the next iteration of Overwatch, and I’m honored to continue serving this incredible community."

Keller also noted that development of Overwatch 2 is "continuing at a good pace," and that Blizzard will begin sharing more frequent updates on the game's status soon. We learned more about the sequel's focus on cooperative PvE missions and new hero Sojourn at BlizzCon 2021.

The latest Overwatch developer update has a bit more of a casual look to it than we usually see, because it comes to us from a corner of Jeff Kaplan's house, apparently recorded on a phone taped to a box. Despite the junktech setup, the recording quality is perfectly fine (Kaplan looks a little rougher around the edges than usual, but who among us does not these days), and the update delivers some welcome news about changes coming to the Overwatch communications wheel.

Kaplan kicks off by noting that a very common request from Overwatch players is the ability to customize the communication wheel to enable the ability to deliver specific orders, or say things like "sorry" or "goodbye." So Blizzard is going to do just that, by adding a series of new lines for the communications wheel and an option in the settings that will let players set them up however they like. Even better, all of the new lines have been voice recorded for all 32 heroes, so every no matter how you set up your wheel, you'll hear the lines properly spoken.

"Everybody has been wanting to say 'sorry' for a long time, not just Mei," Kaplan says in the video. "So now, with any character, you can say 'sorry'. We think it's going to be a cool system. A lot of you have asked for that level of customization in the communication wheel, and we think it'll be really powerful for you."

Kaplan also said that Blizzard is working on getting queue times down, a process that—among other things—will see the addition of a new "priority queuing system" for players who get booted from failed competitive matches. Currently, if one player quits a competitive match, it ends and the remaining players are kicked to the end of the queue; when the new system goes into place, those players will instead be returned to the queue in the position they had before the match started—as long as they're not the player who quit the match and forced it to collapse.

"It's not going to guarantee that you're instantly going to get into another match after the match gets shut down by a leaver, but you're not going to have to wait the entire queue time," Kaplan says. "It's going to put you back in where you would have been as if that match had never happened."

There's currently no target date set for the queuing changes: Kaplan said Blizzard also wants to get "messaging" into the system so players know when it's happening, but that could slow things down a bit.

In January, Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan revealed the Overwatch Experimental Card, an upcoming new mode that will enable players on all platforms to test planned changes. It's similar to the public test realm in some ways, but aside from being accessible to all players (the PTR is restricted to PC), Kaplan said that it will be focused on gameplay changes rather than bug testing. And because it will be part of the live game, progress made in Experimental will apply toward levels and special event progress, something the PTR doesn't offer.

Barring unforeseen catastrophe, the Experimental Card will go live tomorrow. In a new developer update video, Kaplan repeated that the new mode will be focused on "radical gameplay changes or things that we want to try out and get your direct player feedback on," a process that will begin with a change to the role queue system. 

Role queueing enables players to select the role they want to play ahead of a match—tank, support, or damage—and then assembles teams in a specific, locked configuration. Currently, teams are made up of two players in each role, but the experimental card will change that mix to one tank, three damage, and two support.

Kaplan explains in the video that the change was driven by an increase in queue time for damage players caused by role queueing, which led to internal experiments with the increased number of damage players. 

"This was a lot of fun," Kaplan says in the video. "It was very controversial on the development team. We have very strong reactions for and against this system, and ultimately at around the same time we had also mentioned to you that were going to do this experimental card... and so many players said, 'Why don't you let us try it?' So this is your chance."

A major concern Blizzard has about the change is the impact it will have on "off-tank" characters Roadhog, Zarya, and D.Va, who will undergo "big balance changes" as a result. Kaplan didn't detail the changes but he did say that the changes are not intended for the live game unless the 3/2/1 system is also adopted across the board.

"This is a look into what happens if we decide to make Roadhog the only tank in the match, or if we decide to make D.Va the only tank in the match," he says. "You are going to have some insight into the type of balance changes that we would need to make."

Blizzard will be watching damage queue times in the Experimental Card to see if the change fixes the problem, and as always is also looking for feedback from players. Kaplan also teased some "event surprises" that might be taking place while the Experimental Card is up, and reassured players that what they see in the Experimental Card, now and in the future, should not be taken as a sign of Overwatch's inevitable demise.

"Don't panic when you see this card go up. These are changes that we are unsure of, and that's why we're getting your feedback on them," he says. "It doesn't mean that they're imminently coming to Overwatch anytime soon. It just helps you get some insight into what we're focused on and some of our design process."

Bans in games like Rainbow Six Siege and Heroes of the Storm enable players or teams to exclude characters at the start of matches, preventing opponents from selecting ones who dominate specific maps or the overall meta. Overwatch fans have been calling for a similar system in their game of choice for some time now, but so far Blizzard has opted against doing so. 

That will change during Overwatch Season 21, however. Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan revealed in today's developer update video that Blizzard is implementing a "Hero Pool" system, similar to bans, and it's coming to Competitive Play. The big difference is that instead of banning characters on a per-match basis, excluded heroes will be selected by Blizzard every week, in order to "prevent players from stagnating on any one meta too long."

"The Hero Pool will only last for one week, and then there will be a new Hero Pool," Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan explains in the new developer update video. "There will be some heroes that will not be included in the Hero Pool. For example, in the first week of the Hero Pool, let's say Season 21 had just started, maybe Orisa, Sigma, Mei, and Moira are not in the Hero Pool. Players will have to think of a new strategy that doesn't involve those heroes, and that will last for one week, and then the Hero Pool will change."

Kaplan emphasized that the Hero Pool will only be active in Competitive Play, not Quickplay or the Arcade, and also noted that nothing is carved in stone. Depending on how it goes, Blizzard may make changes to the system, such as lengthening or shortening the durations, or even enabling more ban-like per-match exclusions. He also confirmed that the Overwatch League will adopt "a version of Hero Pools," details of which will be revealed in an upcoming blog post.

Another interesting change on the way is the addition of an "Experimental Card" to the Overwatch menu. Kaplan says in the video that the development team has faced criticism for responding too slowly to complaints about balance issues. Blizzard generally relies on the PTR for testing, but it's not the most reactive system, and new content and updates on the PTR often tend not to be changed very much before going live. The Experimental Card will enable more frequent and aggressive changes by making a PTR-like environment, which is currently restricted to players on PC, readily available to everyone.

"This Experimental Card will be some number of changes—they might be related to hero balance, they might be related to other things, we might be testing changes to the way one of our game modes works, like the Control game mode and how it works in Competitive. It doesn't have to be balance related—but the Experimental Card will come up every now and then when we want to test something. And it will give all players of Overwatch, not just players who want to go to the PTR but all players including console players, will be able to use the Experimental Card to test changes out."

Another big benefit for players is that because the Experimental Card is in the live game, any progress you earn will count toward levels and special event progress. Kaplan also said that while the PTR is generally focused on bugs and stability, the Experimental Card will be more about looking at gameplay changes and player reactions to them. The first Experimental Card is expected to be up in a few weeks.

Kaplan also said—warned, maybe—that Blizzard is changing its "philosophy" about Overwatch balance changes. Previously, balance changes have been focused on the game's "stability" for all players, but going forward it will balance "more frequently, more aggressively, and be less concerned with trying something out, and maybe pulling it back later." 

"We're going to try some pretty aggressive balance changes," he said. "We're going to balance more aggressively, target the meta, and moving you off of the meta as frequently as possible."

Kaplan also touched on some smaller changes coming to Overwatch, including the ability to pin and share replay and a "light refresh" of career profiles—a "major overhaul" is coming in Overwatch 2, "but that's way further down the pipe." Blizzard also has plans to step up its anti-cheat efforts in the next update, 1.45, which is expected to go live in early February.

Update: The Overwatch Yule Log livestream is over. Fortunately for everyone who missed it (or who'd like to enjoy it all over again), the full eight-hour show is now available on YouTube, which we've embedded for your convenience below.

Original story:

Remember the 2017 holiday season, when Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan dominated Twitch by sitting in front of a fire for ten hours? It returned in 2018, this time with a number of different "hosts," including Kaplan, and in 2019 it'll be back yet again.

What can we expect for this year's festive season? Kaplan will once more park his ass in a luxurious armchair upholstered in what is surely the finest Corinthian leather, but otherwise it's a mystery. The 2018 Yule log featured appearances from McCree voice actor Matt Mercer, D.Va voice actor Charlet Chung, and caster Soe Gschwind, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the guest-cast lineup expanded even further this year. That's how these things go, after all.

The Overwatch Yule Log, and those who sit in front of it, will be viewable on Twitch. A start time hasn't been announced, but we'll let you know when the fun—which is to say, the sitting quietly, occasionally sipping hot chocolate—begins.

When Hearthstone Grandmaster Chung "blitzchung" Ng Wai called for the liberation of Hong Kong during a post-match interview in October, Blizzard's reaction was harsh: A year-long suspension from pro play, demotion from Grandmasters, and loss of all his season two winnings. Blizzard eventually eased up a bit, reducing his suspension from a year to six months and reinstating his winnings, but it was still a very serious penalty for one of the best Hearthstone pros in the world.

One very surprising critic of Blizzard's handling of the situation is Jeff Kaplan, the high-profile director of Blizzard's team-based FPS Overwatch. Kaplan told the Washington Post that he was relieved when Blizzard reduced Blitzchung's suspension, and furthermore, he thinks it should be "reduced more or eliminated."

"I'm obviously a huge supporter of free speech; it’s something that’s very important to me," Kaplan said. "It got to me personally. I think the punishment was too harsh and I was greatly relieved when they gave his money back. I think that was extremely important."

Kaplan said he and most of the Overwatch team weren't aware of the situation until it began to appear on news sites, and that he thinks it was handled "way too quickly." He's regularly involved in determining bans and suspensions for Overwatch League players who break the rules, he said, and said the process of determining punishment usually takes four or five days.

"There was always a group of us involved in deciding what the punishment should be, and we would heavily devil’s-advocate every part of the decision. So I was actually shocked that such a harsh penalty was levied," he said. 

It's an unexpected stance from someone who may be Blizzard's most high-profile developer, but Kaplan also emphasized that he was speaking solely for himself, and that other Blizzard personnel may feel differently: "I think as individuals, we all have very different feelings about what happened in regards to the Hearthstone tournament and Blitzchung. There is a lot of very different reaction among all of us."

Blizzard president J. Allen Brack apologized to fans for Blizzard's handling of the matter, saying during his BlizzCon keynote that the company "moved too quickly in our decision making." He did not apologize to Blitzchung, however, or reduce his punishment further.

Overwatch 2 is kind of an odd beast. It's a sequel—you can tell because of the "2"—but it feels a lot more like an expansion. It's still early in development so a lot of details have yet to be nailed down, but Joanna said in her BlizzCon preview that Overwatch 2's new story mode "looks and feels identical to Overwatch's gameplay," but for the addition of level progression. All the heroes, maps, modes, and cosmetics coming to Overwatch 2 will be playable in the original game, too.

But it's not just a matter of maintaining two games simultaneously: The long-term plan, game director Jeff Kaplan told Kotaku, is to bring them together as one.

"There will be a point where the clients merge," he said. "We think this is important, especially as a competitive experience. The whole idea is to avoid fragmenting the player base and giving anybody a competitive advantage. If we’re playing in the same competitive pool, you’d better not have a better framerate just because you’re on a different version of the engine."

It's ambitious, although the fact that the new game is built on the same engine as the first will presumably make the effort more workable. But it also fits with the idea of Overwatch 2 as an expansion, despite its billing as a sequel. In fact, Kaplan said that work on Overwatch 2 is "100 percent the reason" for the slow pace of updates to Overwatch, which I'm kind of inclined to take as meaning that Overwatch 2 is the update to Overwatch 1. 

The plan to merge the clients could arise at least in part from a desire to protect the integrity of the Overwatch League, which is still quite young and surely doesn't need the hassles involved with a jarring transition to a "new" game. But Kaplan said that the priority is to ensure that players don't end up feeling abandoned as Overwatch evolves. 

"We’ve all seen when the servers shut down on X, Y, or Z game. It’s always a story," Kaplan said. "I always remember the Halo 2 players who just wouldn’t log out. They kept it up. I thought that was so awesome. I wish I was one of them."

Kaplan said that the launch of Overwatch 2 will enable developers to resume a "live service cadence" with updates and new content, but the original Overwatch will get "some meaningful updates" before it arrives. A release target has not yet been set.

One of the big reveals at BlizzCon 2019 was Overwatch 2, a sequel that's really more of an expansion, which was also one of the worst-kept secrets leading into the show. Kotaku reported in June that a StarCraft shooter (which probably would've been very cool) has been canceled in part so that resources could be dedicated to Overwatch 2 instead, and more concrete leaks floated to the surface closer to the BlizzCon event.

Leaks can be fun for gamers, and they sometimes serve as very effective PR, too. People tend to pay attention when they're reasonably—but not entirely—sure that something cool is going to happen with stuff they're interested in. But for game developers and reps who put great effort into crafting big announcements, seeing all of that work (and those exciting surprises) go out the window days or weeks before they're meant to can be a real heartbreaker, Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan said in an interview.

"If you want to know how game developers feel about leaks, the WoW team made a cinematic called Shadowlands, and picture my face where Sylvanas' was," he said. "And then instead of that helmet, it was my cellphone."

So, basically this:

Speaking to Kotaku Australia, Kaplan acknowledged that leaks are sometimes unavoidable but even so, he said that they take a real toll on developers, particularly those going through it for the first time. 

"The example I used this week a lot with the team was The Burning Crusade. And a lot of the team hasn't been around that long, or weren't part of Burning Crusade, but Burning Crusade leaked in an Italian magazine the week before BlizzCon or the week of BlizzCon that we were supposed to announce [the] expansion," he said.

"If you fast-forward to 2019, everybody looks back at Burning Crusade as one of WoW's strongest moments, their favorite expansions, and nobody remembers that Burning Crusade was leaked at all. Leaks are very interesting in that they have more of a moral impact on the team than anything else. It's extremely demoralizing. You feel totally deflated."

And while leaks can elevate hype, they can also distort initial impressions: Kaplan said that leaked reveals often aren't "coherent" because they're incomplete. "That's the part that bothers us the most, where people are not given all the information and all of the context that they need to understand what we're doing."

His frustrations are understandable, but are probably a fact of life for developers. The bottom line is that fans want to know what's going on with their thing—and the more fans a thing has, the more likely it is that leaks will spring. It's not the worst problem to have (certainly better than nobody paying attention at all), and in this case it sounds like the Overwatch team has bounced back well from that initial disappointment: Kaplan said that after the formal announcement of Overwatch 2, "everybody's on cloud nine."

Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan and assistant game director Aaron Keller revealed more about some of the new content coming in Overwatch 2 during today's Overwatch: What's Next panel, including a closer look at the new Push game mode, and details on the Story and Hero co-op modes.

Push is essentially a payload mode: Players must escort a big robot as it pushes a barrier into enemy territory. Whichever team pushes their barrier the furthest before the match ends wins; pushing it all the way to the end triggers an instant victory. That's apparently not something that happens very often, though. "It's more interesting to have that robot go back and forth across the map," Keller said.

Maps are symmetrical and combat can take place anywhere, thanks to the robot's constant movement. Keller described the mode as "really flanky," because players can access various points along the robot's path through different shortcuts and connections. As a result, Overwatch characters who aren't commonly used in other modes, like Reaper or Tracer, can be very powerful in this mode, and team compositions tend to be different too.

They also dug down a bit more into the new Story and Hero co-op modes coming in Overwatch 2. Story missions will offer a limited selection of heroes to choose from, based on the map in play, and will have an "item system" somewhat similar to what's seen in battle royale games, where players will pick up different types and qualities of items to use over the course of the mission. Different items will complement different characters and playstyles, and will enable players to approach situations differently than they might in a PvP mode.

Hero missions are more of a long term, play-it-forever kind of thing—a bit like Destiny 2 strikes, maybe. They're set in a variety of locations from Overwatch and Overwatch 2, and will have changing objectives and enemy forces each time around. While Story missions are focused on a small subset of characters, players in Hero mode will be able to select from the entire roster. In fact, Kaplan said he hopes it will encourage players to try their hands at Overwatch heroes they might normally avoid, for fear of messing up their SR.

The big question, of course, is when Overwatch 2 will be out.

"I don't know. I have no idea," Kaplan said. "Like, just let us make it great, that's what we care about more than anything. We don't have a date in mind." He also warned that the Overwatch team will probably "go dark" after BlizzCon while it works on the game.

It's been a big day for Blizzard news—keep up with everything that's happening in our ongoing coverage of BlizzCon 2019.

An Overwatch "main" is a character that you play primarily or exclusively, regardless of mode or circumstance. If your team desperately needs a Genji, for instance, but you insist on taking a Moira anyway, then you're probably a Moira main. It's not necessarily the best way to play, because it limits your flexibility and thus your situational usefulness, but it's common. 

It's not just Overwatch; I was a die-hard Sniper main in the original Team Fortress days, although I don't recall using that particular term for it. (Need a Medic? I'm a Sniper. Short a Demo Man? Sniper here. Heavy Weapons Guy? Uhh, Sniper.) So it's obviously not a new phenomenon, but even so, its prevalence in Overwatch, a game that lets you switch characters on the fly, caught director Jeff Kaplan by surprise. In a recent discussion on the Overwatch forums, he said he expected that players would switch heroes more frequently, and "naively" didn't think that maining and one-tricking would become so dominant. 

"We imagined a world where players would be ok with Torbjorn on defense but not playing him on attack. The maining/one-trick mindset led to us having to rework those characters to fit with how the game eventually evolved to be played," Kaplan wrote. "I guess what I am saying is we hoped to be able to create more highly situational characters with the thought that players would switch in situations where those characters weren’t as viable." 

Fortunately, it all worked out in the end: "We like the direction things evolved and in hindsight, it seems obvious that they would evolve that way. It’s not that one direction is good or bad… they’re just different directions and we adapted to what the playerbase was doing, rather than fighting against their instincts." 

The comment arose from a remark about Blizzard's experiments with a more structured game mode with one tank, one healer, and the rest DPS ("It was not fun and we didn't enjoy it") and led into quite a bit of interesting, if jargon-heavy, conversation about the good, the bad, and the inevitability of mains. There's also a fair bit of criticism of his self-professed "naivete," while others state that Blizzard could have more aggressively pursued that vision by enforcing penalties for players who one-trick or put their teams at a disadvantage with their hero picks.   

What I find most interesting, though, is that Kaplan and co. expected a different outcome in the first place. For a lot of players, that's the way it's always been, and without a system in place to force players to do what you want them do, odds are they won't.   

Thanks, Unikrn. 

Overwatch's marquee characters include giant monkey with power armor and a super-genius intellect, and these guys, and so you might reasonably think that new character creation is an "anything goes" kind of process. It is not, according to director Jeff Kaplan, who told Kotaku at the recent BlizzCon event that Wrecking Ball, the hamster with a ball that transforms into a quadrupedal battlemech, is about as far as Blizzard wants to go.

"Do we have ideas that are wackier than Hammond? Yes. Will they ever make it into the game? I don’t think so," Kaplan said. 

In fact, Kaplan said that Hammond himself—Hammond is Wrecking Balls' real name—was too far over the line for some Overwatch developers. "Hammond was very controversial on the team," he said. "Like, actual heated debates where we had to calm people down, where we were like, ‘We’re not gonna ruin Overwatch by introducing this character.’ Some people literally felt like we might be. We took that very seriously." 

Wrecking Ball worked out to be a popular Overwatch hero despite the worries, no doubt in part because he's small and furry and so terribly cute, at least when he's not angry and on the guns. Nonetheless, Kaplan said his creation was "a cautionary tale" about pushing creative boundaries. 

“I think when it comes to the creativity of the Overwatch team, pushing up against Hammond and Winston is maybe as far as we go,” he said. “Maybe? For now at least?” 

Overwatch's newest hero, Ashe, was revealed at BlizzCon and went live on the PTR earlier this week. She's fairly conventional as Overwatch characters go, but her friend is kind of weird. 

It's only been a few weeks since the "looking for group" feature and endorsements were rolled out to Overwatch, but they're already having a positive effect. Game director Jeff Kaplan shared some early stats in a brief forum post indicating that abusive behavior has gone down dramatically in the Americas and Korea since the features went live. 

Competitive matches containing abusive chat were down 26.4 percent in the Americas and 16.4 percent in Korea, Kaplan said, while the percent of daily players being abusive has shrunk by 28.8 percent in the Americas and 21.6 percent in Korea. Other stats aren't available yet, as Kaplan said he's "just sharing what progress we had" so far. 

"Looking for group" gives players the ability to set specific parameters for matchmaking, such as restricting roles or requiring voice chat, while endorsements recognize "commendable behavior" in the game, like sportsmanship, "being a good teammate," or getting on the payload. It's kind of a preemptive moderation system: Instead of punishing bad behavior, it rewards positive play and attitudes, although the specifics of the promised "periodic rewards" haven't been announced yet.   

"We’re really pleased with the community’s efforts to make OW a better place! Thank you all!" Kaplan wrote. "And we’ll keep working on iterating on these features to make them better as well as exploring other systems to improve the gameplay environment."

I don't think anyone believes that toxicity in online gaming can ever be fully eliminated, but it's really pleasing to see efforts like this (and Ubisoft's, which comes at Rainbow Six Siege from a completely opposite but also effective direction) come to fruition. Competition is great, but abusive behavior is something entirely different.

Hearthstone director Ben Brode shed some light on a few Hearthstone mysteries in a new video from Ars Technica. The whole video is a good watch if you're interested in Hearthstone's history and DNA, but the best bit is right at the end, where Brode explains how Hearthstone got its fatigue mechanic, which deals escalating damage to players each time they draw cards after their deck is empty. As Brode explains, fatigue damage didn't always exist, and they only came up with it after Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan played Hearthstone for himself. 

"We were doing a playtest and we asked Jeff Kaplan to come over and try the game," Brode said. "And he got really into it, he started playing minions and attacking, he was having fun figuring out what cards to play. He had never played it before, he was excited to get into it. And he was very close to winning, and then the computer he was playing against passed the turn. And it said 'Your turn, you lose!' And he was like, what?"

In the early version of Hearthstone that Kaplan played, fatigue damage didn't exist. Instead, when you ran out of cards, you automatically lost, like you do in other card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh. The problem with this system, which Kaplan's feedback helped Team 5 realize, was that it could make a whole game feel pointless. "It didn't matter what decisions he made during the game, he was just going to lose because he ran out of cards," Brode said. 

"So we designed the fatigue mechanic so that it ratchets up the damage every time you try and draw a card but your deck is empty," Brode said. "And what that does is connect back into the game. If you're one damage away from killing your opponent, he's going to die to fatigue. The whole game where you got him to that point mattered a lot." 

Fatigue damage not only puts a hard cap on how long games can go on, it ties directly into the strategy of long matches. If you're playing a control deck against another control deck and you know the game is going to last a while, you might purposely avoid drawing extra cards in order to delay fatiguing. 

Racing fatigue makes for some exciting photo-finishes, and the very existence of fatigue damage has also allowed for niche decks like Fatigue Rogue, Mill Druid, and most famously, Fatigue Warrior, a deck whose ability to "go infinite" and avoid fatigue damage entirely nearly led to tournament rule changes.

Putting together a balanced team in Overwatch has always been a problem. No matter how many times you plead for two supports, two tanks and two damage dealers, someone will always upset the apple cart by stubbornly picking their favourite hero no matter what. That's led some to propose a system whereby players pick a specific role—tank, healer or DPS—before queuing up for a game, guaranteeing a reasonable team composition. In an interview this week, game director Jeff Kaplan said that the idea is a "good starting point", but that he isn't keen on putting it into the game.

Kaplan says the community has proposed two versions: an "honor system" whereby you queue as a particular role but you can switch out when you make it into a game in order to respond to enemy picks, or a rigid system that locks you in to your chosen role. "Neither is fully satisfactory to me,” Kaplan told Kotaku, adding that the more rigid system "hurts the spirit of the game".

He's also worried about how long it would take players to queue for DPS slots, which would inevitably prove the most popular. He pointed to a similar system in World of Warcraft, in which some players are left waiting an age before finding a group. 

"The issue I have with it right now, which we would run into if we’re not careful, is that tanks and healers get matched just like that. It takes a second and you’re in a dungeon. But if you say you’re DPS, it takes like 30 minutes. I don’t think that’s what people are expecting right now. So I want to be careful.”

The solution to the problem of team composition, Kaplan says, is to get players to group up with people they enjoy playing with, and Blizzard is determined to make that process better in Overwatch. “I do think people would have more fun playing in a pre-made group than just sort of randomly hoping the matchmaker finds them someone with the same values as them, and I do think people’s reasons for not wanting to group are actually valid right now,” he said. “I think we need to address all those things at once before we can just get to a role queue.”

Would you like to see a role-queuing system in Overwatch?

By 2020, the world will be full of people hunting each other and occasionally hiding in bushes as battle royales spill out into the streets. They're already on our phones. So of course everyone wants a slice of the pie that's currently dominated by PUBG and Fortnite. Including Blizzard. Overwatch has already experimented with several different modes, from PvE horde romps to small duels, but a battle royale mode would be a considerably greater challenge. 

“A lot of times when I hear some of our fans pitch it, they’re like ‘Oh, just put a card in the Arcade one day that’s a battle royale mode,’ and I’m like ‘Fuck, that would be awesome,’” Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan told Kotaku. “But there’s a lot of design and tech work to get us to that place and not just feel like a me-too game.”

The main issues Kaplan and his team have identified are the heroes and map sizes. Overwatch’s characters are designed to work in a team, with several heroes designed specifically to support their pals. It means that some characters wouldn’t be viable in a traditional last man standing scrap, while others would have a significant advantage. 

Maps are a problem because, unlike Fortnite or PUBG’s battlefields, they’re small and they’re not open. “Our primary engagement distance is usually around 15 to 40 meters,” Kaplan explained. “The Hanamura dojo point B is 45 meters across. I don’t think people realize how tiny it is. Part of what makes Fortnite and PUBG so awesome is that you can have these really long engagement distances.”

It’s still something Kaplan sounds eager to explore, but the changes required to make it work mean that you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for it to appear. “Building those systems and getting that many players—I think battle royale for Overwatch starts to get into new game territory.”

In a developer update Thursday afternoon, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan addressed a number of popular topics in the community. 

First up, Kaplan talked about the ongoing toxicity issues that plague the game, saying that minimizing toxicity is a major initiative for Blizzard and the Overwatch team. He said that the recent updates to the reporting process, such as informing players when an account they report has been sanctioned, has increased player reporting by 20 percent and decreased incidents of abusive chat in competitive play by 17 percent. 

"We know those numbers are not as great as they could be, we know that the problem is not solved, and things aren't perfect, but it's getting a lot better," Kaplan said. "A lot of the initiatives that we're doing here at Blizzard are starting to make a difference."

He also mentioned that Blizzard is starting to seek out social media sites like YouTube, look for incidents of toxic behavior, and then sanction the appropriate account—sometimes before anyone has even submitted a report in-game. 

Next, Kaplan addressed the ongoing task of hero balancing, mentioning that the Overwatch community is some 35 million players strong, and "there's not always one central community voice."

Even so, he stressed that community feedback is a very important part of the three-pronged approach Blizzard takes to hero balance—the other two being in-game statistics and the team's intuition as game developers. 

"We're always sympathetic and aware of all three points of the triangle."

To get into specifics, Kaplan brought up the Mercy and Junkrat changes currently being tested on the Overwatch PTR. 

"As a lot of you know, we're experimenting with changes to Mercy. Our efforts are to tone down the effects of Resurrect, and to make Mercy more manageable while in Valkyrie."

Currently, Resurrect is playing out as a second ultimate in terms of power level, and the changes on the PTR aim to correct that. Having said that, Kaplan stressed that Mercy is an important core hero to the Overwatch roster, and they don't want her to be nerfed into oblivion.

"If we tone her down too much, we will bring her back," Kaplan said. "We want her to be viable, we just need to tone down the impact of Resurrect. We do believe it's a balanceable ability."

Kaplan also mentioned that Hanzo, Mei, and Symmetra are heroes the team is looking at for potential changes down the road. Hanzo's Scatter Arrow is the main issue, as it can often feel unfair to be one-shot when it lands just right. Kaplan said they're looking at possibly changing Scatter Arrow to feel more fair, or possibly replacing it with a new ability altogether. 

As for Mei and Symmetra, Kaplan discussed how the heroes aren't quite where the team wants them to be in terms of pickrate, but that they also have to be very careful with buffs. 

"Mei is a hero we need to be very careful with," he said. "She can feel very oppressive to play against if she's too powerful."

As for Symmetra, he said the team doesn't believe she needs major buffs, but that they would like to improve her viability.

"Symmetra is a situational character," Kaplan said. "Right now she doesn't have enough usefulness across the board, but that doesn't mean she'll ever be at a place with a way higher pickrate than currently. She's meant to be a defensive character that can own space, but that design means she isn't going to be useful in 100 percent of situations."

All in all, Kaplan said he feels pretty good about Overwatch's balance at the moment. "There's a lot of variety and strategy. There's a lot of heroes being played," he said.

This Cairo-inspired map, courtesy of Overwatch fan and self-taught 3D artist Joshua Llorente, is so good that it's caught the attention of game director Jeff Kaplan. The payload map is made in Unreal Engine 4, and it looks stunning. The mixture of far-future skylines and Egyptian pillars is straight out the Blizzard playbook.

Llorente initially posted art from the map on Reddit last week, to which Jeff Kaplan said: "Amazing work! We'll be in touch." Today, Llorente shared an actual on-foot walkthrough of the map (which you can see above), and it arguably looks even better from the ground than it does from the air.

I love the way the moonlight reflects off the domed rooftops. The architecture is consistent throughout, and the soft edges mean it wouldn't look out of place in Blizzard's map rotation.

Arguably, it's less focused than an Overwatch map should be, especially a payload map: there's more passageways than I can keep track of. If the Blizzard team ever wanted to do something off the back of it (and Kaplan's comment suggest they at least want to talk to Llorente about his work), then they'd probably look at tightening up. But visually, it's pure Overwatch.

Below is the initial video Llorente posted of the map, and you can click here for more high-quality screenshots.

It's far from the first Overwatch-inspired map Llorente has made. You can look through the rest of his impressive portfolio here—his Favela map is my personal favourite.

Cheers, PCGamesN.

Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan, who looks like his holiday celebrations are still going strong, hit up YouTube today to wish fans a happy new year, and talk a bit about Blizzard's plans for the game in 2018. 

Kaplan began with a mention of the start of the Overwatch League and OWL-themed skins, as well as the Blizzard World map that was revealed in November. "Not only is it a gorgeous map with tons of great Easter eggs in it," he said. "We're also trying a lot of different things with the gameplay in certain areas of how we handle th level design, that I think will make for a really fun and competitive hybrid map." 

More important, he said that Blizzard is also "well along the path" to revealing Hero 27, which he described as a "very needed" addition to the Overwatch lineup. The new hero is actually already in internal testing, "and so far we're having a ton of fun, and we're also making a lot of great progress."   

There are also new maps in the works, and Blizzard is also continuing to work on Overwatch Competitive. That process includes "good, short-term, strategic, and tactical fixes to Competitive Play," but also a focus on the more long-term evolution of the game. The story of Overwatch will also continue to be told, through both animated shorts and comics.   

A Year of the Dog event for the Lunar New Year, similar to last year's Year of the Rooster, will kick off in the near future. Kaplan didn't reveal any details, but he did say that "there some pretty significant content that players are going to be very happy with."   

Beyond that, Blizzard is also planning an updated Uprising event, another anniversary event will be held (what a surprise), and in the very near future—possibly later this month—there will be "a ton of new content" added to the base loot box. 

"I'm only sort of touching the tip of the iceberg in terms of things that we're working on," Kaplan said. "We go way more in-depth as we get closer on all of these things but just know that all of us here at Blizzard and everyone here on the Overwatch team is committed to making Overwatch as great as it can be." 

In case you missed it, Kaplan recently spent ten hours sitting in a chair.

The holidays are almost upon us, and Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan is embracing the festive feeling by sitting in front of an open fire, doing nothing. Occasionally he folds his fingers, or looks pensively toward the ceiling. That's pretty much it. And he's been doing it for the past several hours. Seriously. 

The most action-packed moment I've seen so far occurred just a few minutes ago, when the fire went out. Kaplan, clearly annoyed with his support team, clapped his hands sharply, and an unseen lacky made with the fix.   

According to Polygon he's been at this since around 11 am ET, which means he's been sitting there for about five hours so far. (It may be a loop, but why spoil the fun?) No talking to fans, no playing Overwatch, no stuffing his face with milk and cookies. Just... Jeff. Sitting there. At the time this was posted, 39,000 people were watching him do it.

Happy holidays!  

Update: He now appears to be playing Hearthstone. 

Update 2: He stopped. 

Update 3: At approximately 5:20 pm ET, Kaplan ate a cookie. He appeared to enjoy it. We'll keep you posted.

Update 4: And finally, it is over. If you missed it live, or want to re-live the glory, you can catch all the "action" on demand below.

There were heaps of interesting insights to come out of the Overwatch Archive panel at Blizzcon 2017 (I'll post later today with another), but one revelation that sticks out is that before deciding to make a class-based shooter the Overwatch development team started working on a concept for an MMO called Crossworlds, which had up to 50 classes and was set "at the crossroads of the universe".

Kaplan and his team were given six weeks to come up with a game concept after the MMO Titan, which they were working on, was scrapped. They started exploring a new IP—an MMO that Kaplan referred to during the panel as Crossworlds. "Basically, the idea was that there was a remote outpost planet in the universe [that] was the crossroads of the universe and all different alien races would end up on the same planet.

"The game that we were talking about making was an MMO and it was going to be class-based. We were exploring between six and nine classes for the game," he said. The picture at the top of this article is some of the concept art. Pretty, right?

Blizzard class designer Geoff Goodman (who now designs Overwatch's heroes) encouraged the team to up the number of classes to 50, "each [of which] is very focused and has a certain set of abilities and they could all be wildly different from one another".

Kaplan thought that a 50-class MMO would be impossible, but the vision stuck with him, and he hastily stitched together a presentation that drew inspiration from some of the art for Titan. The image below is what he came up with, and the similarities between these characters and what would come to be the Overwatch lineup are striking. Reaper, a 'Guardian' and a 'Jumper' are all there—even some of the names of abilities that Kaplan envisaged are identical to what ended up in the shooter.

Crossworlds wasn't the only idea bandied around before the team settled on Overwatch, though: they also considered a tie-in to StarCraft that focused on the individuals in that universe. Below is some concept art (Kaplan didn't say what sort of game it was going to be), and you'll notice a striking resemblance to a certain cowboy.

If you've bought a virtual ticket to Blizzcon you can watch the presentation here. The Crossworlds chat starts about 04:40.

Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan's latest blog post is a revealing read. In it, he details the difficulties his team face when communicating with players on the game's forum pages, which include being "personally attacked and threatened" by fans.

On a thread asking whether the Overwatch team needs to grow in order to properly respond to fans' requests, Kaplan said that posting on the forums was "scary" and "intimidating", and that developers were constantly worried about saying the wrong thing. 

"Very few of us actually [post on the forums] because it's extremely intimidating and/or time consuming. It's very easy to post the wrong thing and make a 'promise' to the community that no one intended to make. Once we say we're working on something, we're not allowed to 'take it back'. It's set in stone.

"Also, because we are open with you and do not hide behind an anonymous handle (like all of you have the luxury of doing), we often times get personally attacked and threatened."

It's a pretty sobering thought. As players, it's easy to get frustrated with developers when we feel like they're not reacting to requests, or making changes that seem obvious. But, as Kaplan explains, if a development team feels like they don't have a "safe environment" to communicate openly with players about ideas without being hounded and having their words taken out of context, they'll go into their shell.

"If we post, 'we're talking about Mercy' immediately there is an expectation that she is going to be radically changed in the next patch when the truth is, we might just leave her how she is for a while. We're not allowed to post that here without our bosses (and I am talking literally here) receiving emails from some of you demanding we be fired. It's not exactly what I would call a safe environment for creative people to openly express their thoughts and feelings."

The full 1,300 word post, which ends with a plea for "open, direct and constructive" feedback, can be read here.

Blizzard has issued a warning to the Overwatch community that beginning next week, players who have accumulated three or more seasonal bans will face a possible permanent ban from Competitive play. And permanent means permanent: "Neither seasonal bans nor permanent Competitive Play bans will decay or reset over time," community manager Josh Engen wrote. "Once an account is permanently banned, it currently cannot return to good standing." 

"Starting Wednesday, September 27, any player who accumulates three or more seasonal bans may be permanently banned from Competitive Play, removing their ability to participate in any future matches in that mode," Engen wrote.   

"Seasonal bans do not need to be consecutive to qualify for a permanent Competitive Play ban. For example, if a player earned seasonal bans in Seasons 2 and 4, and then earns another ban in Season 7, he or she will be eligible for a permanent ban from Competitive Play as soon as that third seasonal ban is issued." 

The warning also included a reminder about seasonal bans, which can be imposed for leaving games early or being kicked for idling. "Repeated occurrences of leaving early or being kicked for inactivity during a match will lead to restrictions on future competitive matches. As these violations accumulate, access to Competitive Play will be locked for an increasing amount of time," Engen continued. "Completing matches without incurring further penalties will eventually return the account to good standing; however, repeated violations can also result in a ban from Competitive Play for the current season—including the forfeiture of any seasonal rewards." 

Being "eligible" for a Competitive permaban doesn't mean that it will happen automatically on the third offense, which is reasonable. Being locked out of Competitive play forever is a pretty big deal, and there has to be some room for discretion and extenuating circumstances. But bad behavior is obviously a problem, and while Blizzard may move slower than some players would like, it seems determined to do something about it: Game director Jeff Kaplan said in June that Blizzard would be happy if "leavers" just stopped playing the game altogether, adding, "We keep increasing the penalty for leaving and will continue to do so."   

Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan has used a new developer update video to appeal for better behavior in the game, saying that while Blizzard will continue to iterate and improve upon its disciplinary systems for toxic behavior, players have a responsibility as well.

Indeed, Kaplan says that while the studio has a responsibility to manage its community, there's a degree of self-awareness the community must have in order to keep things in check. If Blizzard didn't need to use so many resources developing disciplinary and reporting systems, he said, they might have more time to work on other, more exciting things.

"There's not going to be a moment where we have a magic patch in Overwatch that makes bad behavior go away," Kaplan said. "But it is a continual process that we are very dedicated to fixing and improving. So you're going to see things that are visible – changes to the game, more notifications – and then there are more things happening behind the scenes."

Kaplan said that while many believe the game's reporting system doesn't work, of the 480,000 players who have been on the receiving end of disciplinary action, 340,000 of those were a result of other players reporting them.

But also, there's a degree to which no amount of action on Blizzard's part can curb toxic behavior, with Kaplan appealing to players to look inwards.

"The community needs to take a deep look inwards, and consider: I'm playing this game because I want to have fun, and the other people, the other team, they want to have fun as well." he said.

"Think of all the times someone said something negative to you in the game, and imagine if they said something positive instead. There's a way to spread positivity that I don't think is really prevalent right now. Sure, we can try to build game systems to encourage that more, and we will, but we need the community  to own up to their part in the accountability they have for really creating a great game space."

He continued: "The reason we got into the thing that we do is because we love creating these cool features for you. We want to make new maps, new heroes, new animated shorts – that's where our passion is. But we've been put into this weird position where we're spending a tremendous amount of time and resources into punishing people, trying to make people behave better. I wish we could have put that time into a match history system, or a replay system instead. It was the exact same people who worked on both, that had to be rerouted. 

"The bad behavior is making the game progress, in terms of development, at a much slower pace."

You can watch the full video below:

A funny thing happened on the Overwatch forums earlier this week. It began when a user complained about being banned for a week for "disruptive gameplay" in Quickplay, which he said was evidence that the system for reporting bad behavior "is clearly automated and abusable." In response, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan killed him. 

Not literally killed him, obviously, but he dropped the guy so hard that you can probably see the impact crater from orbit. Behold the massacre in its awesome totality below. 

It's legitimately funny, especially the way he caps it off with the "good, upstanding members" line at the end. That's the mark of a true killer. But after a few pages of laughter, a different kind of funny thing happened: A user by the name of Nere made the very good point that a player with an absolutely appalling record—"One of the worst offending accounts we've seen," as Kaplan himself admitted—really hasn't been punished for it at all. 

"Why does over 2k reports only amount to 3 gameplay suspensions and 7 silences when he has been ruining games for 2247 people and more because not everyone even reports? He is as your game master has put it, 'a massive griefer' but here is the thing: he had been allowed to do so with barely any consequences before he was banned for it and such reports accumulate from like minimum of 200 games and probably 400 matches in average," they wrote. 

"The effort to get one guy to permanently stop being nasty ingame to the rest is staggeringly high compared to how little effort he has to put to ruin quickplays for thousands of people." 

Another forum user, BT160506, helped put the matter in perspective by doing the math: 2247 complaints over 461 days of Overwatch availability works out to an average of 4.87 complaints per day, every single day—and that 9216 hours of silence is enough to cover roughly 57,600 games. "That's some global toxicity," they noted. "It's a wonder his IP hasn't been banned permanently." 

As that very good point sunk in, the conversation slowly shifted into talk about the effectiveness of Overwatch's reporting system (or, more precisely, the lack of it) and Blizzard's lenience toward bad behavior. In a follow-up thread that more directly addressed the failures of the Overwatch reporting system, Kaplan acknowledged that many of the complaints were valid and promised that a new developer update about the "reporting and punishment system," which was actually recorded last week, will be unveiled "very soon." 

For the immediate future, Blizzard plans to increase the length of player suspensions and convert silences to suspensions, with the eventual goal of doing away with silences altogether. An email notification system to let players know when someone they've report has been banned is also in the works. Further down the road, it will start handing out permanent bans to "repeated Competitive offenders," and for the upcoming Season 6 "we're going to be way more aggressive with boosting/throwing or any sort of SR manipulation." Punishments will also be escalated more quickly, so "extreme offenders will 'strike out' of the game much quicker." 

"In the long term, we really want to work on systems that encourage positive behavior and reward good players. It really bums us out to spend so much time punishing people for being bad sports. We like making cool, fun game systems—that's what we do for a living," Kaplan wrote. "But because people seem to lack self-control or because people like to abuse anonymity and free speech we're put in a position of spending a tremendous amount of our time and resources policing the community. We will do this as it is our responsibility but we'd like to spend more time rewarding good players rather than having to focus on poor sportsmanship and unacceptable bad behavior so much."

As its name suggests, the Overwatch PTR—that's Public Test Region—is a place where Blizzard, with the help of players, can test and tweak updates, new characters, and other such additions to the game before unleashing them on the world at large. But aside from early access to new features, it doesn't offer any incentives to help attract players to its walled garden. As one player named Capfoo wrote recently in the Overwatch forums, that diminishes the fun, and discourages people from taking part, because there's no incentive for anyone on the PTR to "play well." 

"Nobody seems to go onto PTR to test changes in a balanced environment. Instead it seems like the PTR is just an excuse to play abysmally, and to play heroes you would never normally play, and to just play really awful team comps that just do not work," they wrote. "It's basically Overwatch but with no consequences because it'll just get overwritten, and so people just go onto it for laughs." 

It's actually a very well-reasoned argument, something game director Jeff Kaplan acknowledged in his response. "I really appreciate your post. I agree with a lot of what you're saying," he wrote. But he went on to explain that it's not quite so simple. 

"We'd love to improve the PTR experience. The difficult part for us is that the same time and resources we spend improving the PTR experience could go towards improving the core game. For that reason, we usually favor the latter," Kaplan explained. "We do frequently discuss the topic but we're wrestling with making the correct choice. To provide one example: The same people who would work on match history or replay features would be required to work on making EXP carry over from the PTR to your main account." 

He added that the typical reaction from fans is to say that Blizzard should "just hire more people," a suggestion he responded to with a link. 

Maybe because the weekend is almost upon us, or maybe because the pressure of revealing Doomfist is finally off: Whatever the reason, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan has taken to the forums to share, in great detail, his thoughts on getting and keeping the game in balance, and how Blizzard can and should (or shouldn't) mess with the "meta." First and foremost—and also, he predicted, most controversial—is that he believes the game is actually balanced as it stands right now. 

"What I mean is that I don’t feel like there are any heroes who are way too strong to the point of breaking balance. That doesn’t mean that I personally don’t think there are some problems with heroes," he wrote. "While I believe moving Roadhog away from a 1 shot combo was a necessary thing we had to do, I’m not entirely satisfied with where he’s at right now. I also think we need to do some brainstorming when it comes to Mercy’s resurrect, for example. The ability is extremely powerful in a very unfun way for both Mercy and everyone playing against that Mercy. But it’s not doomsday." 

Furthermore, he continued, "the perception of balance is more powerful than balance itself." The real issue, he believes, is that the relatively static pro scene has led players to believe that the meta isn't shifting enough. But while Blizzard could do something to change it, Kaplan said that he doesn't believe the game should be changed simply to "shift people off the meta."

"The game team should be constantly evaluating balance and making changes that are actually needed because a hero is unbalanced. But making changes to a hero because their pick rate is too high or too low is not my idea of responsible game balance," he explained. "Balancing heroes who are unbalanced is good, balancing heroes just to make them picked more or picked less is not good (in my humble opinion)." 

Kaplan acknowledged that players want all 25 Overwatch heroes to be viable at any time in every match, but said that's just not going to work out that way at the professional level—which, again, is what informs perceptions of the meta at the non-pro level. The majority of Overwatch players play Quick Play, but that meta is actually different than Competitive. The top-picked hero among "elite players" over the past month has been Ana, for example, who doesn't actually feature in the Quick Play meta at all. 

He also addressed, and to an extent dismissed, complaints about the "dive" meta, in which a fairly rigid group of heroes—Tracer, Genji, Winston, and D.Va most commonly—launch fast, all-out attacks on high priority targets. Kaplan said it's actually "fun to play and watch," because it features "super-high-skill heroes doing very OW things," which is really what it's all about. 

"I don’t think dive comp is bad but I think what players want is to see more comps in addition to dive comp. I too would love for this to happen. But in a non-forced, non-damaging way. I don’t think we should just throw a balance grenade at the heroes to change pick rates," he said. As for a possible MOBA-style ban system, he added, "I don’t think long-term for the game it’s good to start imposing restrictions on you as to what hero you’re allowed or not allowed to play." 

He concluded by saying that the dive meta will go away eventually, but Blizzard isn't going to force it. "We are going to make balance changes to heroes when they need it—and we do this more frequently than you give us credit for," he said. "3 months from now there will be a new meta. If you’re the type of person who feels like the meta should shift every 2 weeks, then you’ll probably be sick of that meta and wishing it was back in the good ol’ dive comp days." 

Overwatch "leavers" are players who, for one reason or another—maybe their internet went out, or maybe they got mad because everyone on their team sucks and it's all their fault and arrrrgh—bail out of a game before it's properly concluded, leaving their teammates at a significant disadvantage. Penalties that keep them from immediately joining new games are already imposed on those who do it, but game director Jeff Kaplan said in a recent forum post that even harsher sanctions, including possible permabans, are on the way. 

"Our philosophy has been that we would rather not have leavers playing the game at all (especially in Competitive Play). We keep increasing the penalty for leaving and will continue to do so," Kaplan wrote. "We're in the process of implementing a new policy which would take into account how many Competitive Seasons you have been banned from and at a certain point, prevent you from playing Competitive ever again." 

He also said that Blizzard has been working on ways to address the problem of players who intentionally throw games. "We had a lengthy meeting about this yesterday. We've been doing a lot of research on the problem for months now. We think we have some good solutions," he wrote in a separate post. "We still need players to help us by reporting people. We do both manual and auto detection on our end, but player reports are the most immediate indicator that point us in the right direction. We also discussed the need for more feedback for the person doing the reporting so it doesn't feel like your report is going into the void." 

Blizzard recently suspended Overwatch pro Dafran from the first two seasons of Overwatch Contenders for behavior that included, among other things, intentionally throwing matches, something he admitted to publicly during a (mildly NSFW) Twitch livestream. 

The Overwatch Anniversary Event got underway earlier this week, and sadly, not everyone is happy. The complaints stem from the loot boxes that contain all that sweet anniversary swag—108 pieces in total, which according to Reddit's calculations (via USGamer) cost more than 56,000 credits to buy. That's a lot of credits, especially in comparison to previous events, such as Uprising, which featured 95 items worth a total of 37,000 credits. 

The difference, as the post explains, is the presence of 11 Legendary skins, which on their own weigh in at 33,000 credits. And sure, nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to grind for this stuff, but the reality is that everybody wants it, and placing it too far out of reach just annoys people, something Blizzard works hard to avoid. To that end, game director Jeff Kaplan took to the Overwatch forums to acknowledge the problem and invite continued discussions about "rewards, loot boxes, and anniversary cosmetic items." 

"I just wanted to acknowledge that we've been following the threads about the loot box rewards as they pertain to the anniversary events, other events and loot boxes in general. The feedback and suggestions have been helpful to us," Kaplan wrote. "We had a really great discussion yesterday about the feedback we've been hearing this week. While I don't have any immediate action items to report, I thought it was important for you to know that we are listening." 

It's not a promise, or even a suggestion, of an adjustment in the future, but I'm inclined to think that if Blizzard wasn't at least thinking about fiddling a bit, Kaplan wouldn't have brought the matter up like this in the first place. And if there's one thing Blizzard likes to do, it's fiddle. 

The Overwatch Anniversary Event is live now and runs until June 12. Don't forget that a free weekend kicked off today for gamers who are curious but non-committal, offering access to the full lineup of heroes, maps and modes until midnight PT on May 29. 

One year ago today, Blizzard officially launched Overwatch. In the time since, the game has grown to be massively popular, boasting more than 30 million players and a burgeoning esports scene. 

Overwatch is currently celebrating the anniversary in-game with a three-week commemorative event, featuring 11 new legendary skins, three new arena maps, a handful of balance changes, and a pile of other cosmetics. To mark the occasion, we chatted with game director Jeff Kaplan and principal director Geoff Goodman about the past, present, and future of Blizzard's mega-hit FPS. 

PC Gamer: Congrats on the anniversary! If there's one thing from year one that you could do differently, what would it be?

Jeff Kaplan: We learned a lot about Competitive Play from our many iterations of the feature. Knowing what we know now, I think we could have had a more solid design for the mode straight out the gate and made the system more understandable for players from the beginning.

What are the chances of us seeing skins or stuff from other Blizzard games make its way into Overwatch?

We love the other Blizzard Universes and would love someday to pay homage to them. For our first year, we felt it was very important to establish the core Overwatch tone and vibe. Because we were creating a brand new universe with its own unique story and characters, we wanted to build a strong foundation for the game before straying too far. As Overwatch continues to become more firmly established as a Blizzard Universe, it opens the door for exploration, such as the awesome ideas you’ve suggested.

You've said the goal is to release three to four new heroes per year. How do you plan to keep releasing new heroes without retreading abilities and design we've already seen? Is there a number you have in mind where you'd say: "Okay, that's it, no more new heroes."

We don’t have a specific number of heroes in mind for Overwatch. That said, we also can see slowing down adding additional heroes over time. Because the game embraces hero switching, our players need to be aware of every hero in the game in every match. This is quite different from the MOBA genre, which has embraced the concept of hero locking.

One of the things that makes Overwatch unique is how closely our players identify with our cast of heroes—they’ve fallen in love with their voice lines, animations, and backstories. We want to make sure every new hero we add compliments the existing cast and doesn’t detract in any way. And as you mentioned, we don’t want to homogenize our heroes by repeating abilities or variants of the same ability. We still have some amazing ideas for heroes that would have unique gameplay and backstories that would fit well within our game. But ultimately, when it comes to heroes, we prefer quality over quantity.

And finally, because I have to ask, what can you tell us about Doomfist?

Rumor has it he can level a skyscraper.

How would you describe the health of the Overwatch metagame?

Geoff Goodman: In general, the metagame is feeling really good right now. There are a lot of heroes being used effectively, and many different strategies that can all work. That said, there’s always room for improvement, so expect to see changes in the future to help out some under-utilized heroes.

When creating and balancing heroes, what skill level do you design for? 

When both balancing and creating new heroes, we have to look at all skill levels and try to make them viable for everyone. That is easier said than done, though, and some heroes tend to be stronger in different skill brackets. In general, if a hero has to be focused in a particular skill bracket, it’s better to have that hero be weaker at low skill and stronger at high skill. There are a couple reasons for this:

1) If a player’s skill level is changing over time, it is more likely to be going up, not down. Because of that, if a player deems a hero to be weak at first they may come to appreciate and use them much more effectively over time as they get better. The inverse of this would be a situation where a player really likes playing a hero but feels forced to stop playing them over time as they get better and move to a higher skill tier.

2) Some players really enjoy the idea of mastering a hero that feels more difficult to play, such as Genji or Widowmaker. For these types of players, the fact that a hero can be harder to play effectively can actually work in their favor.

3) From an esports perspective, it’s always nice to see most of the roster have a chance to see play. If a hero feels weak at high levels, they are unlikely to be played even in niche strategies.

Building on that—do you think it's okay for there to be 'easy' heroes that are beginner-friendly but have a low ceiling, (and 'hard' heroes that are difficult to play but reward high skill) or should every hero be viable at every skill level?

Ideally, every hero has a high skill ceiling, which allows players to continue to improve with a hero the longer they play. Being beginner-friendly is more about having a low skill floor, where you can pick up a hero and be reasonably effective with them right away. The goal of every hero is to have a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling, but sometimes a hero design doesn’t lend itself to having a low skill floor. Widowmaker and McCree, for example, are all about being super accurate with each shot, which can be difficult for new players. In these cases the skill floor ends up a bit higher than we would like, but the high aim requirement is such a core part of these heroes that we believe it’s a necessary sacrifice.

Often players will directly relate how difficult it is to aim with a hero to how high their skill ceiling is. However, there are many ways to increase the skill ceiling far beyond pure aim skill. For example, when the game first launched, many players coming from other games thought of Winston as having a low skill ceiling because of how easy his gun is to aim. These days we’re often seeing pro teams put some of their best players on Winston because of how critical the role can be and how difficult it can be to play him at the highest level.

After some fairly dramatic PTR balance changes (the Symmetra and Lúcio reworks), the most recent PTR was very measured in its changes. Are there any other heroes you think are due for a large rework, or are they mostly at or near where you'd like them to be?

We’ll have to see. Nothing major planned as of right now but things change as we constantly evaluate the game. There are a few points that can frustrate players that would be nice to try to work out, such as Roadhog’s hook combo damage, but we don’t have any major reworks planned at the moment!

You've talked about how Orisa was designed to be another 'anchor tank' option, giving an alternative to Reinhardt. Now that she's been out for a few months, how do you feel she's filling this role?

Orisa has proven to be quite effective, but a lot of her current power is due to her damage output as opposed to her survivability and tanking for the team. We have some changes to her coming soon that will lower her damage a bit and significantly boost the uptime of her barrier. She should still dish out quite a bit of damage, but this shift in power will hopefully help her fulfill that tank role teams often need.

In an attempt to limit toxicity, Overwatch doesn't have an in-game scoreboard, but many say it has resulted in the opposite. Is this a decision you continue to think about and/or are considering revisiting in the future?

I think it’s unlikely that we’d revisit putting in a ranked scoreboard, though anything is possible. The main issue with a ranked scoreboard is there is so much you can do to help your team that is nearly impossible to measure, so it would never accurately reflect how useful you are to your team. For example, let’s say your team is tied up at a choke point and just can’t seem to get through. You decide to change to Tracer and get behind them. Standing on the point to pull the enemy back and making them chase you around could be the best way to open up the choke and let your team in, but it’s also extremely difficult to score something like that. Another simple example is how much score do you give Lucio for speed boosting the team? Sometimes hitting that amped-up speed boost can completely define a team fight but it would be very hard to accurately give score credit for something like that.

As we approach the Overwatch World Cup, what work is the Overwatch team focused on to make the game an even better spectating experience?

We have a ton of plans to help make spectating the best we can make it, and it’s really just a matter of finding the time to get everything in that we would like. One big problem we’ve been trying to tackle internally is the issue of team coloring. Right now when you watch the game, you’re either watching the red team or the blue team, and the camera can swap quickly between players of different teams. Oftentimes, this makes it very difficult to quickly determine who is an enemy and who is an ally of the player that is being spectated. This is even further complicated by the fact that when someone is playing the game themselves, the enemy is always red, and your team is always blue. So when you’re watching a player on the red team run around with red allies, it can be very confusing.

We’re very actively trying to solve this problem, and we have a number of different options we’re experimenting with internally. Hopefully, if all goes well, our changes will dramatically improve the viewing experience. There are many other large features we’d love to get in as well and we’ve been actively getting feedback from the community and casters to make it the best spectating experience possible.

What can we expect from the future of Overwatch PvE?

We have a ton of fun making PvE content, and the player response has been overwhelmingly positive for the events we’ve done so far. We’d love to keep making this kind of content as long as players love to play it!

Overwatch's cast covers a lot of different hero archetypes—are there any abilities or mechanics that Overwatch hasn't touched on yet that you'd like to explore?

To be honest, I feel like we have barely scratched the surface of fun things to try for playable characters. I have a giant list of cool ideas to try out, from full hero ideas to specific mechanics to experiment with. Pharah was one of our first heroes, but I remember when we implemented her I was immediately thinking of a hero that flies 100% of the time and never needs to touch the ground—that might be interesting to try some day. We’ve had a few experiments where we had abilities or guns that could pierce walls…what if a hero could just blast a hole through a wall? Or somehow create objects for players to run on or stand on? The possibilities are endless!

In more, ahem, game-related Overwatch news, Blizzard's esteemed FPS is hosting a free-play weekend on May 26-29 to mark its first birthday. Over the course of the Overwatch Anniversary event a batch of as yet unrevealed stuff is coming to the online shooter, however its non-event-related loot boxes are getting updated too.

In conversation with Polygon, game director Jeff Kaplan said the loot box refresh will target a few cosmetic features that fans have previously requested—such as laughing and sitting emotes for heroes Orisa and Sombra.  

Furthermore, Polygon reports Blizzard will add the fan-favourite shrug action Gabriel "Reaper" Reyes enacted in the recent Overwatch Uprising comic as an emote, which is outlined in the above header image and in the following strip.

Expect these changes to land alongside Overwatch's patch 1.11 that's due next week. When the new emotes arrive, here's hoping this guy's dad revises his act: 

aHave you ever wondered what a "Toblestein" is? Why Widowmaker is blue? Why competitive rankings are based on win/loss ratios rather than skill rating? Or why people love Roadhog so much when the official lore makes it clear that he's a big, nasty dinkus? Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan recently took part in an Overwatch "Tech Support" video with Wired—basically a video AMA—to answer these questions, and a whole bunch more. 

Short answers to the questions above: "Toblestein" is a made-up word which came about because nobody at Blizzard could speak Russian; Widowmaker's skin tone is a side effect of the experimentation that made such an amazing sniper; win/loss ratios, despite some obvious shortcomings, are the best way to measure a person's overall success in a team-based game; and if people want to crush on Roadhog, that's their business and they shouldn't be judged for it. 

The short-and-sweet answers can actually be found on the OWSupport_JK Twitter feed, which I assume was created specifically for this event, but it's really worth watching the video for the full experience. Kaplan seems relaxed and looks to be having real fun with it, and there's some practical value to it as well: He also explained how Blizzard has added functionality on PC report players who go AFK in placement matches, for instance, and added that the same feature is "coming soon" to consoles.

Back in July of 2016, an Overwatch player by the name of ChaosProz made a simple request in the Battle.net forums. "I'm deaf," they wrote. "Please provide subtitles for all voice lines." Yesterday, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan dove into the necro'd thread to say, okay. 

"Uprising is the first event to support subtitles," Kaplan wrote, alluding to the Overwatch seasonal event that got underway earlier this month, featuring balance changes, a pile of new skins, and a four-player PvE brawl. "We now have some of the underlying tech and systems in place to proliferate subtitle support to other parts of the game. The team is very passionate about adding subtitle support." 

As an online FPS, Overwatch may not seem like the sort of game that desperately needs subtitles, but there's an enormous amount of information conveyed in its sounds. Audio cues are used to signal both friendly and enemy ultimate abilities, for example. As the original poster pointed out, subtitles would bring "viable information" to the game: "A character might say 'There's a turret over there.' Or 'There's a teleport over there'... How would deaf people know?" 

The Overwatch animated shorts are also lacking subtitles, and in some ways that's an even more egregious oversight, since Blizzard puts so much effort into establishing a coherent backstory for the game's setting and characters. 

Kaplan didn't say anything about when subtitle support would be rolled out for the full game, but having publicly committed to it like this, you can be sure he'll be held to it. Kaplan also revealed yesterday that Blizzard currently has three new maps in development, and all of them "are looking likely for a release this year." 

Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan responded to a thread on the Battle.Net forums today saying at least three new standard maps would "likely" release sometime this year. The thread was started by user lalato, who questioned whether or not the trend set of two new maps per year—Eichenwald and Oasis, so far—was enough to sustain the game as it approaches its first anniversary. 

"We currently have 3 maps in development," Kaplan said in his response, "all past the initial playtesting phase that are 'standard' maps (Quick Play/Competitive). While something could always change, all 3 of those are looking likely for a release this year." So while we don't know what type of maps those might be, they'll all seemingly be put into the regular rotation sometime in the next seven months.

Kaplan continue by saying they "also have 3 non-standard maps in development (these won't go in QP/Comp)." It's not entirely clear what this means, but it's easy to assume it could refer to unique maps made for events, similar to the Lucioball arena for the Summer Games event last year—though all the events since then have just used modified versions of current maps. The non-standard maps could be variants like that as well. 

Kaplan finished by saying the Overwatch team "also have a few other experiments going on," as I imagine they almost certainly always do. We'll keep an eye out for when these maps get officially announced, but it seems this year will have a higher concentration of new locations to visit than Overwatch has seen in the past.

When an experienced Overwatch player, for whatever reason, creates a new account for the purpose of being matched up against (and dominating) lower-ranked players, it's called "smurfing." And generally speaking, the practice is frowned upon: After all, it's no fun getting your ass kicked over and over again just because some guy doesn't want to pick on players his own size. But how bad is it, really? According to game director Jeff Kaplan, not that bad at all. 

Kaplan recently shared his thoughts in a Battle.net forum thread entitled "Smurfing is cheating. Stop downplaying it," and unfortunately for anyone expecting quick action from Blizzard, he doesn't see it as a deal-breaker. He started by contrasting smurfing with boosting, which is when a high-ranking Competitive player attempts to "carry" a lower-skilled partner to a higher tier. That's bad, and Blizzard is "actively working on preventing and punishing" it. 

But smurfing, well, that's a different matter. "Smurfing—and I know this isn't what you want to hear—isn't really that big of an issue," Kaplan wrote. "For example, a few weeks ago one of the Pro Overwatch players created a smurf account and was streaming from it. We were able to watch his MMR [matchmaking rating] internally and compare it against his 'main' account. Within 15 games, the MMR's were equal. I know there is a very bad perception of smurfing. But the reality is, skilled players are moved rapidly out of lower skill situations." 

Kaplan also said he's encountered situations where players believed someone was smurfing, when it actually wasn't the case. As an example, he cited a member of Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm team, who is apparently very good at Overwatch but only comes on to play occasionally. "As a result, he is way lower level than we are. Most of us are 3-5 stars... and he is about level 30," Kaplan explained. "Every time we group with him, someone accuses him of being a smurf. But he's not." 

Regardless of how serious you consider the problem of smurfing, that really cuts to the heart of the issue: Before Blizzard can crack down, it has to be able to determine who's actually doing it. Some guys are sandbaggers, but others are just really good and on their way up—or might even just be having a really good night.   

Not everyone in the thread is satisfied with his conclusion, but there's a general sense of appreciation for the response, and in the knowledge that Blizzard is at least aware of the situation. And Kaplan said that the team is staying on top of things. "We will always monitor deviant behavior and if we feel like there is behavior occurring that hurts honest, fair players, we will take action," he wrote. "We are definitely working on the boosting issue." 

The new Overwatch seasonal event Uprising went live today. Read about the changes it brings to the party here, and check out all the new skins right here.

According to this graphic posted by Reddit user Oberdiah in December last year, Ana, McCree and Genji are the best competitive Overwatch characters. Now, before you sound off with your own favourites, you may be interested to know that a jetpack-operating feline character almost made it into Blizzard's fast-firing first-person shooter. Yes, really. 

"It was a cat in a jetpack," Jeff Kaplan told Gamespot in a recent interview, speaking of the hero which ultimately didn't make the cut. 

The director explains that prior to the game's launch, he and his team were keen to test the boundaries of what they could and could not get away with hero-wise—and that the straight-shooting Soldier 76 and slightly outlandish talking gorilla Winston acted as "good bookends" who featured on opposite ends of the likely/unlikely spectrum.     

"We had done a lot of concepting," says Kaplan. "We had one hero who was just a hockey player. Literally a hockey player. We later made a Lucio skin for a hockey player. But he was just a hockey player hero. Then there was this one hero that was a huge internal debate on the team because we just loved it so much but it didn't make it. It was this jetpack and it had this cat that laid in it, like a cat does. Then every once in awhile it would paw at the controls.

"That was one of those moments that helped define Overwatch. We just went, 'Yeah that's probably too far.' But yes. We had a cat hero."

So there you have it. Gamespot's interview with Kaplan in full can be read over here—the rest of which contains far less feline hero-related scoops. 

Between stories of players donating PC parts to other lesser equipped players, intricate community ARGs, and a sophisticated cosplay scene—the Overwatch community is a busy one. Yet, against other similar communities, one thing the arena shooter is missing is a map editor. Game director Jeff Kaplan reckons that's something he and his team would definitely consider, suggesting the idea is on its "long-term road map."

Speaking on the game's corner of the Battle.net forums, Kaplan says technical challenges are the main reason Overwatch does not have a map editor as yet, however it's something which is in his plans into the future. 

"We are extremely open-minded about releasing a map editor for Overwatch someday. But because Overwatch was made with a brand new engine, this is not a small task or one which can happen any time soon," says Kaplan. "We have this on our long-term road map and believe heavily in user-made content. But there are many challenges ahead of us and it will be a very long road before our editor can be made available to the public."

Elsewhere in the thread, Kaplan was asked by forum user LastLaugh if he had "any news on saving Play of the Games or highlights without having to use external programs", so which Kaplan responded: 

"Yes. This will be live before the end of summer. It's being worked on right now."

Interesting times afoot for Overwatchers, then. Speaking to the here and now, Lucio is being reworked on the Overwatch PTR.

Personally, I don't have a problem with draws in competitive events. Two teams clash, they put the pedal to the metal, and in the end neither is able to gain the upper hand and they both go away mad. It happens. My feeling is that it gives both sides incentive to figure out how to gain an edge the next time they meet. But plenty of other people hate them. That's why we have silly shootouts in hockey, and it's also why Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan said changes are coming that will help reduce their frequency in the game. 

"We have changes coming to the PTR very soon. These changes will greatly diminish the number of draws. More details inc. extremely soon," Kaplan wrote in the Overwatch forums. "We're also working on reducing Capture the Flag draws and elimination draws but those changes are further out." 

"Extremely soon" is obviously a subjective measure, as no changes have actually made their way to the PTR yet, but for people who hate draws (and based on the comments, there does seem to be an awful lot of them) it's good to know that the wheels are turning. I've emailed Blizzard to ask about what sort of changes it has in mind. We'll let you know when something happens. 

"Hopefully I don't bore you to tears," said Jeff Kaplan last night in response to a Reddit AMA request posted last week by user AuTiMechanic. "Sure... let's do this!" For the three hours that followed, the Blizzard vice president answered hundreds of questions from eager fans—including who his favourite Overwatch hero is, what other games he likes to play in his spare time, and which wrestling techniques he prefers to use on the other developers. 

Between the humorous exchanges, though, Kaplan addressed a few more serious Overwatch-related points, such as the possibility of gifting loot boxes to friends at some point down the line, how hero Lucio will be re-tuned in future updates, and that a making of documentary could be in the works. 

Starting with the uber cool Lucio, Kaplan suggested he and his team are experimenting with things behind the scenes at the moment and that while many players see the mobile support hero as essential to their squads, Lucio's input doesn't always match up. 

"We feel like a lot of players feel like [Lucio] is a 'must have' in comps but he also doesn't feel super impactful to play," says Kaplan. "We're trying some ideas to make him more engaging to play while making him a little less obvious/must pick. We'll see if those changes make it to the PTR. One tricky thing is that player perception of 'must pick' doesn't match actual behavior. I sometimes look at the hero pick stats and they clearly don't match the 'hero meta report' stats. Then players tell me to throw out my stats and look at only diamond and higher in competitive play only."

Kaplan continues: "Well, at that point, I'm not sure players realize what a small percentage of the player base they are asking me to make a decision based on. Obviously, we are in the process of toning Ana down right now. But we're also not out to see her never get played either. Player reaction is often to sledgehammer everything."

On the heroes front, Kaplan also identified Winston as the least picked hero in the game, and that as a result he's in line for "some new changes" directed at the PTR. "I am looking forward to seeing how the barrier changes play out from the PTR once they go live," he adds. "We've seen that Winston in the hands of the right player can be amazing."

As for loot box gifting, Kaplan was less open—simply saying "working on it" in reply to a direct question from user LeOswalito. When asked about the possibility of a making of-style documentary based on how the game's heroes are made, Kaplan said: "We have something for you!" 

Kaplan's Reddit AMA can be viewed in full over here. 

Update: Check out new hero Orisa's reveal and making of-style short by heading over here. 

Some shameless Overwatch players have been using the new custom game server browser to farm for XP. Custom games reward experience upon completion, so players were setting up Skirmish matches in which they could safely AFK, collecting experience without any effort. The practice was always ethically dubious, but most players assumed it existed in some sort of grey area as far as Blizzard was concerned. 

Consider that grey area now officially black. In a forum post, game director Jeff Kaplan made it very clear that Blizzard does not approve of the practice.

"Abusing and exploiting Custom Game or any other game mode to earn experience in Overwatch while inactive is NOT okay," Kaplan said. "The reason I want to be absolutely clear about this is because we are going to start to take disciplinary action against people who partake in these activities. If you create a Custom Game that in any way encourages players to gain experience while inactive, you risk having your account banned. If you join any game mode – including Custom Games – with the intent of gaining experience while being inactive, you risk having your account banned. Also, do not name your Custom Game that in anyway even implies that gaining experience while inactive is OK – please do not even do this as a joke – because you are putting yourself at risk of having your account banned."

Kaplan went on to explain that the Overwatch team expected this sort of thing to probably happen, and has an "escalation plan" in place to combat the behavior. The actions taken today—Skirmish mode in custom games ceasing to reward experience, and implementing an AFK timer for the same—are the first steps on that plan. If players don't shape up, the nuclear option means turning off experience gain in custom games altogether.

"I really don’t want to see us getting to that point. So I am going to ask for some help from the vast majority of you who are simply playing the game and having fun and not abusing it: please report those who are creating Custom Games with the intention of gaining experience while remaining inactive. If you select someone’s Custom Game you get three options: Spectate, Join and Report. These options exist on all 3 platforms. Use the Report feature. It works."