Blizzard have done a great job of keeping a steady stream of new content coming to Overwatch, looking to keep players engaged in the long term with a new character here and a new map there. Last week saw them give those at Gamescom a sneak peak at a new map named Junkertown, alongside an animated short featuring Junkrat and Roadhog called The Plan.
They’re essentially trying to break back into Junkertown, from which they were exiled by the abrasive-sounding queen. Set in Australia in the wreckage of a destroyed Omnium factory town, there are definite Mad Max and Borderlands overtones to the ramshackle buildings and structures, and a kinship with Route 66 and a few other maps in the game with its dusty colour palette.
It’s a rather straightforward Escort map type, with the gold and dynamite payload being accompanied along a path with two checkpoints and a final destination. There’s no initial capture point or other real diversions, just straight up Escort play. Considering that it’s the first map for that mode since release, that’s still great for fans of the game type.
Of course, it’s never great to be on a team that’s being so thoroughly outmatched, as I found myself without the niceties of matchmaking from Blizzard’s servers. When defending we were steamrolled, when attacking, we were bottled up, despite having multiple routes out from the start point, or perhaps because of the rather open area allowing for broad defensive play with Orisa and Reinhardt with their shields.
My frustration at the way the fight went aside, it’s a handsome map, with all the love, care and attention that you’d expect from Blizzard’s team infused into the world. You have the plan for Junkrat and Roadhog’s outlandish attack on a blackboard in the starting area, Roadhog’s bike, shops, food stands, and on to the Scrapyard with its spinning central column that’s bound to make for a few interesting defensive and offensive possibilities.
One thing that is certain is that Blizzard will continue to grow the world in which their game is set, which has helped make it one of the most beloved games of recent times. Speaking of the animated short that released last week, Blizzard Animation’s Project Lead, Terran Gregory said that, “Given that it’s set in Australia, it was inevitable that it was going to be Junkrat and Roadhog’s big on-screen adventure. In the past we’ve done many animated shorts that explore many deep and resonant emotional themes like hope and justice, but we realised very quickly that’s we’re going to have to do something a little different this time!”
What that resulted in is a fun and amusing short that goes back and forth through Junkrat’s crazed heist planning. The payload, for example, stems from the artists designing it with gold and dynamite, which the animation team latched onto this as a key story point in the short.
The Junkertown short, in contrast to Mei’s ‘Rise and Shine’ short, is a little different as it was rendered using the game engine itself, as opposed to the film level animations of before. That should hopefully let Blizzard bring yet more stories to the world, but could also be something that is brought to fans in future, though they have nothing to say on that front just yet.
Blizzard are similarly tight-lipped about other aspects of the game’s future, and little seems set to shake up the game and disturb the status quo that drastically. The regular matches stick to the same game modes that featured at launch, while the Arcade that was released at the end of last year is used for forms of experimentation. In some instances that might be bringing in classic game modes like Deathmatch, Elimination, and quirkier additions like Lucio Ball.
However, for something to break out from the arcade and into the regular rotation? That seems to be off the table for the time being. When we put that question to them, Andrew Boyd, Senior Game Producer explained, “We like having the arcade being a place where we can be a little bit freer and keeping the emphasis of quick play and competitive play on the game modes we’ve already established.”
“One of the really interesting things to add to that,” Chacko Sonny, Blizzard Production Director said, “is that a lot of the game modes [in arcade] arise as a result of the passion from team members. The deathmatch stuff was one engineer who was super excited about it, and when you ask how that percolates up to become something that has momentum, the members of the team generate this passion in the rest of the team as well. When something gets that kind of hold with us, it becomes something that we might want to roll out to the rest of you.”
Looking and searching for hints as to what the next addition might be is typically difficult, with Blizzard rather coy and guarded over what that might be, and yet informative with their general philosophy. Take the general disposition of the heroes in the game, for example. Last year’s additions leant toward conventionally good characters, such as Ana and Orisa, while Doomfist’s introduction as a more typical villain could potentially herald a new string of heroes that lean toward the darker side.
Chacko explained, “It’s really interesting to hear [Senior Game Designer] Michael Chu talk about the heroes. I think one of the things about the Overwatch universe is that I don’t believe there’s anything that would be categorised as purely heroic or purely villanous. Even with Doomfist, he believes that his intentions are good and that the way that he’s achieving his intentions are justified by the ends that he’s getting to. That depth and complexity in the heroes is pretty important to us, and I think you’ll continue to see that in the hero designs that we have coming up.”
Separately, Chacko also added that “Jeff [Kaplan from the Overwatch team] has already said that there’s multiple heroes in development simultaneously, and Geoff Goodman, who is the hero designer, spends time working on different ideas as they occur, based on the state of the game, on plans that we have around different classes of heroes for a while. As those progress over the course of development, certain ones take hold, certain ones become more important, and based on their progression, we may shift that plan.”
So what does the future hold for Overwatch? Well more of the same, essentially. The team is working on new heroes, completely overhauling existing ones – such as Mercy – adding new maps, new modes, events, stories, animated shorts and so on. Blizzard being Blizzard, they’ll take their time with each of these, and probably would do so even if Overwatch wasn’t as ludicrously successful as it has been. When will we see all of that? Well, Blizzard aren’t telling just yet.
