

Then I think it's a matter of exploring the health of the game post-launch, what the community's like, what is the community tolerant of and not tolerant of.

"In terms of if we decide ," Kaplan continued, "it would be a combination of us wanting for us to make more heroes and the community feeling like new heroes should be added to the game - if they think the metagame's stale and it would really mix it up or we're really excited to add this damage type or that gameplay mechanic. "our entire focus is those 21 heroes at launch" "The combination of the game systems that we introduced and the feedback from the community is gonna direct us on how we're going to give players access to new content." "We're just getting into beta, we are not done with all the game systems yet," Ford added. I think that's gonna answer 'How many heroes can we have? Is there room for a lot more? A little more? How's the game feel? Does it feel solid and balanced?'"
DO YOU HAVE TO PAY TO PLAY OVERWATCH ONLINE PATCH
"I'm hoping that some time next week that we patch in the three new heroes in and then we just want to see the ecosystem with those three heroes in. There was one misconception that we're gonna have 21 at launch and then we're going to have a hero store with additional heroes, and that couldn't be further from the truth. "We don't have a concrete answer on what happens after the initial launch in terms of heroes. "It's not our intention to dodge the question," Kaplan said. And it's looking to the Overwatch community for direction on its future design plans. Blizzard is still figuring that out, he said. "It's not our intention to dodge the question"īlizzard's fans have expressed concern about the developer's plans for post-launch content: Will the studio add new heroes? Will it sell them? How will it sell them? How much will they cost? Kaplan said those are commonly asked questions, but that he doesn't have an answer yet.

"A year ago, we didn't know how we were going to sell this game, it wasn't until we learned what Overwatch was that we were in a position to make that decision. "We take inspiration from a whole bunch of different games, even our own games at Blizzard," Ford said. Tim Ford, lead gameplay programmer on Overwatch, said it took Blizzard a long time to figure that out, even though it has plenty of experience with both traditional and free-to-play business models. They're all going to be available to you - have it all." "That traditional model removed some of that stress of, if needs to be Roadhog and needs to be Junkrat. "What you see is what you get here's the game, here's the 21 heroes, we think they're amazing, we think the the gameplay's fantastic," Kaplan said.
DO YOU HAVE TO PAY TO PLAY OVERWATCH ONLINE PC
Releasing Overwatch as a $60 product - Blizzard is also selling a $40 version exclusively for PC - was, Blizzard thought, a "fair deal for the player." I really want Mei, Widowmaker and Reaper, so what formula do I need to figure out in order for that to happen?'" "We saw a lot of feedback coming from the community, almost like a fatigue with, like, 'I'm trying to figure out how I'm gonna play this game. Kaplan said the decision was also in part driven by Blizzard's fans. Overwatch: How Blizzard turned its biggest failure into its next great hope We really didn't want to change the core gameplay and limit it in some way just to make the game free-to-play." "A lot of the free-to-play models that we were exploring involved people not having access to enough heroes to make those team compositions actually viable. Overwatch and other games is the fluidity in the team compositions and matching what the other team's doing. "If you've played a lot of Overwatch, you know that hero-switching is a core part of it - it's a really fun dynamic part. "We really made the decision on the business model based on what we thought was right for the gameplay," Kaplan told Polygon in an interview at BlizzCon. But game director Jeff Kaplan said there's a good reason Blizzard is releasing Overwatch as a full-priced game. That Blizzard would pursue the business model that it employed with Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and Heroes of the Storm was a widely held assumption. This week, Blizzard announced that its next game, the hero-focused shooter Overwatch, wasn't going to be a free-to-play game.
