1. #1

    Director's Take - Looking Ahead To Season 4

    Director's Take - Looking Ahead To Season 4
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
    ]Season Four starts in just a few days! Over the past week, we've revealed a lot about what's coming next Tuesday and beyond. There's a lot to look forward to and I’m going to go a little more in depth on some of the pieces that we've already revealed.

    Lifeweaver

    One of the biggest releases of Season Four is our newest Support hero, Lifeweaver. If you'd like to see more about Lifeweaver, you can find his trailer here. I'll wait while you watch it…

    This hero can do quite a few things that are totally new to the game: some, like his Petal Platform, we've been talking about since before the original game shipped! His wildest ability is Life Grip, where Lifeweaver can grab an ally and pull them to his location. It happens almost instantly, without any confirmation from that player, and it can have a huge impact in a fight. The first thing that many people question when they see this ability is whether it could be used to grief teammates. It can, but it can also be used to save them or to set up even bigger plays. Teamwork—including depending on and trusting your allies—is crucial to Overwatch combat. It's possible to use different abilities in ways that don't always have a positive outcome for your team: think of Mercy using her rez at just the wrong moment. We’re always looking for opportunities to evolve Overwatch, and to give players new ways of interacting with the game. When creating new heroes, we want to pursue abilities that make them feel powerful as well as let teams work together in ways that they never could before. Sometime this causes a little friction, but we think it's worth it. If you want to practice this ability, jump into the new B.O.B and Weave game mode, where you can use Life Grip to position your team’s B.O.B. It’s a whacky mode, but a total blast!

    Lifeweaver is the fifth new hero for Overwatch 2. The following hero, slated for Season Six, will also be a Support. Before Lifeweaver, there were eight Support heroes in the game: three less than the Tank role and a lot less than our Damage role. We think that this gap is too large, and we'd like to start correcting it. However, we don't want to abandon either of the other two roles. We probably won't stick to an exact formula, but we'll be shooting to release roughly 2 Supports to every 1 Damage and Tank hero.

    Starwatch

    We're releasing a new game mode in Season Four called Starwatch. Players take the side of a Watcher or an agent of the Infinite Empire. It’s a lot of fun and takes a page out of Junkenstein’s book, in that it tells a story that is set outside of the Overwatch universe. Who knows… if players enjoy Starwatch, it would be great to be able to expand this story in the future. One of the things that I'm most excited about with Starwatch is that it introduces some PvE elements into a PvP match. Turrets are placed for the Infinite Empire and Doomfist will play alongside the Watchers. We've been talking about game modes like this lately and would like to explore them more. We've done experiments like this before. The Archives missions were design and technology testbeds to allow us to start creating the upcoming Story Missions for Overwatch 2. I'd love for us to think of Starwatch in the same way; the first step into something bigger and more ambitious that we could be doing for the future.

    Pride

    Pride is coming to Overwatch this year! I'm so excited about this, and I'd like to briefly touch on why.

    This is an important subject for us. It's easy to get called out for talking about a fictional character's queerness without the proper setup, or to get accused of adding inclusivity for the wrong reasons. We've always thought of Overwatch as a game that portrays a bright, hopeful, and inspirational future. The world is a diverse place. We would not only like Overwatch to reflect that, but we want players to be able to see a part of themselves in our game. To have it showcase who they are. We’d like Pride to feel like it's being recognized and celebrated within our game world. Before June, we will share how we are celebrating Overwatch 2’s first Pride, and we will also share the values that drive this team every day to bring our game’s vision to life.

  2. #2
    Still teasing that PvE mode they announced the game off the back of and then just haven't said shit about since, though supposedly will say something this year.

    I'm still fully expecting them to release a sad blog post canning it at this rate though. Or announce it's delayed until like 2025 or something.

  3. #3
    Eh, the three Archives PvE maps were good for a run or two, more if you cared about the challenges, but otherwise they weren't very engaging. Shooting mooks over and over again. I think they've delayed the full on PvE side of OW2 because they realized it suffered the same problem, even with the additional variety and hero stat/ability functions.

    Hard to advance the story with just PvP and side-content like comics, but.. I'm technically invested in the universe and its world building, not so much on the actual plot. Because so far it has sucked. Read all 5 issues of New Blood recently, it was quite clumsy and infantile. I don't recall earlier stories to have been any better.

    Also, how are they going to monetize the PvE mode? Will it be a separate purchase, leaving only the PvP side F2P? Paid content patches? I'm fairly interested to give it a try as long as it's free, but with the shop pricing and selection handicap BS you know there'll be something for them to recuperate the costs.

    Love the Starwatch concept, anyhow, I'm a sucker for space opera.
    Now you see it. Now you don't.

    But was where Dalaran?

  4. #4
    No amount of change can stop her from going to death

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Edge- View Post
    Still teasing that PvE mode they announced the game off the back of and then just haven't said shit about since, though supposedly will say something this year.

    I'm still fully expecting them to release a sad blog post canning it at this rate though. Or announce it's delayed until like 2025 or something.
    I mean last they said was "sometime 2023" and we're barely 4 months in. Honestly I'd be tired at this point if I was them with the amount of people screaming "IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE OUT BY NOW". Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if they save it for BlizzCon with the fact that Diablo 4 is right around the corner, and then Wow patches.

  6. #6
    Stood in the Fire BB8's Avatar
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    Excited to read next season will also be a support role.
    Was already hoping some kind of plant-growth-druid-alchemist would join.
    I my imagination it would be more green and thorny, but the way they create Lightweaver is actually way much cooler than a just a 'druid'.

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