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'Weird meta' of inclusivity between Overwatch and players

We talk to Blizzard's Tim Ford and Rachel Day about the first year for Overwatch and its community.

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During Gamescom we sat down with Blizzard's Rachel Day and Tim Ford for a chat about the current state of the game that's been in the wild for just over a year.

"It has [been quite a year], yes, it's been really exciting," says lead gameplay programmer Tim Ford.

"We've seen a lot of very exciting events come out of the first year of Overwatch," says senior visual effects artist Rachel Ford. "Uprising kind of brought us around to the end of our events there and the anniversary event was fantastic. I think we got to tell a lot of fun stories, bring out some new characters; Orisa, Doomfist, Sombra, Ana, I guess that all counts in that, doesn't it?"

"A couple of new maps, Eichenwalde and Horizon Lunar Colony, Junkertown, and I'm missing one, Oasis, yeah," says Ford. "So four maps over the course of the whole year. It's been great, kind of, building this game with our community. We try to be as reactive as possible, we add new features, we add new heroes, add new maps. The fact that we can actually take that feedback from our excited players and realise that in the game has been the most rewarding part. And to see that they like it and they keeping playing it, that really tells us that we're probably on the right track."

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Speaking of the community, we asked what's been the defining thing they've taken in from a community perspective.

"It's cool to see echoed back one of the core principles of Overwatch from a mission statement standpoint," says Ford. "The whole mission statement of Overwatch is that it's about these heroes, more importantly it's about inclusivity. So seeing how people really love these characters. Seeing how a whole wide demographic of players are engaging in this game on multiple platforms, on multiple regions across the planet, really tells us that the mission statement was correct. And there's this weird meta that happens, that's an overloaded term, between our player base which is a very inclusive player base and the game which is designed to kind of demonstrate that inclusivity."

"We saw some interesting stuff come out with character design," adds Day. "Where we put out a character like Diva or like Soldier 76 and what the community gave back to us was not what we had in mind at all, but we loved it so much we had to embrace it. Like Diva has an animation now where she sits eating Doritos and drinking soda, cause that's the personality that the internet gave her, so it's really cool for us to find those standout moments and make them real in the game."

Speaking of the community, Gamescom was overflowing with Overwatch cosplayers.

"The cosplay scene for Overwatch has been incredible," says Day. "People not only take our characters the way that we make them, but they make them their own. We see people taking Hanzo and making him this gigantic Hanzo character that they've dreamt up to make him even better than we first put him out and it's so incredible to see the passion people put into this."

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