Overwatch’s Game Director Jeff Kaplan is back with a new Developer Update video dedicated to the new mode coming to the game.
The Experimental Card (and its Experimental Modes) are not targeted at bug fixing or stability, or anything of the sort. It is really focused on radical gameplay changes or things that the team wants to try out and get the direct player feedback on.
When we make balance changes, they have to go to the PTR [Public Test Region]. While they’re on the PTR, we’re also going through the console certification process for Sony, Microsoft, and now Nintendo. On average, that takes a week—and that doesn’t include testing or deploying, so it can be a long process. To change the damage of McCree’s gun by one point takes longer than players think.
Then, from a balancing standpoint, we also want to live with those changes for a while before making our next round. So, it ended up putting us on an almost bi-monthly balance schedule, just by the nature of the process. If you asked any designer on the Overwatch team, “what are the top 10 features you want?” one of the things they’d say would be, “The ability to immediately change things and be much more responsive to balance requests.”
