Jeff Kaplan: belief

Transcript context

…And by the way, we should say that it’s a PvP game with six versus six at first, and where there’s three distinct roles that people take on on a team. And those roles, at first, I guess were not required. Like, you can reallocate those roles as you wanted. And then to maximize the fun, you add a little bit of structure. You enforce two per role, and the role being Tank, Support, and Damage. So, that. And then there’s all the kinds of heroes that are associated with the different roles, and people pick and there’s lore. And some people are probably like hardcore just one particular hero. And so there’s a lot of personality and story and community that builds around each of the heroes. And, but at the end of the day, it is just a fun shooter. Yeah. Our goal was to pay homage to the shooters before us that we loved. There’s no way you can talk about Overwatch without talking about Team Fortress 2. Uh, Team Fortress started as a Quake mod, which was brilliant and I played tons of. Then there was Team Fortress Classic that came out with Half-Life 1. And then Team Fortress 2, I think everything about it blew everybody away when it came out in 2007. And there’s obviously just huge influence there. But the shooter mechanics of Overwatch are… They hearken back to what people call the arcade or arena shooter genre. Which pains me ’cause I never… Back in the day, I didn’t think of Quake as an arcade shooter. It was almost an insulting way of saying it. But just the fast movement, really epic, over-the-top weapons. You have a low time to kill, or TTK, that players call it. Meaning you’re very survivable; you can take a few hits. Where, in a game like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike, if you get shot in the head, you’re just dead right away. So it was supposed to be this explosive, larger than life, fun, arcade-y shooter- With a lot of teamwork involved. And so you said Tracer up there? She’s the OG. Who else?…

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