At the Blizzard main booth located at the Hall No. 7 of Koelnmesse on August 23rd, Blizzard Entertainment is planning to introduce various information regarding the company’s games such as the new Overwatch short animation.



On the day before Blizzard’s main event begins, we had an opportunity to meet two developers who are in charge of Overwatch, and asked questions about the newly introduced “Junkertown” and D.Va with new upcoming features and changes.



▲ Andrew Boyd, the senior producer (left), and Timothy Ford, the lead engineer

Q. It seems that you are trying many different ways of changing the play mechanics in the new maps. What can we expect from Junkertown?



Timothy Ford: About the new game mechanics, there is a large arena called Scrapyard. There is a large turbine spinning in the center of the map, and we hope it is used in various ways of defence and attack such as building a turret on a turbine blade.



Also, the area around the main gate to the Junkertown is quite spacious, and we believe that such place will be an unusual environment out of all maps in Overwatch.







Q. The new content called Deathmatch in the 1.14 patch of PTR server is receiving many favorable responses. However, this content was originally said to be “not released” by developers, but it came out nonetheless. Was there any reason for this decision?



Andrew Boyd: From the moment of the official release to the present, there have been many events occurred even by one developer in Overwatch.



The Deathmatch was one of them; one of our programmers felt the needs of this content and made a prototype by himself and shared it with the rest of the team, and it was very positive. So, even though we said in the past that there will be no Deathmatch mode, but we have decided to add the content to the game in order to do the right thing and make the game much more fun.



Timothy Ford: That’s why I think that it became a good example from two perspectives. FIrstly, whatever developers have said about the game in the past can become a lie (laughs). Secondly, this process proved us that the arcade opened the door for more various tests.



Q. The D.Va’s skill set change has been notified through the forum recently. Can you explain this in more details?



Timothy Ford: Long story short, D.Va’s Defense Matrix can almost nullify any skills and ultimates without much cooldown, and we thought that it needs to be modified.



Therefore, we will maintain the current system, but double the spending time of Defense Matrix. Also, Defense Matrix will be activated by right-clicking, and we would like to add the new ability of launching missiles in E.



The new skill may seem similar to Pharah’s ultimate, but is a downgraded version of range and damage overall. We expect her to be used more flexibly in various situations with the newly added ability.



Andrew Boyd: The changes of D.Va which were explained previously will be live in the next PTR, and some other surprising changes are planned to be revealed concurrently.



