I took some time at PAX East 2016 this past weekend to check out Overwatch running on a PlayStation 4. The game plays really well, and you can dig into my impressions of it on that format right here. After my hands-on session, I sat down with Assistant Game Director Aaron Keller and talked about a bunch of stuff as it relates to the game. I’ve transcribed that interview in its entirety. My questions are in bold, Aaron’s answers are in plain text. Check it out below this gallery.

Did you need to make any design changes in order to accommodate bringing Overwatch to consoles? We talked about it, it was something we anticipated while developing the game… Even early on, we wanted to develop this game for consoles. Most of the team had console controllers on their desks even though they were hooked up to PCs and we didn’t have a console build yet. We wanted it to feel as good as it could on the console, and I feel like we accomplished that. I think it plays really well and handles really smoothly on console, and it’s always locked at 60fps. We had anticipated that we’d need to make a lot of tuning changes, and we didn’t actually have to do that. Really? That’s sort of surprising… There are very small differences, and I don’t think we have any on the tuning side right now. There are differences like voice chat, you know, because the consoles handle that. We do have aim assist on consoles, so that’s probably the biggest difference between the versions for gameplay. How does this aim assist work? I don’t have all the details of it, but we actually worked really closely with Treyarch [one of the studios behind Call of Duty]. They gave us a lot of tips for it, and a lot of help with tuning on it. They were actually really helpful all around. Is that sort of an unexpected perk of being with Activision now? Yeah, we’ve collaborated with a lot of different studios. We worked with Treyarch for our game, the Destiny team [Bungie] has come down multiple times to talk to different people at Blizzard. It’s actually… you know, a lot of people look at Activision as this dispersed set of studios, but there’s actually a lot of collaboration between them. Did that surprise you? A little bit when it first happened; but, it’s actually been really refreshing and really nice to feel like your part of this broader set of kick-ass developers.

So, it’s 21 characters right now, right? Yep. How did you arrive at that number? Was there a lot cut out… I mean, I’m sure there was… Yeah, it was pretty fluid at the start of development, you know, exactly how many heroes we wanted to have in the game. One of the things that was really important to us was that we have a variety of play styles, and a variety of play styles within each role. We have four different roles in the game: attack, defense, support and tank. We wanted a lot of people to be able to feel like they could pick this support instead of another because it better fits their play style. Sure. We wanted there to be a lot of different options and counters for people to select from over the course of a match. 21 is where we had it. The interesting thing that happened during development is that even when we had 17 or 18 heroes, we would add a new one in and it would totally change the way the game was played. Did that mean that you would have to go back and re-tune all 17 of the previous heroes? That could happen, but some of it was almost just that the meta of the game would change because this new hero was there. There were new things that you would have to think about as you played the game. Does that sort of meta game change make it harder to decide on stuff like character DLC after launch? Yes and no. The game sort of reacts a little differently to each hero you throw at it. It’s always, from our point of few, become more interesting and more exciting each time we’ve done it. It’s always this refreshing thing that happens; the new heroes are there, and you’re thinking about everything. Whether it’s on a specific map or how your team should handle strategy, you’re thinking about everything in new and different ways. We have already talked about it. We will be adding new heroes to the game, and we will be adding new maps to the game. That stuff is coming.