Yearly Recall: 2025 and Beyond

Greetings, gamers! This is Liz from the Community team, here to deliver you a special end-of-year edition of Weekly Recall. We'll be looking back at the highlights of our newest blog series, how it reflects our communication priorities, and what this space will look like in 2026 and beyond.

As the author of the majority of Weekly Recalls this year, I want to personally thank you for the love you've shown them. Thanks, Overwatch community. Consider this Yearly Recall a chance to catch up on some of the cool things we've covered and an opportunity to think about what you'd like to see here next year!

Our 2025 Recall Recap

I don't think we can legally call anything a "Wrapped" but that's the vibe we're going for today. Please play our new lo-fi holiday Overwatch mix in the background to really nail the ambiance.

This year, we had two main topics on repeat: deep dives into the development of core game updates and insights from our Stadium team. Considering how many of our core developers spent their free time trying to invent the world's most overpowered Stadium Builds, this tracks.

We'll get to Stadium in a second, but let's start at the beginning. The first Weekly Recall in May gave us a chance to share information the Overwatch community had been requesting for a long time: data, data, and more data. Turns out you all really love charts (who doesn't?) and analysis about Hero Bans.

The reception to that first blog inspired us to keep up the pursuit of information gathering. We dove harder into massive Overwatch updates and the processes of our designers, engineers, and creative staff. I know you shouldn't have favorite children (or blogs) but I'm partial to our deep dives into Wuyang's animation process, Vendetta's glorious origin story, the art of balancing patches, and the wizardry behind matchmaking.

Stadium's introduction in Season 16 gave us a new way to play Overwatch and handed me more opportunities to get avoided for only playing Ashe's mini B.O.B. build. Unlike me, the Stadium development team never shied away from experimenting and iterating on what they learned as the mode gained traction. They also kept up a wild pace adding new features and integrating favorite Heroes like our best girl Tracer.

We also got a boost from (Aaron Keller voice) PERKS in Season 15, which added another layer of strategy and depth to the core game. Shout out to associate hero designer Scott Kennedy, who joined us to break down a major Perks update and talk about his time in the Overwatch World Cup. Hopefully this paragraph is enough of a bribe to keep Hanzo's Scatter Arrow Perk in tip-top shape.

All work and no fun makes the Community team a little bonkers sometimes, so we added a few lighthearted Weekly Recalls into the mix...mostly when our devs were too busy working on [REDACTED BY VENDETTA] to give us the dish. We hope you enjoyed our goofier offerings, from astrology-based Hero picks to fantastic community fanart selections. Next year is pretty jam-packed with important things to cover (eyes emoji) but we can never rule out a fun blog every now and then.

The Big Why

We have a lot of fun making Weekly Recalls, but they're important for serious reasons. Over the years, we haven't always showed much transparency about the development process. That came from a very practical place of protecting what the team was working on or saving hype updates for big events. But in this era of Overwatch, we want you to be more aware of what we're doing-and be an active participant.

These weekly peeks behind the curtain give you a chance to learn more about game development and the reasoning behind changes or updates, especially if they're complex. Our developers get a forum to explain their thinking and show off their expertise. Beyond that, it's our way of integrating you into a team that always has the community on their minds.

To me, blogs like this have been a long time coming. As both a fan and a journalist, I craved more information about Overwatch, the world it represented, and the people who cared about it. If you gain nothing else from Weekly Recalls, I hope you feel the passion and dedication that Team 4 puts into everything they do.

…I mean, I hope you learn something most weeks. But that can be second.

What's Next?

Thankfully, Aaron doesn't mind the Community team sending "heyyyy wanna chat?" Slack messages to our extremely busy developers and creatives for the foreseeable future. Some of those brave souls have even come to us with Weekly Recall pitches of their own, and we hope to have more developer-led blogs in 2026!

If you've read this far expecting story or game spoilers, I admire your hustle but can't give you anything. Have you ever seen Winston get angry? I'm not making that scientist angry.

We can share that Weekly Recalls will be even more in-depth and educational as we hit certain beats over the next year. Expect deeper dives into narrative and lore, the development of Heroes and the world around them, and more insight from devs about updates they've cooked up. And yes, data enthusiasts, we'll get more charts going. You'll also get the chance to influence topics we cover in the future by voting in a special blog at the top of the year.

From all of us on the Community team, have a great holiday season and make sure to go easy on any old people (like us) in your games over break. Good luck, stop charging in on Reinhardt, and have fun!