Weekly Recall: Seriously Fun

Ah, spring is in the air! Rain is falling, flowers are growing. And if you close your eyes, you can smell the fresh glue from developers slapping googly eyes onto everything in sight. That can only mean one thing: it's Underwatch time.

Every year, Team 4 comes together to generate a full patch of frivolities to spread joy and a little bit of chaos in the Overwatch community. But getting this goofy with our favorite Heroes takes much more work than you might expect. Today, our devs are walking you through the process of creating the most shenanigan-filled patch of the year.

Goofs Generated

Silly patches start in a decidedly normal way: we have a big meeting with everyone likely to have a hand in developing the patch, normally several seasons ahead of the anticipated delivery time. Once a core team of engineers, designers, and producers make administrative decisions, that's when the real fun begins.

Folks across Team 4 are then invited to join a brainstorming meeting to pitch their ideas for the next Very Non-Serious Overwatch patch. Those ideas can range from minor Hero tweaks to patently ridiculous suggestions; there are no limits at this stage to encourage creative and maniacal thinking. You want Lúcio's ultimate to trigger dance emotes for everyone in range? Put it on the list.

The core team handpicks a few ideas to run with for each Hero, focusing on suggestions that excite them the most. They also queue up pitches that are funny enough to try and make work through coding or development solutions. From there, they implement ideas using existing assets and create a test build for the rest of Team 4 to try.

Collaboration quickly churns out additional remixes and riffs, giving the core team more material to work with. The process of coding, testing, and integrating those bonus jokes repeats itself until developers have a substantial build to improve upon.

Teamwork makes the memes work and that's doubly true for patches like Underwatch. Beyond engineers, design teams like VFX and Sound are involved from the outset. Once the patch is about halfway complete, the rest of the cavalry arrives: UI/UX, additional engineers, and more staff dive in to get work done. Animation gets called in once most changes are set. Altogether, the initial core team of five to ten people grows until the entirety of Team 4 gets a chance to playtest and offer feedback.

Buffoonery Balanced

As you can probably imagine, it's terrifyingly easy to create an unbalanced (and unfun) mode when the ultimate goal is having fun in new, ridiculous ways. It's also easy to accidentally break Overwatch, which our developers admit has happened when creating early iterations of these silly patches in the past.

Devs avoid the dreaded server crash by thinking about the parameters available to them. Each Hero has a certain amount of assets they can have in the game at a time; for some Heroes it's a lower number, for some it's a higher number. If a Hero has a simple base kit without a lot of extra bells and whistles, the team has more room to get wild with additional assets. Heroes with more complex kits or higher native asset loads are limited to fewer obvious physical changes for the patch. That doesn't mean they're free from shenanigans, though, since our devs still try to push limits in different ways.

The pursuit of balance doesn't end at "just don't break the game, team." Part of the process is proving that hysterical ideas can be achievable, in the sense of not breaking the code and not breaking the community's collective patience. Some genuinely funny changes end up being miserable to play against. Imagine if Orisa moved 100% faster than everyone else because she has 100% more legs than the rest of the roster. Sounds fun in theory…but playing against Orisakart isn't so fun in practice.

Thankfully, repeated playtests reveal pain points and the Heroes' changes are bumped up or taken down, just like they are in every other Overwatch patch. You'll see Wrecking Ball take a more substantial form in Underwatch that seems unstoppable from an outside perspective. To keep him from becoming rodent king of the universe, his movement speed was downgraded to that of your average boulder. All things in moderation.

Our favorite cowboy Cole Cassidy also gets a measured change in Underwatch: every time you say "howdy," he'll shoot a Peacekeeper round from his outstretched finger. Since it's attached to a voice line, spam rules still apply to stop him from becoming the world's most friendly assassin. It's a simple but hilarious change that ended up being a favorite for many of our developers. Another favorite is for gorilla scientist Winston…though you'll have to figure that one out on your own.

Absurdity Achieved

Developers rarely get the chance to follow through with their most nonsensical ideas; for them, there's no better outlet than patches like Underwatch and its predecessors to see their wildest dreams come to life. (Well, maybe not their dreams. Double-stacked Torbjorn is more of a sleep paralysis demon, but it makes for a good bit.)

Inventing new and ridiculous ways to have fun in Overwatch feels like a breath of fresh spring air for us. We hope it feels the same for you. Have fun in Underwatch this year and make sure to send your best (or most cursed) clips to us on social media!