Director’s Take – Flashpoint, Cinematics, & the Dawn of a New Hero

news.blizzard.com:

Grab Bag week!

There’s a lot the community is talking about—and we're excited for. This week, I'd love to briefly touch on a bunch of those topics. 

We talked about Flashpoint during the livestream, and then some of the points around its design over Twitter, but nothing compares to a picture. It's good practice to draw paper maps before building a new level, especially when it's part of the process for designing a new game mode.

This image was one of the first ones drawn for Flashpoint. The final layout of Suravasa won't be exactly like this—for instance there won't be a river dividing the map in two—but it does a good job of showing how a Flashpoint map is designed. There are two spawn points for each team and five points arranged in an x pattern. We talked about the quasi-symmetrical nature of the map on the Overwatch 2: Invasion Reveal livestream, and when you look at point B, for instance, you can see that the entrances to the arena are all symmetrical, with this symmetry extending outside the point for a short distance.

Another detail about Flashpoint I mentioned on the livestream is that when the match starts the first point will be picked randomly. In actuality, this has been changed so that the first objective will always be the central point of the map. 

Game balance this season continues to be in great shape. With Season 5, we saw Junker Queen’s dominant reign over the tank role even out, making way for a more diverse selection of tank heroes, with Winston and D.Va on the rise. Damage heroesnotably saw a shift in play rate with the previously popular picks like Tracer and Hanzo being overtaken by Genji and Cassidy. Support is seeing a notable increase in both Brigitte and Lifeweaver team compositions as well.

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