Director’s Take – Retrospective from BlizzCon 2023

news.blizzard.com:

A little event happened two weeks ago, and I was lucky enough to be a part of it… and all of you were too. BlizzCon isn't just for those who attend the show in person, it's also a time when we get to connect with fans around the world and show off more of the game than we normally do, and this year we even ran an event in-game with a playable version of our just announced hero, Mauga. I'd like to run through the show - this is partially a recap, a correction to misunderstandings around announcements we made, and a bit of a sentimental journey. If you're not into that and just want the deets on Mauga changes, skip to paragraph 3 (don’t worry, I won't mind).

Let's start with Clash. We announced our next new game mode as well as one of the maps, Hanaoka, which will be part of its debut. Watching through some of the videos that people made off of our introduction to the mode, it was clear that I talked waaaaay too long about 2CP, but it also felt like there was some confusion over match length. This has been one of the most difficult parts of the mode to solve. Traditionally 5CP game modes had edge cases where there was never a clear winner. Some games use a phase, like Sudden Death, in order to reign in the game's length. We don't want to have matches that can go this long, so we've been experimenting with a scoring system (which we alluded to at BlizzCon) as well as an alternate where the match ends after a set amount of time with the winner being decided by whoever is controlling more points on the map. We’re still iterating here, but our goal is to have a game mode that moves back and forth across the map and also enforces a clear time limit.

Let's talk Mauga! This hero is so cool. We heard so much love for his art, his