Overwatch: Play of the Game is a work in progress, says developer

Overwatch Lead Software Engineer, Rowan Hamilton, today shared some insight on the title’s Play of the Game (POTG) feature.

“The idea [of POTG] was to capture those moments which slipped by,” Hamilton said, speaking with Gamespot.

Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t; Hamilton conceded it’s a work in progress.

“From a technical standpoint, it’s a really hard problem to have a computer figure out what is cool. They’re not very smart. They take some numbers in, they put some numbers out. It’s hard to figure out what is cool there,” he said, acknowledging that POTGs largely deal with multi-kills as a result of a popped special.

“We constantly look at Play of the Game, and we’ve got a whole bunch of data on Play of the Games are actually happening out there in the wild, and we can kind of see patterns about this character getting a lot of POTG for these killstreaks, they’re getting a lot of damage, or they’re getting a Play of the Game for that.

“So it might’ve been Widowmaker getting three snipes, but I change the weighting on some other aspect that we take as important, and it could all of a sudden its Mercy resurrecting everyone on the point two second before the match ended. It’s going to be an ongoing process, and hopefully we continue to improve it.”

Hamilton also said the system’s come a long way throughout Overwatch‘s development.

“I think at [one] point when we were tweaking it, Zenyatta would almost always get Play of the Game every time he popped his ultimate, because he would just do this massive amount of healing and the algorithm would almost always freak out, but it was just Zenyatta just sitting there floating.”

Overwatch is available now on Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4.