"It does cause you to have conversations."
Characters in Overwatch and Overwatch 2 have not been created using the Diversity Tool shown off by Activision Blizzard and King last month.
Speaking with Stevivor, Overwatch 2 Game Director Aaron Keller clarified that while he and his team have tested the tool out — something that was already known as Overwatch characters were used to show how it worked — they’ve not actively used it during the development process.
“The short answer to that question is we didn’t use that tool to make any of the heroes in Overwatch, it’s something that we looked at; something we wanted to test out,” Keller said.
“The longer answer is diversity is really, really important to Overwatch. To be able to find a hero that not only you feel like you can gel with as far as a playstyle goes, but you feel like that represents you in the game, that’s one of our values — one of the hallmarks of hero design for Overwatch,” he continued.
“It can go from things like body type, gender, disability — all of these things are things that we want people to be able to feel; like there’s someone in the game that represents them. That’s important to us and we’ve always kept that as a core piece of our design philosophy.”
The tool was widely criticised last month for removing some humanity from the process of developing diverse and inclusive video game stories and characters rather than just having a diverse and inclusive set of employees to do the same. To some extent, Keller agreed but also saw how the tool could be of help to some teams.
“It’s interesting; we don’t use that tool [but] there are things about it that are nice,” he said. “It does cause you to have conversations; anytime you’re just confronted with judging what your own implicit biases are, or your own prejudices are, and you do in a group setting with other people on our team that have the same values that you have, it sparks really amazing conversations.
“A tool like that is something that — even though we don’t use it – it is something that can spark conversations for different groups of people as they use something like that. It is important to us, we don’t use the tool and we have deep, meaningful conversations about this in the office.”
Overwatch 2 goes free-to-play on Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5 and Switch on 5 October 2022 here in Australia. We went in-depth on what to expect from it here.
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Overwatch 25 October 2022PC PS4 PS5 Switch Xbox One Xbox Series S & X |
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