Blizzard is hoping to keep improving the Play Of The Game highlights featured in its new multiplayer shooter Overwatch. Speaking with Gamespot in an interview, lead software engineer Rowan Hamilton shared how the process of tweaking the highlights.
In case you missed our review, the Play Of The Game highlight is played at the end of each match, showcasing a feat that was awesome and impactful to the course of the match. This is interestingly done with just algorithms determining what part of the game deserved to be highlighted for everyone to see, so it’s not perfect.
Currently, most Play Of The Games that players would see are from damage dealing heroes, leaving certain heroes, especially the supports, a bit left out when it comes to being highlighted (though it is not entirely impossible, just not as often seen). They are aware of this however and plans to refine the algorithm.
We also have a lot of cool systems internally where we can play with the algorithm that determines Play of the Game and play the same game back again, and be like, “Okay if I tweak these numbers, what’s going to be the Play of the Game that gets picked this time?”
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.
So if you feel your great plays as Tracer or supports like Zenyatta has not been highlighted as it should, this should leave an easy feeling. However, the focus right now for the team is getting the Competitive mode available again, so it will take a while until we see some drastic changes.