Overwatch’s Play of the Game Feature is Going to Get Better

The idea behind Overwatch‘s Play of the Game mechanic is to showcase what’s considered the “Best Moment” of a particular match. They call it more of a “Social Feature” meant to share cool parts of any Overwatch battle. However this highlight feature has a tendency to point in the direction of being kill based, rather than overall “epic” types of action.

Blizzard did an interview with Gamespot talking about Overwatch‘s Play of the Game in extensive detail. The system considers variables like damage and kills, but it also considers things such as healing. Recent additions include actions like how hard a shot was to hit based on target speed, and how far away the target was.  Skillful maneuvers like that are just one example of what the Play of the Game System considers.

Lead software engineer Rowan Hamilton said to Gamespot that “from a technical standpoint, it’s a really hard problem to have a computer figure out what is cool,” addressing the perceived imbalance with the Overwatch system. Due to Blizzard’s setup, they can replay the same match back again and tweak internal numbers in the Play of the Game system. Variable changes can cause the calculated Play of the Game to be completely different.

In terms of the future now that the game has launched, the Overwatch team is working around the clock on getting competitive ranked mode up and running. But alongside that, the engineer team is monitoring game performance and seeing what changes need to be made, performance wise.