Now that a few Overwatch characters have stepped into multi-brand-verse Fortnite, it's time for a decade-old myth around Tracer's butt to flop in with them.

Fortnite welcomed a handful of Overwatch heroes this week - Tracer, D.Va, Mercy, and Genji included - as well as some iconic series weapons, but one particular asset is getting all the attention online.

"NO SHOT THEY UN-NERFED TRACERS BUTT," one viral social media post says alongside a screenshot of Tracer's model in the evergreen battle royale game. "Finally, Fortnite with the courage to do what [Blizzard] wouldn't. The world needs heroes."

Tracer butt discourse in our year of 2026? Is the first place my mind went to upon seeing all these online reactions because, as chronically online Overwatchers might remember, the game's first ever controversy, referred to in some online circles as Tracer's butt-troversy, has been floating about almost as long as the game itself.

The tale well-known to greyed Overwatch sweats kicked off 10 years ago when a widely-circulated forum post accused a Tracer victory pose of turning the chirpy, aloof hero into "another bland female sex symbol."

Even at the time, heated debates began popping off almost immediately between fans who loved Overwatch character designs for the fan service and those who loved the designs because of how they represented what a hero could look like. Until original director Jeff Kaplan stepped in and replaced the pose, that is: "We want everyone to feel strong and heroic in our community," he said at the time.

Blizzard's updated pose rang truer to Tracer's personality, but also spawned myths that traveled far and wide, alleging the devs 'nerfed' the hero by making her butt smaller. The butt-troversy even followed Jeff Kaplan to his promotional run for The Legend of California, his new game, where he debunked the myth once and for all (or so we thought.)

"We actually didn't nerf Tracer's butt," Kaplan clarified a few weeks ago. "It stayed exactly the same. That was a good repose I just had."

Butt sickos who had spread a half-truth on the internet for a decade were living through a Mandela Effect, it seems - except this one is a little more resistant to dying, based on plenty of newly-viral posts about Tracer's butt-troversy.

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Anyone who was both chronically online and in the Overwatch trenches a decade ago might remember one of the game's first ever controversies, sometimes referred to as Tracer's butt-troversy. Former Overwatch director and co-creator Jeff Kaplan now says some fans were going through a Mandela Effect – Blizzard never actually did anything to Tracer's butt.

The controversy has been well documented but has also been shrouded in lots of misinformation over the last 10 years. It all kicked off when a thread on the official Overwatch forum took issue with a certain victory pose for Tracer that put the usually chirpy, sometimes goofy hero in a arguably flirtatious, over the shoulder pose.

"It's not fun, its not silly, it has nothing to do with being a fast elite killer. It just reduces tracer to another bland female sex symbol," the thread claimed at the time. Discussions and debates popped off almost immediately until Jeff Kaplan chimed in to promise a replacement pose. "We want everyone to feel strong and heroic in our community," he said in a comment in the forum.

Blizzard's all-new pose represented Tracer's personality much better, but also led to allegations that the company had nerfed her, urm, assets. Now, 10 years later, while streaming his forthcoming game called The Legend of California, Kaplan responded to yet another question related to the butt-troversy.

"We actually didn't nerf Tracer's butt," Kaplan says in an almost offended tone. "It stayed exactly the same. That was a good repose I just had."

There you have it – in case it wasn't clear before. Blizzard devs never did much to Tracer's behind; they simply put her in a different pose, and everyone who got angry over a virtual hero's potentially slightly smaller ass was living through some sort of mass hysteria.

The same discussions and debates over the character's body have, for some reason, followed Overwatch over the course of a decade. Similar 'butt nerf' claims were thrown around at the time of Overwatch 2's relaunch, as well. But at least those butt sickos can finally find solace in Marvel Rivals.

Overwatch will free Anran from her "baby face" in Season 2, director confirms, and her voice actor approves: "She looks much more like the strong older sibling we knew her to be."

Jeff Kaplan loves Rust. The former Overwatch lead reckons that Rust shows the absolute best that PvP games have to offer, which is why he's logged over 5,000 hours in it. While Kaplan's love of genre is part of the inspiration behind his new survival game, The Legend of California, you won't see much influence from Rust's brutal PvP here. In fact, his work on World of Warcraft might be a more relevant point of comparison.

"I have always been a huge fan of the survival genre," Kaplan says in an interview with noclip_2. "In particular, I have one favorite game, which is Rust. I've played Rust for over 5,000 hours. The game that we're making is not like Rust in many ways. Rust is really like probably the pinnacle of PvP games. Anybody who's played a lot of Rust knows what I'm talking about. It's the ultimate month-long battle royale."

Presumably, that still leaves Rust a step behind The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which Kaplan recently called "the greatest game ever made."

The Blizzard veteran previously noted that The Legend of California eschews Rust-style PvP in favor of the more chill base-building of games like Valheim and Subnautica. He has, however, also said that "Rust-like mechanics" may be implemented as an option for servers that want them, so a more hardcore experience isn't off the table entirely – just don't expect it to be the main focus.

Some influence also "comes from my background on World of Warcraft, of just wanting to get back to working on a big, open-world multiplayer game. Just, what happens when people from all walks of life are playing in a space like this together?" Personally, that's a question I've always found a lot more interesting than PvP, but we'll see how well The Legend of California can answer it when it hits early access later this year.

These are the best survival games you can play today.

Jeff Kaplan is best known as the original lead of Overwatch, but now that he's split from Blizzard, it seems he wants his new game to be a little less PvP-centric – at least for now. Kaplan's new studio, Kintsugiyama, is working on a Wild West survival game called The Legend of California, which is currently taking more cues from PvE-focused games than the brutal PvP of something like Rust.

"Someday, I would like to introduce – on servers that want it – Rust-like mechanics," Kaplan said in a recent Twitch stream, shared on Twitter by Jake Lucky. "But this building system is more built like, for those of you who have played games like Valheim and Subnautica, where the building is more focused on utility, progression, aesthetics, and customization, rather than defending your stuff. That's what our sort of ranch is set up for."

As somebody with a lot more love for Valheim and Subnautica than Rust, that's music to my ears. I love slowly gathering resources and having a chill time planning out a little homestead without the fear of enemy players running in and destroying everything I've put together.

But equally, constant vigilance for bandit raids is a big part of the frontier fantasy that The Legend of California is bringing us, so offering more Rust-style options makes plenty of sense. I'm just glad that PvP isn't the core of the game.

Kaplan has been talking pretty freely while showing off The Legend of California, noting that the game probably won't be free-to-play because "you need 8 billion players and 2 thousand devs cranking out fucking keychains like a sweatshop." His takes about other games have arguably been even more interesting, like in a recent podcast appearance where he asserted that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is "the greatest game ever made."

These are the best survival games you can play in 2026.

Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan has dubbed Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as the greatest game ever made.

Speaking with Lex Fridman, Kaplan is asked which games he thinks are in the running for the greatest game of all time. He responds, "So, there's one that's the best – it's Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – and then there's this list of 'greatest games'" with Kaplan shouting out classic adventure game Zork and RPG Ultima.

Kaplan continues, explaining it's "the greatest game ever made" because "every aspect is so thoughtful, so well designed." He shouts out specific instances like "the way you can chop down a tree and float on a river," and adds, "The world is a toy, and everything works as you wished and hoped it would work."

The Overwatch director also asks, "How can Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time exist, and somebody make an even better Zelda game?" He explains, "there are so many things that that game gets right, that other games are lucky if they get one of those things right." Kaplan continues, "Nintendo is the mecca, they're the best," and that "if it's from Nintendo it's going to be great."

Breath of the Wild would go on to win Game of the Year at The Game Awards the year after Overwatch won the same prize, and if you put every one of that award's winners against each other, I feel like Zelda would probably come out on top.

Zelda Breath of the Wild actor didn't even know what game she was auditioning for, let alone that it was for the title role: "I'm grateful I didn't know."

Many players have felt conflicted about Overwatch since the hero shooter rebranded to Overwatch 2, then re-rebranded to Overwatch, then introduced the eye-wateringly adorable Jetpack Cat, who also gets banned all the time for being too powerful. But it could all have been an even bigger mess. Ex-Blizzard vice president and Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan could have decided to officially name the game "Monetized Shooter," which is what he first pitched it as.

"It was a seven-page deck," Kaplan tells AI researcher and podcaster Lex Fridman in a recent interview. "And it was called Monetized Shooter at the time. It just said 'Monetized Shooter,' and then the first slide was League of Legends plus Team Fortress 2 logos."

Overwatch's first title came from Kaplan's plan to make it "free-to-play, and you had to buy the heroes, which is fucking terrible. But, at the time, I actually thought that was a good idea." So Kaplan was inches away from pitching Blizzard his Monetized Shooter when he remembers initial Overwatch producer Matt Hawley stopping him and saying, "I refuse to put up a deck in front of the team where the first slide says 'Monetized Shooter.'"

Hawley requested Kaplan give his game idea a real name rather than an inflammatory placeholder title, and Kaplan remembers immediately saying, "It's Overwatch" – which Blizzard developers once wanted to name canceled multiplayer Titan.

"I basically named the game Overwatch to high-five my team," Kaplan reflects, and also to send a "middle finger" to an unnamed Blizzard dev who really didn't like the title for Titan. But, you have to admit, it's certainly more subtle than Monetized Shooter.

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Former Blizzard vice president and Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan hasn't decided on a monetization model for his new open-world action survival FPS The Legend of California, but he's pretty sure it won't be free-to-play.

Having previously worked on Overwatch at the highest level, Kaplan knows a thing or two about free-to-play games, and he doesn't see it as a viable model for The Legend of California. "To be free-to-play, you need eight billion players and two thousand devs cranking out fucking keychains like a sweatshop," Kaplan says during a recent 10-hour livestream of Legend of California (via Majid Manzarpour on Twitter).

"That's not us. We're not gonna be able to support ourselves on free-to-play, I don't think. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on that," he adds.

Under Kaplan and studio co-founder Tim Ford's leadership, The Legend of California is being developed by a 34-person development team at Kintsugiyama. Compared to the hundreds of people who work on a free-to-play game like, say, Overwatch, it's easy to see how Kaplan feels a little understaffed for another live-service game.

Another problem with the free-to-play model, in Kaplan's view, is that they typically make money via in-game shops that allow players to buy items using real money. That goes against Kaplan's philosophy that games should go back to rewarding players for their time by giving them stuff for free.

"I wanna do something simple and, like, right now I'm just unlocking this stuff by doing gameplay," he says while scrolling through a list of challenges in his game. "It's like this crazy idea that hasn't been seen in the past ten years, maybe I could play the game to get shit."

It definitely sounds like Kaplan is leading toward a traditional monetization model where you buy the game for a certain price and then earn loot and rewards by checking off boxes in-game. He makes it clear he's still open to free-to-play, and it's crucial not to infer too much from the ramblings of a man in the middle of a 10-hour livestream, but still, it's refreshing to hear a prominent game dev in 2026 speak out against microtransactions while making an online multiplayer game.

Former Overwatch director has sage advice for those who complain about games they don't play: "Shut the f**k up"

If Jeff Kaplan had his wish, World of Warcraft would look quite different. During development of the MMORPG, he campaigned within Blizzard for the first-person perspective to be used, and he views his upcoming game The Legend of California as an indirect realization of those aspirations.

"I really wanted [World of Warcraft] to be first-person," he said during a livestream, as clipped by Majid Manzarpour on Twitter. "I argued a lot for that."

He believes "WoW is great" as it is in third-person, and there are "a lot of arguments about seeing your character more," but his playing history molded his preferences toward another direction. "I had come from EverQuest, they had this weird third-person camera that didn't really fully work that great, you didn't play with it on," he explains.

"[EverQuest] is all first-person," he states, before adding that The Legend of California is him indirectly coming back to the notion of a first-person fantasy sandbox. First-person was prevalent in role-playing games for years, as evidenced by The Elder Scrolls and Might and Magic series as well, before third-person became more fashionable.

Although the open-world shooter isn't heavy on the RPG elements, nor is The Legend of California very fantastical, you can see the elements strewn throughout. There's horseback riding through forest and mountains, and the guns give you long and short-range combat, and plenty of exploration. Most importantly, less of an emphasis on how your character specifically looks, which is a fundamental facet of playing a game with customizable equipment and such.

Kaplan showed the project off during the stream, which was a mammoth ten hour long session between him and Tim Ford. There's no release window for the game yet, but when it arrives, I wouldn't bother looking for the third-person toggle, because it likely won't be there.

Former Overwatch director has sage advice for those who complain about games they don't play: "Shut the f**k up"

Jeff Kaplan have forever become known as "Jeff from the Overwatch team," but once upon a time he was "Jeff from the World of Warcraft team." And he's sorry – sorry for those of you who had to deal with the infamous Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest. Nonetheless, it still holds "a really special place" in Kaplan's heart, both because of the writing he did for it and the lessons it offered to him as a young quest designer.

"The Green Hills of Stranglethorn holds a lot of emotional value for me because amongst WoW players back in the day it was unanimously hated as one of the shittiest, most annoying quests," Kaplan explains in an interview with Lex Fridman, as spotted by our friends at PC Gamer. "But it holds a really special place in my heart. First of all, it's one of the few times I just wrote a short story that's actually in the game. It's me paying homage to Hemingway."

If you've been spared the horror of dealing with The Green Hills of Stranglethorn yourself, the idea is that the author Hemet Nesingwary – no points for figuring out why he's named that way – has misplaced the pages of his manuscript. So you need to find them as drops from mobs throughout Stranglethorn Vale.

The problem, as Kaplan explains, is that "players had very limited bag space. And as they're fighting in Stranglethorn Vale, I'm just shitting up their inventory with all these pages. And they only needed so many! You might be unlucky and you have, like, three page fives that are just junk in your inventory, and I might have, like, eight page sixes.

"This was the goal – the designer trying to puppeteer everybody. Everybody in Stranglethorn chat is like, 'Hey, I'm looking for a page six!' 'Anybody got a page three?' That was my fantasy as a designer, of like, 'and then they're gonna be social and meet each other and players are gonna be appreciative of each other!' Eventually no one did the quest, they just were super annoyed or they went to the Auction House."

Kaplan cites a bit of wisdom from legendary Civilization designer Sid Meier, who said that there are three types of fun: fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer. This particular quest, unfortunately, fell into the "fun for the designer" category. Players didn't enjoy it nearly so much.

"It was the typical hubris of a junior game designer who thinks he's clever but is actually a dipshit," Kaplan explains. "That's The Green Hills of Stranglethorn summed up."

"It felt surreal": Overwatch co-creator allegedly left Blizzard after a former exec said he'd be responsible for 1,000 layoffs if the shooter didn't hit financial targets.

The development of Overwatch 2 was troublesome, to say the least. Some PvE elements wound up being scrapped, and there were tensions over the release schedule. Jeff Kaplan, a former director on Overwatch, considers the whole ordeal one of his greatest failings in the industry.

"It's one of my biggest mistakes I've made as a creative leader in my career," he says on the Lex Fridman podcast. "There were two points of failure for me. The first was, I had people on the game team who didn't like PvP or competitive shooters, and they really loved the Overwatch universe and wanted to play these characters and heroes, they wanted to do it on their own terms in a PvE setting."

Though they were enthusiastic, they wanted the emphasis to be on a more co-operative, campaign-driven experience, rather than PvP, despite the first Overwatch being a "runaway success." The second, he states, was from management.

"The Blizzard, and more so the Activision management teams started really putting the heat on, 'You said Overwatch 2 was going to be out in 2019,'" he remembers, as they pointed towards slides he presented featuring a hypothetical timeline for the hero shooter. "You never want to put a PowerPoint deck in front of a corporate executive, you might as well etch it in stone and come down from the mountain."

The slide shown has a second game arriving around 2019, "all bullshit," as Kaplan calls it. A means of communicating a vision, not a hard plan, but execs apparently saw it differently. The pressure was compounded by ideas being thrown around on Overwatch 2 in 2015, prior to the original, by Kaplan, Chris Metzen, former creative director on Overwatch, and Michael Chu, the former lead writer on Overwatch.

It was all so early, because he was trying to create a runway for Overwatch as a multi-faceted property. Sadly, things didn't turn out that way, and Overwatch 2 launched in 2023, still focused on PvP, and has since been rebranded to simply Overwatch. Kaplan left Blizzard in 2021.

"It felt surreal": Overwatch co-creator allegedly left Blizzard after a former exec said he'd be responsible for 1,000 layoffs if the shooter didn't hit financial targets

Overwatch co-creator and former director Jeff Kaplan was obviously a huge part of the shooter's success and very publicly so, frequently appearing at in-person events and recorded streams. He's now shed light on why he left Activision Blizzard in 2021 after cementing himself as such a beloved figure in the game's community for nearly a decade and, urm, it's not because he wanted an early retirement.

Kaplan recalls that after Overwatch's initial launch in 2016, he "felt very in control of the Overwatch team and the direction of the game" in an interview with Lex Fridman. He was steering the wheel on a very sturdy ship. Some endeavours that began with good intentions began to rock the boat, like Overwatch 2 and The Overwatch League, but the director's breaking point was allegedly a dramatic meeting with a former executive at the company.

"What sort of ultimately broke me in my Blizzard career was I got called into the CFO's office," Kaplan says. "And he says, 'Overwatch has to make [redacted] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [redacted].' And then he says to me, 'If it doesn't do [redacted] dollars, we're gonna lay off 1,000 people and that's gonna be on you.' And that was the biggest f**k you moment I had in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition... Luckily for Blizzard that CFO is no longer there."

The dollar amounts were bleeped out due to Jeff Kaplan's confidentiality agreement with Activision Blizzard.

Kaplan also remembers another head-scratching meeting with an unnamed executive who thought that Overwatch could make Fortnite money if the first-person shooter simply went free-to-play and hired 1,400 developers.

Overwatch definitely went through its rough patches during Kaplan's tenure, but his passion for the game and its characters were always really evident. He even expresses that he "loved" the company and never thought he would work anywhere else. "It was a part of who I was, I felt I was a part of it. And I literally thought I would retire from that place. I never thought the day would come."

When exactly that fateful meeting took place is unclear, though Activision Blizzard had Dennis Durkin as its CFO between 2019 and 2021. Spencer Neumann held the position shortly before but was fired in a dramatic move to Netflix.

Overwatch has since steadied the ship. Earlier this year, the game dropped five new heroes (and the '2' from its name) and saw a huge resurgence in players.

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Marvel has hired writing duo Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer to write the new Fantastic Four movie, Deadline reports.

The news comes just one month after Matt Shakman signed on to direct, which was officially confirmed at D23. Spider-Man director Jon Watts was originally set to helm, but after the hugely successful Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, the filmmaker wants to take a little bit of a break from the MCU. We don't blame him.

Together, Kaplan and Springer have penned The Last of the Great Romantics, and the forthcoming comedy-dramas K-Pop: Lost in America and Disaster Wedding – the latter of which is set to be directed by Palm Springs helmer Max Barbakow.

The first two Fantastic Four films, which come from a pre-MCU era, starred Chris Evans, Miles Teller, and Jessica Alba. While no new casting has been confirmed, John Krasinski did make a surprise appearance as an alternate universe version of Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Alternate or not, this cameo marked the first official appearance of Reed Richards in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – something that many fans felt was long overdue.

Fantastic Four is set to hit theaters on November 8, 2024 – kicking off Marvel Phase 6. Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars will follow.

For more Marvel madness, check out our guide to how to watch the Marvel movies in order, what you need to know about the Marvel timeline, and all of the upcoming Marvel movies and shows flying your way in 2022 and beyond.

Overwatch director and Blizzard veteran Jeff Kaplan is leaving the company.

Kaplan announced his departure today as part of a larger blog post from Blizzard detailing leadership changes for the Overwatch team, which is still hard at work on Overwatch 2. Aaron Keller, previously assistant director on Overwatch, will take Kaplan's spot on the dev team. 

"It was truly the honor of a lifetime to have the opportunity to create worlds and heroes for such a passionate audience," Kaplan said in his letter. "I want to express my deep appreciation to everyone at Blizzard who supported our games, our game teams and our players. But I want to say a special thanks to the wonderful game developers that shared in the journey of creation with me. Never accept the world as it appears to be. Always dare to see it for what it could be. I hope you do the same."

Leadership departures aren't always a sign of troubled development, but coupled with Overwatch 2's prolonged and often vague reveal cycle, this news has left many fans worried for the sequel. Seemingly getting ahead of these concerns, Keller stressed that "development is continuing at a good pace. We have an exceptional vision we’re executing on, the reaction from many of you to the updates we shared at BlizzConline thrilled us, and we have exciting reveals planned for this year and beyond as we ramp to launch. We’ll be sharing more frequent updates about Overwatch 2 progress and new features in the live game with you all very soon." 

"While I have no pretenses about filling Jeff’s shoes, I’m excited to step into the game director role and continue to be part of a team that’s putting all of its heart, talent, and focus into the next iteration of Overwatch, and I’m honored to continue serving this incredible community," Keller added. 

Kaplan joined Blizzard some 19 years ago as a Warcraft 3 designer and continued to work as a designer on World of Warcraft and its Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions. He went on to work on Titan, the troubled and eventually cancelled project that became the foundation of Overwatch. After Overwatch's explosive launch, Kaplan quickly became the public face of the game – he was to Overwatch what Ben Brode was to Blizzard's Hearthstone – and an iconic figure among the game's community. 

Inside Blizzard's plans to make Overwatch 2 a "true sequel" that "expands what Overwatch means to players."

It's time to start speculating about who the next Overwatch hero will be, now that years of teases have finally paid off with the proper reveal of Echo. Fortunately, Jeff Kaplan is happy to oblige.

I got to speak with Kaplan, the game director of Overwatch, during a preview event for Echo on the Blizzard campus. We talked about how Echo works as a throughline all the way from the canceled project that preceded Overwatch all the way to Overwatch 2. But with no release date provided for the sequel yet, Blizzard will likely add more heroes to the roster before it arrives. When it does, it could go just about anywhere.

"Sometimes we want things to be a surprise, sometimes we want to deliver on expectations," Kaplan tells me, citing the long leadup to Doomfist compared to the sudden appearances of Sigma and Baptiste. There are plenty of old threads to follow up on and plenty of new places to expand on the Overwatch story. Fans do tend to fixate on the former category, since it gives them something to speculate about.

"There's like the running top three at any time of who they think is coming next," Kaplan says. "That's fun to us, when they're like 'Oh, it's gonna be Mauga', or 'It's gonna be Junker Queen!' OK, cool! We're glad you're excited for them and that gives us something to think about, you know. Maybe the next one will be Mauga, maybe the next one will be Junker Queen, or maybe it'll be a new Sigma that you've never heard of before."

He means "a new Sigma" in the sense of somebody who comes out of nowhere, not a new version of Sigma himself. That said, lead designer Geoff Goodman did tell me that Overwatch may eventually get to the point where its heroes have more overlap, mechanically speaking - though he always wants each hero to feel distinct and viable on their own. If we ever do get a new Sigma, I hope they bring shoes.

Find even more to play in our big list of games like Overwatch.

The biggest new feature of Overwatch 2 is fully featured co-op PvE play, and making that work means changes are in store for the heroes we know.

Since the fundamentals of Overwatch were built for PvP, the team working on Overwatch 2 PvE is leaving no assumptions unquestioned. That goes for everything from user interface to sound design to camera movements. Making sure each character feels good when you're fighting AI instead of players is especially key, as Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan tells me at a preview event for the new Echo character.

"Winston's an incredibly fun character to play in PvP but in PvE he's currently not, because he just has a very low level damage over time attack and it's not super exciting," Kaplan says. "So we're starting to think about, if it was just a single-player game of Winston fighting robots, how do you make Winston feel amazing? It's really fun for us to revisit not just Echo, but every one of our heroes with that in mind."

Many games with both PvE and PvP elements, such as Destiny and World of Warcraft, try to make both sides feel as consistent with the other as possible. Overwatch 2 will not: "So far our philosophy is actually very different, and it's to tune PvE to feel great for PvE. What we don't want to do is have a character that works entirely [differently]."

Mercy will not be blasting robots with a shotgun. She won't even be "beaming people to death" in PvE modes, unless she unlocks that with some wacky talent. If you've played the first game's limited-time co-op modes, you've already seen a bit of that philosophy in action. Certain abilities have their damage adjusted in co-op, and the AI can even cheat in the player's favor by making everybody shoot at Genji as soon as he uses Deflect.

It's all about preserving the heroic fantasy, as Kaplan explains by way of a lackluster experience he had with Bastion's tank form in a recent playtest.

"I'm like, 'Look guys, the fantasy - what's gonna feel right - is I should be one-shotting all this stuff. I guarantee those robots aren't gonna go to the forums and complain about it. They're not gonna make posts that say Bastion's ultimate is way overpowered."

See what else is on the way with our guide to the upcoming games of 2020 and beyond.

Overwatch 2 was officially announced earlier this year at Blizzard's annual BlizzCon expo, and fans of the hero shooter already have thousands of questions about the nature of this unexpected sequel, which introduces a full single-player campaign to  complement the series' traditional focus on competitive PvP.

Edge Magazine recently got to speak to the man himself, Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan, about all things Overwatch 2, with the full interview published in this month's edition, issue 340, out now on store shelves. 

"We're definitely going to explore what endgame means for Hero Missions." explains Kaplan in the interview, when asked about whether replay value has come into consideration when designing Overwatch 2's PvE missions. "We have many experienced developers who created content for World of Warcraft and Diablo on our team. This is one of the challenges we're very eager to start working on."

Kaplan had plenty more to say about the potential of Overwatch stories outside the mainline games ("Movies? An animated series?"), and how Blizzard is trying to redefine what it means to be a sequel in 2019, but you'll have to read the full interview to find out more about that. 

As it happens, you can pick up the latest issue of Edge in stores now, or subscribe to have every latest issue delivered directly to your door each month, saving money and getting your hands on special edition subscriber covers in the process. Hurry; you can save up to half price on a new subscription just in time for Christmas!

For more, check out our official hands-on preview with Overwatch 2 from BlizzCon 2019, or watch below for the latest episode of Dialogue Options. 

As the Overwatch Switch release date of October 15 draws ever closer, game director Jeff Kaplan has offered up his thoughts on whether Super Smash Bros Ultimate could receive new fighters from the world of Blizzard's multiplayer hero shooter. 

"To the Smash Bros team, [you can have] whatever character you want", Kaplan revealed in a recent interview with IGN. "We love them all. They’re all our babies, you can have any single one of them. We have 31 to choose from."

That said, the famed game designer did reveal his personal pick should Nintendo ever consider which Overwatch hero to invite to the Smash Bros roster, and you can probably guess who it is...

"Tracer's our girl, Tracer's our mascot. She'd be my first choice", Kaplan admits. "There's a lot of great runners up. I think a lot of people can immediately see Doomfist gameplay applying to Smash, but if it were up to me, I'd like to see Tracer."

Tracer is indeed the hero on the front of the Overwatch box, and the one the Blizzard has devoted a lot of time to perfecting, so it would make sense that this "mascot" would make the transition to Nintendo's popular brawler. 

Whether that dream becomes a reality is another matter entirely, but the Smash Bros. Ultimate team has promised that several more DLC heroes are on the way after Fatal Fury's Terry Bogard enters the ring later next month. Watch this space, Overwatch fans...

For more, check out all the best Switch exclusives to play right now, or watch our latest Dialogue Options episode below.

If you're waiting on Overwatch hero 31, get ready to wait a bit longer. As director Jeff Kaplan explained in a recent Overwatch developer update, hero 31 is most certainly on the way, but "he is going to be released a little bit later than you're used to."

For the past three years, a new Overwatch hero has been released around mid-July. We had Ana on July 19, 2016, Doomfist on July 27, 2017, and Wrecking Ball on July 24, 2018. Given this pattern, most players expected hero 31 to come out in the next two weeks or so, but it sounds like he'll slip into August. 

"If some of you have tracked us over the years on what we release when, you're probably anticipating a hero release sometime very soon," Kaplan said. "Don't worry, we are working on a hero. Hero number 31 is going to be awesome, but he is going to be released a little bit later than you're used to. He'll be here soon enough, so don't worry. We think a little bit of extra time is going to make the hero even more awesome." 

Fortunately, Kaplan also said the Summer Games event has been moved up the schedule, which should help tide you over in the meantime. Blizzard's also making a big change to this week's Summer Games event: every week that the event is live, players will get access to a new mini-challenge which unlocks an Epic Summer Games skin. This should give players a more direct path to the fun-in-the-sun skins that make the event what it is. Here's hoping hero 31 is out in time to soak up some rays. 

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Some of us are content showing our fan flair for Overwatch with a cute D.VA headset and a pair of Mei slippers - but 3D artist Joshua Llorente created a whole map for the game. The Cairo-inspired masterpiece is so impressive that it even won over Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan.

Llorente is from the Philippines and is currently studying for a Bachelor of Fine Arts major in Advertising Arts, and made the map in his free time. "This map took me about 2 months to finish, since I'm doing this together with my college thesis," says Llorente. "I guess I'm doing this because I'm enjoying it, it's like I'm also playing a game." In the past he's also made level designs inspired by other Overwatch locations like Luxor, Vishkar Labs, and Manila. 

Llorente posted the work on Reddit, and actually got a response from Kaplan. "Amazing work! We'll be in touch." It feels as though an internship (at the very least) at Blizzard could be in the works, even if this amazing payload map doesn't ever really make it into the game. 

The Overwatch development team, and Kaplan in particular, pays particular attention to what the passionate community is up to. "I love being held to high expectations. And part of the thrill of what we do is trying to meet them," Kaplan says in an interview with Waypoint. "I know we won't always meet them, but I think that the type of developer that's attracted to be at a place like Blizzard wants that challenge, and wants to try to make the best thing possible. We think it's totally fair that people criticize us - it just spurs us to do a better job next time."

I recently got a chance to talk to Overwatch's Jeff Kaplan (ahead of the BAFTA Games Awards for which it has five nominations) and ask him a few questions about characters, tweaks and future plans for the game. 

How's the reaction to Orisa going?
I think it’s been great so far. There are some people in the community who are saying she’s underpowered and we’re keeping a close eye on that. But I feel like with a new character like Orisa there’s a lot of people playing her who wouldn’t normally play her, like a lot of non-tank characters trying her out who might not be used to how a tank plays. So I think once the dust settles we’ll really know where she’s at in terms of balance.

And what about more established characters? Junk Rat had a few damage tweaks recently didn't he?
We knew when we were introducing a character like Orisa there were going to be a lot more barriers in play. So we started to think, well those barriers might get really frustrating to players. We think it’s cool gameplay and adds a lot when it’s on your team but we also want to make sure there are appropriate counters. So that’s where we took a look at Bastion, and we made some changes to him to be more effective against barriers. We’ve always through Junk Rat is a great counter to barriers but he doesn’t get that much play. But we also don’t think he’s wildly underpowered so we were looking for minor quality of life changes we could make to him to attract players to try and play him again, or play him in different ways. So with the explosion damage you can almost play him more like a Reaper where you can get right in on people and put a lot of damage right at their feet. 

When you can always make changes is it hard to know when to stop?
We try to fiddle as little possible. But at the same time balance is always changing. Even if we didn’t tweak any hero ability or any damage numbers and just left the community to their own devices, the way that the community evolves the meta on their own through play styles and strategies is going to change the need for balance. Even if we ever thought the balance was perfectly locked in I’d be confident that the community would evolve in such a way that we’d need to make some changes. They come up with new things all the time and new ways to play and we need to be reactive to that so the game doesn’t skew in one direction. 

How do you deal with new strategies and combinations that appear suddenly with established characters?
Those cases are the best. We love when those happen where someone is suddenly doing something that wasn’t in vogue before. Like, right now in the Korea Apex Tournament we're seeing really a rise in these new dive comps using Winston and D.Va. And those characters have been around. If anything D.Va took some nerfs recently, it’s not like she got buffed. So in those cases we evaluate and say 'is the in vogue thing wildly out of balance or it it the type of thing that’s just fun evolving gameplay?' I think you have to take it on a case by case basis and you really have to watch the community closely. 

How do the community react as a whole?
They defintely don’t all agree with us and they’re very vocal with that. But I think at this point we’ve built a relationship with our players, that they know if something feels off to us collectively, meaning the players and Blizzard, that we’re there and we’re going to fix it. I think we’ve done a good job of representing ourselves as being very much on call to the community, and this isn’t one of those games that’s just sort of off on its own and no one’s looking after it - ‘where’s the dev team, they’re probably working on another game at this point and they don’t even care.’ That’s not who we are. And I think, so even if something feels off they know we’re going to come in and fix them soon. 

What's the larger overall strategy for the game?
I think we have a lot of really big plans. They way I like to talk about Overwatch is that there’s a crawl, walk, run strategy. And where we are at with the 6 vs 6 team-based action shooter is really at the crawl stage of where we can go. And I’m not saying we’re defintely going to get to the walk and run we want to get to, but we have some pretty big plans for the game. We want to continue to evolve, obviously the content: you’re seeing that with the heroes, brand new events, we want to evolve the story telling, what we’re doing out of the game, and the mediums we’re using to take stories out of the game. And then we have really big plans for eSports with the Overwatch league and where we want to take that someday. I think there are some really big ambitious goals that we have and we have a lot of people working super hard to do our best. 

Where's your breaking point on Doomfist?
It was funny because the community was hilarious with Sombra. We were terrible at Blizzard and I felt super bad because we were sort of teasing them along with an ARG and it was poorly planned and poorly executed and I really felt like Mea Culpa on that, that was out fault and we’re humbly sorry about that. But with Doomfist, this is the community’s own doing, they created this monster and we’re enjoying their enthusiasm for Doomfist. I hope they don’t just burn themselves out too early on him.

How do you feel about PS4/Scorpio introducing a 0.5 generation jump?
We’re super excited about it. Any time hardware manufactures want to up their system specs and put more capability in, not only our hands, but our players hands it’s just a win situation. And, because we’re a three platform game, on Xbox, PlayStation and PC, the PC market has already enabled us to push higher end hardware. We’re chomping at the bit to make the game look better and play better. So I’m really excited for it. 

From his early days as an EverQuest commentator, to the lofty heights of lead designer on World of Warcraft, Jeff Kaplan’s rise to power has been meteoric. In the flesh he’s polite, kindly spoken and passionate, often sporting- as most of Blizzard seem to- own-brand shirts with brightly coloured orcs on them. We cornered him recently and demanded details of our imminent journey into Northrend- and Jeff’s promises were exciting to say the least...

On geography...

“When people heard the expansion was going to be set in Northrend, they freaked out, saying ‘No, I can’t go to a continent that’s all snow!’ Just visually alone, we’ve made sure that all the zones are not full of ice. For example, the Howling Fjord is completely green, and it’s modeled after the Redwood Forest on the Pacific north-west.

“There’s another zone called the Borean Tundra that has typical autumn colours, and we’re really going out of our way to make sure the zones are visually distinct. Another cool part of Northrend is the big PvP zone. It’s about the size of Westfall, and will be all-PvP – in no way, shape or form will we support PvE players in it. It’ll be optional, but it’ll be completely non-instanced, have multiple objectives, siege weapons, and destructible buildings.”

On high levels…

“We feel that we now have an overwhelming majority of players who have played through the content to the end. It’s not even about the casual/hardcore thing, it’s more about addressing an issue that exists among max-level players. We felt we could deliver on content towards the end of the game, and that players between level 30 and 40 already have so much to do in the game that they haven’t run out of content yet.

“These medium-level players are not really hungry for the new features that Wrath of the Lich King brings. It’s really about satisfying the players who have reached max level, whether they solo or whether they PvP, whether they raid or role-play. If they’re at max level they’re all saying, ‘I want more, what are you guys doing for us?’”