The ARG for Sombra from Overwatch is over. But Blizzard is not entirely satisfied.
One might think that insight is the first step towards improvement when reading the interview between Kotaku and Overwatch developer Geoff Goodman. For there, they admit that the whole ARG (Alternative Reality Game) for Sombra did not work as well as they had hoped. In summary, fans were too often sitting in front of a countdown, which they had to wait several weeks for, only to be greeted by another countdown afterwards.
“We take the feedback. I think the feedback has been fair so far. We are not very good at designing ARGs. We’ve never done anything like this before.”
Nevertheless, they see Sombra’s ARG as a whole as a success. Players had the opportunity to get to know some of Sombra’s character traits even before she was officially introduced.
It was also disappointing that theories arose very early on that Sombra would hack BlizzCon and introduce herself – and that is exactly what happened. “The biggest mistake was probably the timing. I think we just assumed that fans would need longer [for the individual steps]. But they were just always on the ball. That made the time windows significantly longer than they needed to be.”
Cortyn says: After the trailer at BlizzCon, I must admit that my frustration with the ARG has almost faded, even though it (warning, pun alert!) backfired quite a bit. In the end, it was again unintentional leaks that presented Sombra and unfortunately not just the cool cinematic. For the future, Blizzard will surely have learned some lessons and will adjust the timing and duration of such actions a little better.
