Maps with water for swimming and diving in Overwatch would be great. But what do the developers think about it?
Although Overwatch is regularly supplied with new maps and content, players are particularly wondering right now – in the hot season – why one thing is missing in Overwatch: water. While there are maps like Gibraltar and Ilios that take place right by the sea, water as a gameplay element does not exist, as it is always outside the map boundaries.
In the official forum, the user dolevkle noted that while there is now the moon with reduced gravity in Overwatch, there is still no water.
Many fans joined in and explained how grand a water mode would be or the ability for the heroes to swim.
This took Jeff Kaplan, the Game Director of Overwatch, directly as an opportunity to elaborate further on the topic. In excerpts, it says:
“Although one day we might implement more water or swimming into the game, we have very consciously decided to avoid water gameplay.
A reason is that we have never found the gunplay while swimming in other shooters we have played to be very fun. While the immersion was great, the actual gameplay is mostly underwhelming or at best tricky.”
It seems one cannot imagine that this would really consistently provide fun.
Water maps would consume too much animation work
Another reason is that the characters of Overwatch are not animated by motion capturing, but by hand, frame by frame.
“If we were to bring swimming into the game, each character would need an intensive amount of animation work for the basic movements and animations for each ability. The end result would be that we can invest much less animation time in other aspects of the game (emotes, highlight intros, etc.). But the really big downside would be that it would take significantly longer to create new heroes, resulting in fewer heroes.”
Basically, it seems to be a problem of animation effort – especially since everything for Overwatch is done by hand. The additional workload would likely set the team back months and put all other animations on hold. So swimming will probably be off the table for now.
But since Blizzard never says never, Kaplan adds: “Maybe in the future!”
Would you like “water gameplay”? Or would it be too annoying and unfamiliar?
