Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch is the company’s first attempt at a multiplayer shooter and as such, it drawn inspiration from many different genres like MOBAs, class-based shooters and more. However, game designer Geoff Goodman revealed to Rock Paper Shotgun that it’s doing some things a bit differently. For instance, the current internal build for Overwatch has no scoring.
“In our latest build we really revamped that whole [scoring] system. In fact the scoring been completely pulled out. You don’t even see a number anymore. The way it works internally – what we’re testing – is instead of seeing the score you see your own stats so you can see how much damage you’re doing and stuff on the corner if you want that kind of information and you can see where you stand relative to other people.
“So I can see if I’m first place or if I’m second place let’s say you get a little medal there [on the screen]. You can’t see who is in first place or how much they have or anything but it gives you a good understanding of how well you’re doing and streamlines the whole thing and cleans everything up.”
Though the change was somewhat of a shock, Goodman and Blizzard are currently in favour of this system. “But scoring has some problems and we thought this was a different approach we hadn’t seen before and wanted to test. So far it’s been going really well so we’ll probably end up rolling that out, hopefully pretty soon.”
This isn’t meant to absolutely confirm that scoring will be the final game but if positive progress continues to be made, then it could happen. Overwatch will entering into beta testing in the next few months while the full game releases in 2016.
