Overwatch: 15 Things You Never Knew About Hanzo

Hattori Hanzō was the son of a minor samurai, who earned a fierce reputation in battle. He rose in rank and led hundreds of soldiers into battle. Hanzō was responsible for saving the life of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who would go on to become the Shogun of Japan. Ieyasu is considered to be one of the major historical figures who managed to unite Japan's separate warring states into a single country. Hanzō worked closely with Ieyasu and had a huge part in helping to establish his administrat

I looked over at Brian Raffel, our studio head, and we just kind of smiled at each other and we nodded and for me it was just so gratifying to hear the response that we felt for so long. When this project was first proposed I don't think there was a single person at Raven that wasn't like 'yes yes we want to do this. Absolutely we're all in.' That's very exciting right? It's also many moons ago that we started on this, and we knew we had something good and something fun but we didn't know know. Until you get in front of gamers you're not really gonna know. So today's reveal was king of the hold our breaths for a little bit, and the applause and the excitement; it resonated and I kept smiling most of the morning because of it. I got an opportunity to go and take pictures and the lines were long afterwards and I was like 'they screamed and in a good way, and the lines are long so they really meant it.' So I did a little bit of walking around and listening to people. So that was a fun thing for me to get on my break was a chance to hear what people thought. So I think it went pretty well, social media seems to be going pretty well for us too.


No longer protects allies from knockback




_Developer Comments: This is actually reverting a change that we made a few patches ago, which made players immune to knockbacks if they were hit by an effect from inside her barrier. This had some negative side effects, such as making targets immune to knockbacks from effects that pierce barriers, like Reinhardt’s charge and Winston’s Primal Rage punches. Now, these will cause knockback again. This does not affect knockbacks from effects that originate from outside her barriers, such as Pharah’s Concussive Blast. Those will still be blocked by the barriers, not causing any knockback. _ Zeny


_However, now that the awards have been given out and games have been chosen, this week we're diving into the staff's selections for their top Game of the Year pick and favorite game of 2016. In this installment, Features Editor Ryan Meitzler makes the case for Blizzard's vibrant and fast-paced online shooter, Overwatch. You can also catch up on the previous features in our series on Darkest Dungeon , Firewatch , and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End for our Game of the Year title

So I'm going to show my colors here. I am PC MR for sure. That's where I got my start in gaming. There is no way in the world I would the PC version of the game ship if it was poor. It plays amazingly, I love it. When we do our play test I do play with a controller, but I get owned so bad. But it's so satisfying trying to play PC for our play test and come out with a two to three KD and I'm like 'there bches. Don't give me any more sht. I'm okay!' Cause I'm not a console FPS Game cheats guy I just can't move my thumbs and fingers and hands the other people can. I'm amazed that people can do it, but you get me on a mouse and keyboard I'm going to wreck some sht up. So yeah it's really good. It's great. The frame rate is fantastic. Now I also have a killer rig, so I'm not playing on the lowest common denominator for sure, but I am really enjoying it. So for someone who comes from that background I think that anyone who plays this on PC is going to be really happy.

The biggest concern was probably the ADSing because you have a fair argument to say that the static image that you pop up is iconic. I think that there's something to be said about that. I think that what won out in the end was that the gameplay had not changed in any kind of significant way with any of the improvements and the new animations. So when we had done our user testing and play testing, and this is play testing across most of Activision so we had Treyarch, IW, Beenox, we had our whole crew. However many studious are in the business at this point. We had a lot of people in there and these are hardcore people. If it f*cking sucks they will tell you it sucks, and these are the people playing the game and giving us the feedback on it. Universally it was loved and appreciated so we knew after a couple play tests like that and run throughs we're not hearing the negativity that we feared, and it doesn't get more hardcore than hardcore COD makers. We're all playing this pretty regularly. So we felt really confident. That was one of those ones that we were a little worried about and given some of the social media stuff I'm not worried once they get it in their hands, I'm just hoping that they give it the chance that I think that it deserves. I think that they'll be happy with the results.