'Overwatch' Devs Teaching the Game to Spot Toxic Players Is a Good First Step Towards a 'Battle Royale' Mode
"Battle Royale" style games like "Fortnite" and "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" are all the rage nowadays, so it just makes sense that "Overwatch" players expect their game to offer the mode in one of its future updates. Blizzard is focusing on maintaining a positive player community first, though, which is something that "PUBG" developers are now scrambling to cope with.
"Overwatch" has its share of toxic players, and Blizzard's recent effort to identify and take them out has started to give results. It's an effort that requires a lot of manpower and time to maintain, and the company is now turning to artificial intelligence to hopefully make the process more sustainable for the staff.
If Blizzard succeeds, the company would be able to scale this up to cope with the millions of players a "Battle Royale" mode might bring over.
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"We've been experimenting with machine learning, we've been trying to teach our games what toxic language is, which is kinda fun," Game director Jeff Kaplan explained to Kotaku in an interview at Blizzard.
The idea they have is for the game's administrators to be able to act faster on toxic behavior. If "Overwatch" can flag offenders in real time, players may not have to file a report and wait before action is taken, Kaplan noted.
It's the same issue with cheaters and toxic players that are now driving "PUBG" developers up the wall, with the team busy developing anti-cheat and banning measures that have taken out as many as five percent of their monthly number of players.
"There have been no major game updates to keep the game fresh compared to a game like 'Fortnite' which receives an update every week or two with hundreds of changes included in each update," one commenter noted at the time.
These are the problems Blizzard could avoid if they get their automated systems right, and machine learning could play a big part in that. For now, though, there's another obstacle getting in the way of "Overwatch" getting a "Battle Royale" update.
"A lot of times when I hear some of our fans pitch it, they're like 'Oh, just put a card in the Arcade one day that's a battle royale mode,' and I'm like 'F***, that would be awesome,'" Kaplan said, as quoted by PC Gamer.
"But there's a lot of design and tech work to get us to that place and not just feel like a me-too game," he admitted, noting that "Overwatch" is tightly designed around the six-versus-six format, and scaling that up to a hundred players will prove to be a challenge.
All the "Overwatch" maps reflect that design, and while "Battle Royale" maps measure in the range of kilometers, Blizzard's areas are much more compact. The Hanamura dojo point B, for example, is just 45 meters across and it's already considered an open area in the map.
"Building those systems and getting that many players—I think battle royale for Overwatch starts to get into new game territory," Kaplan noted.
