Overwatch

A no-stakes, unexpected highlight can feel better than topping the score. Play of the Game does nothing mechanically, but it is a huge ego boost for the player who stars in it, because it is an unexpected reward tied to what they actually did.

Mark Brown: "It doesn't really do anything, but it's a huge boost to the ego of the player who gets the starring role."

Balance the team as a whole, and let individual heroes counter each other. In fighting-game terms, what gets locked in before a match is the hand and what you pick during it are the throws. In Overwatch the whole team is the hand and each player is a throw, so heroes can be deliberately unbalanced against one another to create counter-play and teamwork.

Mark Brown: "The throws are specifically designed to be unbalanced against each other."

Soft counters keep bad matchups playable. McCree outperforms Tracer, but his chance of winning the fight is far from 100 percent. A soft counter gives an edge rather than shutting a hero down completely.

Track pick rate too: Symmetra was balanced but nobody chose her. Blizzard found Symmetra balanced on win rate yet rarely picked, so her first redesign let players choose between two ultimates, a teleporter or a shield generator.

A hero can be fine on paper but unpicked because they are unfun or too situational.

Let players shift the meta before patching an overpowered hero. When everyone picks a strong hero, finding counters becomes worth the effort and the meta shifts on its own. Jeff Kaplan calls a meta changing through player innovation "the best-case scenario."

Full controller remapping on console, a rare and much-requested option. Overwatch lets console players move any action to any button, so someone who can't pull a trigger comfortably can fire from a face button. Few console games do this, alongside Titanfall 2 and Nier: Automata.

Mark Brown: "full remapping on controllers is one of the most requested accessibility options around."

Real physics and manual aim give a grapple a high skill ceiling. Wrecking Ball swings like a heavy object on a rope with little mid-air control, so the speed, position and angle of the initial hook matter. There is no aim assist on the hook, and the swinging ball damages enemies it hits, tying movement to combat.

Mark Brown: "there's zero automation on the grapple hook point."

Full-screen colourblind filters helped some players but distorted the game. Overwatch recolours the whole screen, which helps some players but leaves many with a game that looks "utterly bonkers." Colourblind settings should only make vital information clear.

Ultimates announced only by voice leave muted players with no warning. Lines like "it's high noon" signal a deadly ultimate but have no subtitle or visual cue, so a deaf, hard of hearing or muted player gets no warning. Critical audio needs a visual twin.

Mark Brown: "Without sound, you're completely screwed."

Explicit highlight categories let a machine credit very different heroes. Play of the Game asks a computer to judge what was most exciting in a match, so Blizzard wrote rules for four highlight types: High Score, Lifesaver, Sharpshooter and Shutdown. That lets Genji's kill streaks, Mercy's resurrections, Mei's barrier and Roadhog's hook all compete for the spotlight.

In a game where heroes help in very different ways, a scoreboard shows only part of the story, and Play of the Game recognises contributions points miss, like a barrier, a rescue or an interruption. Mark Brown: "We're asking a dumb robot to pick out something interesting."

Context modifiers stop the system from rewarding raw numbers alone. Each candidate moment is weighted by factors like the velocity of the enemy you shot, the potential impact of the player you shut down, and how close the play was to the objective.

Blizzard keeps tweaking these values in patches, so a system like this needs ongoing tuning.

A no-stakes, unexpected highlight can feel better than topping the score. Play of the Game does nothing mechanically, but it is a huge ego boost for the player who stars in it, because it is an unexpected reward tied to what they actually did.

Mark Brown: "It doesn't really do anything, but it's a huge boost to the ego of the player who gets the starring role."