- They have a loose plan for the next 5-10 years, including major changes and all that kind of stuff. Obviously things change as the game evolves, but they like to at least have ideas up on the board.
- The next six Overwatch heroes are already planned. They intend to release them at the same rate they've been doing (every four months).
- As it stands, they don't see a point where they stop adding heroes to the game.
- Echo (the robot woman from the trailer), who is not related to Athena, is not the next hero, but the next hero is already fully playable. Echo will be later.
- Blizzard is working on several new modes that they find promising, but aren't 100% sure they'll ship yet.
- The Winter event will be basically the same as last year.
- The World Cup Viewer is being used as a technological basis to adding replays with all sorts of advance camera functionality into the game. To be clear, this will be integrated into the actual game in its final form.
- They have a prototype of user creation tools for doing things like scripting modes for the game, but it will probably be more than a year before we would see anything like that actually come out.
- They were asked if they have any very non-conventional heroes a la Abathur in Heroes of the Storm (he plays like an RTS commander), and they said yes, they have some very non-conventional ideas (though didn't specify beyond that).
- They are open minded about bringing the game to the Switch, but no promises it will ever happen or anything of that nature.
- They would like to switch Quick Play to using the same single match system as competitive (you play one match, and then it finds a new match, instead of rolling matches), since they think it would improve matchmaking quite a bit, but it's something that would take a fair amount of time, and users likely wouldn't feel like they got an immediate benefit, so it will be a bit down the road.
- They would like to have PS4/XB1 crossplay someday, no timeline.
- They are aware that it might some day make sense to drop the upfront fee for Overwatch given the lootbox system, but there are no immediate plans for that.
- They note that sometimes things take longer to get into Overwatch because it's a brand new engine, and thus they have to build everything from scratch. It's worth noting that Blizzard is now making a unified engine for all of their next-gen titles, and I'm pretty sure it's built on top of the Overwatch engine, so that might help with this as well.
- They would be interested in things like a Netflix show or a movie, but there are challenges in getting those things set up.
- They do have general plans for the franchise beyond just this game, but it sounds like they're much more in the realm of "Overwatch: The Mobile Spin-Off" and "Overwatch: The Spin-Off That's A Different Kind Of Game" as opposed to intending to make an "Overwatch 2"
- They want to do a lot more lore about the Deadlock gang, including talking more about who the other two founding members are.
- Ashe and McCree never had a relationship. Ashe just has a picture of her and him together on her motorcycle dashboard because this a completely normal platonic thing in the mind of Michael Chu.
- They will be moving the storyline forward in the future instead of just doing backstory stuff.
- It's pretty clear from their statements that a story campaign isn't happening, if you were were for some reason holding out hope for that. If they did ever do one, it would be part of a different game.
- Their engine is also not set up to support campaign development, so it takes them a long time to build the technology they need for PvE missions. For example, it took them an entire year to build the last missions for the Overwatch Archives event due to all the AI and related engine technology they had to make for it.
- There are no plans for banning heroes.
- There are a lot more comics planned and coming. The comics slowed down for a bit because they wanted to reimagine how they were doing them, but they've done so, and they will be coming pretty quickly again.
- They want to do a tournament mode, but are currently prioritizing systems that impact everyone. They do intend to do this some day though.
- More people play competitive than play quick play.
- There is a clan/guild system coming eventually, but it's a very large scale one that ties into a lot of Battle.net things to boot, so it will take a while to make. I'm kind of curious if this is actually planned to be clans that span across all of Blizzard's games, because the Heroes of the Storm developers said a very similar thing about clans.
- They have a lot of big things in development, and are aware you want things beyond just new heroes, maps, and skins.
- Blizzard doesn't currently have plans for any more hero reworks, but they will definitely do them if the need arises. The hero who is most being considered for a rework is Bastion, but that's far from set in stone.
- Jeff isn't intending to leave the Overwatch team anytime soon, and is happy with his position of primarily working on Overwatch while giving feedback to other game teams about their projects.