// PC GAMER — GAMING
Looking back on 10 years of Overwatch, the promises kept, and where Team 4 goes from here
"In order for people to play the game in the present, they need to have confidence in its future."
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10 years is a long time for anything, but for a live service game it's a milestone that very few are able to cross. Overwatch made it over the line earlier this year, and has since been able to do something of a victory lap because after all the highs and the lows, Overwatch is in the best place it's ever been.
"It doesn't feel like 10 years to me," game director Aaron Keller tells me. "Although, I could probably answer that question in a few ways. There's probably a year or two that might have felt like five or six years in the middle of this process, but there's always so much to be doing on the team and for the game." But Keller reiterates the good old adage "if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.
"Our team is filled with people that are not just passionate about making games, they're passionate about Overwatch itself, our heroes and the world in which they reside. So when you get to go into the office and talk about that all day, the time can fly by pretty quickly."
Alec Dawson, associate game director, joined before the launch of Overwatch 2 but also feels as if these last four years have flown by "in a blink of an eye … It's wild that when we started the year, we had these silhouettes of heroes that we didn't even know what they were going to be, what they were going to look like, and now we do," Dawson adds. "Sometimes it just goes by much quicker than you think it's going to."
Overwatch has undergone many metamorphoses, some good, others not so good. We had the early golden years, then we had GOATS, then a plethora of some of the best game cinematics ever, then we had early Brigitte taking a literal hammer to the game's balance.
After something of a content drought, excitement was renewed with the announcement of Overwatch 2, and while this did offer a lot of good changes like more heroes, content, and focused team fights in 5v5, it failed to meet the requirements of a sequel, and that's without the disappointment surrounding PvE.
There was a time when I thought that was it for Overwatch, that PvE and Overwatch 2 would be all anyone would ever talk about. But I've never been happier to be proven wrong, because all these years later Overwatch is going from strength to strength experimenting with things like perks and Stadium, tweaking the user experience with map voting and hero bans, and changing to a new annual content release format.
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