I have been seeing a lot of people complaining, saying “That’s it? 11 months for 1 new ability?” with the Hog rework. There were similar complaints when the Sombra rework came out and when the Brig Ult was reworked.

It seems to me like a lot of people in the community have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a Hero rework is developed.

Reworks are not and never will be a top priority. This game’s (Not just this game but any similar game. Apex, League, Valo) business heavily revolves around new Heroes. Developing new Heroes and releasing them on a set schedule will always be their top priority, so any and all reworks of this level (Not soft reworks like the LW changes) are always something that’s being done in the background and by smaller strike teams.

Constant Balance changes will also always be a bigger priority than any reworks, since not tending to the active complaints that the community has about Hero Balance creates a ton of negativity from the community towards the game incredibly fast. And if they are working on other Reworks then a Rework that started development before is likely going to be a higher priority to get out before a newer one.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of people seem to not give proper weight to the Dev process of actually figuring out a rework but this is one of the most time consuming parts of developing new heroes and especially reworks.

Some people seem to think that the devs just cook up something in days/weeks when developing a rework or a new hero. This process requires a lot of ideation and testing. Remember that they are making stuff that’s going to be played by people for 100s-1000s of hours. So they themselves have to have multiple team members internally putting in a few hundred hours of playtesting something new before they make a decision. If they don’t respect these processes properly then they can end up wasting a lot of resources in the future fixing stuff and reworking stuff again. LW at launch is a great example of this. Somewhere somehow something went wrong in the development and testing process for him and they ended up spending a lot of dev time immediately fixing him as soon as he came out.

Reworking an existing hero is also especially complicated because everything they can do with the hero is confined within the limitations of everything related to the hero that already exists. They have to work within the confines of the model of the hero that already exists, their other animations (Both First person and 3rd person), their hitbox, their skins, their Highlights, Victory Poses, Emotes. All of this requires them to go to the technical teams and ask them if an idea they came up with is technically possible or not. This is why they often end up giving entirely new item based abilities to existing heroes when reworking them. Like giving Orisa a Javelin, Bastion a Nade, Sombra a energy Cube, and now Hog an entirely new Trap.

Then once they finalise what new ability they wanna make is when the process of actually making the visual design of a new ability starts. Then there is also modelling, VFX, animations, SFX, writing new voice lines, recording new voice lines, localisation. All of this can take months and can only happen after the gameplay design Devs finalise what they want to make. Then they also have to test all of these aspects as well. It might just be “one new ability” but it requires dev work from all of these disciplines who also need to prioritise higher importance work as I explained earlier.

The point of this post is to not be like “Don’t criticise the devs” but more so to explain that there is valid criticism and there is invalid criticism. Criticising the Devs for “Taking too long reworking a hero” isn’t going to achieve anything as they are not going to start skipping (Nor should we want them to skip them) important steps in the dev process which can create a lot of problems in the future. Valid criticism would be criticising the actual Rework if it’s not good, doesn’t achieve the goals of the work or if you just disagree with their goals behind the Rework.