Let’s be honest here, the last couple of years have proven to be an absolute nightmare for Activision Blizzard. The company has found itself in the middle of a number of controversies that led to many key figures departing. The community has also bashed Blizzard’s recent games for the over-the-top monetization and lack of features.
However, a new controversy surfaced online, suggesting that Activision Blizzard was forcing its designers to use the so-called “Diversity Space Tool” in Overwatch. However, all these allegations have been proven outright false by a number of sources, including a Blizzard developer themselves.
Overwatch developer smashes diversity tool rumors
Back in May 2022, Activision Blizzard published a brand-new article on its website, as reported by Kotaku, that revealed what it called a Diversity Space Tool developed by King. According to the company, the tool was an effective way to prevent exclusion, stereotyping, and tokenism while developing game characters.
Anyone who opened the piece before it was edited the next day was met with an image. It was a radar chart that displayed the diversity rankings of Torbjorn, Lucio, and Zarya of Overwatch. The visual representation presented the characters’ sexual orientation, body type, and culture in terms of diversity.
According to King, the Diversity Space Tool was supposed to be a measurement tool to see how a diverse cast of characters performs compared to the “norm.” However, many in the community couldn’t understand why the company was reducing diversity to such weird and degrading metrics.
Considering the backlash regarding the situation, many of Blizzard’s owners chimed in. One of the character designers for Overwatch stated that development teams don’t need such tools and confirmed that the hero-shooter isn’t using the tool despite the rumors suggesting so.
God I swear our own company tries so hard to slaughter any good will the actual devs who make the game have built
Overwatch doesn’t even use this creepy distopian chart, our writers have eyes. The artists: have eyes. Producers, directors, etc, as far as I know also all have eyes https://t.co/WEMRf8QmBu
— melissa kelly 💙 (@_mlktea) May 14, 2022
While it’s great to see that Overwatch isn’t using such tools to develop games, it doesn’t change the fact that Blizzard was quantifying diversity. There was an image in the edited article that seemed like the tool’s actual interface.
We could see usual traits related to diversity, but there were odd things such as “Facial features/Beauty,” where Ana scored just a 1 out of 10 because she’s old.
This means that Blizzard was judging a character’s diversity by how they looked, which is kind of odd. It’s also not clear how the so-called “norm” of this tool was measured and the exact plotting of the 10-point scale.
Overwatch 2 is finally getting a much-requested feature
As Marvel Rivals has been proven to be the biggest hit in the market right now, Blizzard has realized it has competition and is working hard to fix Overwatch 2. In the last couple of days, the company has announced tons of new features are coming to the game.
However, one that has caught everyone’s attention is none other than hero bans. The game director, Aaron Keller, has given players insights into how the system would work. He stated that each gamer will have three slots to ban characters under a priority system.
Once 10 players have made their ban choices, the four heroes who get the most votes will be banned from the match. Multiple players across social media platforms are happy to see the hero ban’s inclusion in Season 16.
It’s not just hero bans either; Blizzard has revealed that map voting is also coming to Overwatch 2, which will address a long-standing complaint about players not having control over where they fight.
With that said, what do you think about Blizzard’s diversity tool? Let us know in the comments below.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
