Blizzard Talks About Some of the Next Steps for Overwatch

Right over Blizzard's official forum, Game Director Jeff Kaplan laid out their future plans for their famous shooter Overwatch. He noted that the team is “working on content patches throughout the rest of the year and into early 2017 currently.”

While he didn't offer much details about their plans, he reiterated that they are focusing more on Competitive mode. As what Kaplan said, Blizzard plans to release the mode onto a public test server soon. “We’re working very hard to make it awesome at release but there are some things you need to see and feel along with a large population before you can properly sign off on the feature,” he wrote. “I anticipate Competitive Play will require a few seasons’ worth of iteration before we’re in the place we want to be.”

In addition, he mentioned that their team is also working on new maps and heroes "daily". The heroes are still in a prototype phase, so it's too early to announce anything. However, their are rumors that the next hero that they'll release will be named Sombra. So, it's safe to say by now that they are working on Sombra. On the other hand, Kaplan said the one map is "officially" in production and they may announce it sooner than expected. Whether they release a new hero or a new map, rest assure that those live updates will be for free.

Also, Kaplan talked about the improving spectating and highlighting functionality, which will help improve Play of the Game. However, he noted that that this is not their main focus at the moment, “These features are not being worked on heavily right now,” he added. “We’re more in a mode of design and planning around these. So there’s not an immediate timeframe for the spectating stuff.”

The most exciting discussion on the thread however, is when Kaplan said that they're looking into more custom game options (including a server browser!!!) and social features, as well as a beefier progression system. “We want to give you more customization options (we know people want to have random option for Poses for example),” Kaplan wrote. “We have some cool ideas of how you could equip more than one spray or voice line... so those are fun things we’d like to get to. But they are minor and are far off. We also have some pretty cool new content we want to add to the progression system—so we’re looking forward to getting some of that in eventually.”

And also, he mentioned that they have more in stored for those cheaters and hackers in the game. “There is a large anti-cheat and anti-hack effort going on, but I can’t really discuss that (the first rule of fight club...),” Kaplan said.

And lastly, Kaplan said that they have heard about the tick rate rant of players and currently looking into pushing the game's high bandwidth mode into other places. “Obviously, we’re putting a lot of effort against our high bandwidth Custom Game option to see if we can explore proliferating that feature further,” Kaplan said.

With all that, I can say that Blizzard is really devoted in making Overwatch a great game for gamers. And that's a good thing for us Overwatch fans! Before leaving, you might want to check out some of our Overwatch news and updates to know the latest about Overwatch.

Source: us.battle.net

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