Overwatch has good plans for future updates!

Overwatch has taken the world by storm since its initial release in May and, according to Activison, it has racked up an amazing 15 million player base, the only question on everybody’s minds now is, what is coming to Overwatch in the future? Jeff Kaplan released a developers update video telling us all just this and it is good. Check it out at the bottom of the page.

At the start of the video, Jeff makes it perfectly clear that not everything he is about to go through is destined to be part of the game, in fact most of it probably won’t be, he says “Sometimes in game development, you get pretty far along with some work and then you realise it’s not working the way you want it to, so you end up removing it”. Which roughly translates to don’t get too hopeful because it may not even happen. One of the biggest points that Jeff makes in the video is a Symmetra update that is coming in the near-ish future.

While Kaplan doesn’t have any concrete details to what it is exactly they are changing about Symmetra, he did state that “Changes to her mechanics and overall feel through changes to things like numbers and cooldowns is always a possibility”, he also added, “we are going to explore some other things as well that might be a little bit more drastic in terms of design for her”  While Symmetra is getting an update, Jeff responded to a lot of feedback from players regarding Symettera’s role as a support hero, “We are not really interested at this time in exploring Symmetra as a healer, we know she is being categorised as a support character, that doesn’t necessarily mean to us that she needs to be a healer”, he even went as far as saying he would rather “move her out of the support category than to completely shift the characters design to something she was never intended to be”. It seems like Blizzard have no intentions of giving Symmetra any healing capabilities anytime soon but not to worry, Jeff thinks the earliest we could see an updated Symmetra is mid-November but be warned, “it could be much later than that”.

After getting everything he had to say about Symmetra, (there has been an awful lot of Symmetra in this post), Jeff stated “We are actively working on new heroes, one hero is very far along, its coming together really well, this hero will see the light of day sooner than later”, as well as Somb… I mean this unidentified hero, there is another hero in the works, although this one won’t be around for a while, he said “we also have another hero prototype that we are extremely happy with, we feel like we have found another really great Overwatch hero”, this hero won’t be out until next year.

If you thought that we were all done here then you my dear, dear…acquaintance were wrong, strap yourselves in and hold on because there is still more to talk about. Back in August, Blizzard released the newest map, Eichenwalde and it was well received, in the video, Jeff states that they are also working on new maps as well and one is a lot closer than you think, he says “We have one that is very far along right now, to the point where we have play tested it enough where we are adding art into that map now”, Jeff then went on to announce that they have been working on a few maps for a completely different game mode, “we have a number of maps, I think its about 4, that are prototype, developer-only stages for new game modes that we are experimenting with”, this prospect of seeing new maps and new game modes in the future fills my heart with joy. Along with everything mentioned already, there is going to be updates to the cameras in spectator mode for the E-sport side of things as well as new voice lines and emotes, I think we can be assured that there is plenty still to come for Overwatch in the future.