Where is Overwatch going next?

Overwatch has only been out for a month, but already there have been loads of fans cosplaying, it has passed League of Legends in Korean PC bang shares, and hundreds upon hundreds of loot boxes have been opened. So what’s next for the colorful shooter?

At the game’s official forums, in a thread asking Blizzard to release future patch notes, game director Jeff Kaplan laid down the foresight about what the team is currently working on and what we can hope to expect in the future.

Already they are focusing on patches that are meant for this year all the way up to the beginning of 2017, but one of the things that the team is focusing on is the competitive play mode. Other online competitive games have had modes that follow player rankings and titles but Overwatch did not launch with one. Kaplan clarifies why this is the case, stating that when the open beta drew to a close the player feedback they were receiving made it clear that the mode needed to go in a vastly different direction than where it was at the time. Because of this change he believes that there will be a lot of work that needs to be done within the first couple of seasons in order to reach a good state.

“Even when it goes live, I anticipate our first few seasons will require iteration on the feature”, he writes. “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. I anticipate Competitive Play will require a few season’s worth of iteration before we’re in the place we want to be.”

Of course the team is working on more than competitive mode, everyone wants to know about new heroes and maps! He writes that multiple heroes are in many different states ranging from prototypes that may never be seen by the public, and some that are fairly far in the development process. Maps are in a very similar production line but he does note that one map is in the “official” works at the moment after passing the prototyping and testing phases. In a later post he clarifies in a reply that some of these will be released by the end of the year.

 

 

Other than the base playable content Kaplan notes that there are other features that they would like to see added to the game. This includes improvements to the spectator mode, and changing how the play of the game is determined.

The team also wants to see custom games and brawls become much more appealing to the players. “We talk a lot about the Brawls and Custom Games,” he writes. “These are really cool features that we feel like we haven’t even fully scratched the surface with yet. We want to do a lot more with Brawls and there are some seriously awesome ideas from the team as well as the community that we want to get to. For Custom Games, we want to improve overall functionality but figure out a way for players to play more Custom Games with their friends or with strangers (for example, we’re researching what a server browser-type feature would look like in OW). This is a ton of work so would not be on the immediate horizon. But in our dream world, you could play Custom Games with 11 other people (friends or strangers) with fun rules in play and gain EXP while doing it… so yeah.”

Lastly he notes that there will always be bugs and glitches to fix as long as the game is being played.

Important to note however, Kaplan makes clear at the end of the post that some of these things may never see the light of day. He writes that he isn’t writing the post to inform the fans what will definitely be included in the future of the game, but more importantly to include them in what the team is thinking about and working on. He writes the following, “The reason developers usually don’t give insight like this is because if something changes or doesn’t happen, players get very angry at us. I would like to change that dynamic but we need to do that together. We’ll share more information with you guys so long as you understand none of this is a promise and things do change throughout the course of development.”

Whichever way it ends up going, it is nice to see some trust between the developer and the players forming. For now we can only hope that at the end of the day everyone is happy, we would hate to see the hammer brought down.