Last week Jeff Kaplan shared some of his thoughts about the future of Overwatch. Now he's decided to give us even more in-depth details.
When a user took to battle.net to ask what they had for Overwatch in the future, Kaplan responded with a lengthy post. Here are some of the most noteworthy bits:
• They are working on content patches throughout the rest of the year and into early 2017.
• Their big focus right now is Competitive Play. The feedback they got from the beta basically asked them to go for a different direction. This meant that they basically had to start from scratch, and demanded almost as much work as the original version. It has now come a long way, and they are considering putting up a public test in the near future.
• The first few seasons of the mode will almost definitely require iteration before it's in a place both they and players want it to be.
• As we already knew there are also new heroes on the way. There are some that are very far along and others that are just getting started. He doesn't want to give us false promises so he didn't give us a release window or anything.
• It seems that we might get a new map before we get a new character. One of the maps that they're working on is "officially" in their production pipeline as it has passed through enough prototyping and play-testing that they feel confident in it.
• He also talked about a map they are play-testing that showed off some "very innovative level design tricks". Unfortunately it also feels very unbalanced at the moment, as it is basically dominated by long range heroes. Hopefully they can fix the sight lines while not losing the overall vision, so we'll get to experience the innovations ourselves.
• They want to make a lot of improvements to the spectator/broadcast/observer functionality in the game. Some of these improvements will also benefit things like Play of the Game and Highlights as well once they get to them. These features are not being worked on heavily right now. They're more in a mode of design and planning around these.
• In terms of Brawls and Custom Games they want to implement features and ideas both they and fans have come up with. For Custom Games, they want to improve overall functionality by figuring out a way for players to play more Custom Games with their friends or with strangers. One of the examples he mentions is that they're researching what a server browser-type feature would look like. In their dream world, we'll get to play Custom Games with 11 other people (friends or strangers) with fun rules in play and gain EXP while doing it in future.
• The progression system is also being worked on, at least long term. More customisation options, equipping multiple sprays and new content are some of the examples he uses.
• There's an endless list of social feature improvements they want to make. These will most likely make their way to game gradually in future patches. For example, the upcoming Competitive Play patch will let us instigate many of the social actions on another player any time we have mouse control.
• Then there is the never ending amount of bug fixing. We cannot leave a game as a group. They are working to fix that. Also, if a friend gets recommended to your group you get a dialogue telling you to press Y/N on PC, not consoles. They are working to fix that.
• Lastly, there is a large anti-cheat and anti-hack effort going on, but obviously he can't talk much about that aspect.
Obviously some of this stuff might not happen, but we're glad to see how open Blizzard is about the internal development. Kaplan also says that there are a few surprises on the way. What could they be? Time will tell.