Blizzard holds its promise of tweaking Overwatch based on player’s feedback.
[dropcap size=small]B[/dropcap]lizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch has become one of the most popular video games to date and quickly rose to professional competitive gameplay. With Overwatch now a major part of the esport industry, Blizzard Entertainment has been tweaking the game by added certain buffs and nerfs to characters in the game based on player’s feedback. The company is reportedly going to release an updated version of Overwatch‘s competitive game mode some time later this month that will be different than the that was in beta. Curious about what changes Blizzard Entertainment will be making? Watch the video below as Overwatch‘s game director Jeff Kaplan explains what Blizzard Entertainment plans on doing.
According to Jeff Kaplan, many Overwatch players found the game to be not as competitive as they had liked. Blizzard Entertainment plans to correct this problem by removing the tier-based system from the competitive mode and a system that places a gamer in a match with players who have a skill rating as she or he has. Players will be able to see not only their own skill rating but other player’s skill ratings as well. In addition to this, Blizzard Entertainment has added the ability to see not only your team’s overall skill rating that is comprised from each player’s skill rating and then averaged out, but the other team’s average skill rating too.
“The downside of a system like this is [that your rating is] going to go down sometimes. But this is the sort of competitive system that we think players who are attracted to competitive play really want.”
In addition to competitive play being tweaked, Blizzard Entertainment has changed the format of several assault maps that players felt were “flipping too quickly”. Jeff Kaplan didn’t go into details about how the company has done this, but he said the changes made would allow matches to last longer than before. This allows teams to bounce back from losing, giving the losing team a chance at victory instead of being completely annihilated.
If the idea of showing off your skill rating to your friends and other players wasn’t enticing enough to play in the competitive mode, Blizzard Entertainment is awarding “awesome cosmetic rewards” to players that are only specifically available for playing in each season. The “highest skilled players” will have the opportunity to unlock other cosmetic weapons including weapons that are coated in gold.
Jeff Kaplan said Blizzard Entertainment would continue to tweak the game if players weren’t satisfied with the changes made. There is a delicate balance between players and developers, in order to keep players hooked on the game the company needs to continue to release new material so that the gameplay doesn’t become old and repetitive. Of course, with new characters introduced there is the chance that certain characters would be too powerful, upsetting the balance between characters played in a match and the game quickly becoming one sided. With Blizzard Entertainment promising to listen to its player’s feedback, Overwatch has the chance of becoming the most popular video game and esport thus far.
Overwatch is now available for PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
