New heroes, new maps and more are all in the works for the insanely popular team shooter.
If you're one of the 10 million people that have purchased Overwatch so far, then there's a good chance that you've been investing many hours into the game in-between E3 reveals over the last several days. If so, then it's also likely you've had many questions on your mind such as: "Why do we have three snipers on this team?""Why has nobody killed that Mei yet?" and, of course, "What's next for Overwatch?"
While we can't really help with those first two, a few hours ago Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan made a post on the Battle.net forums that does actually shed some light on what fans of the massively popular team shooter can expect to see next.
According to Kaplan's post, the number one priority on the development team's mind at the moment is implementing competitive play. Overwatch's competitive mode was present in the game's beta, but was removed from the final version so that Blizzard could implement some necessary fine-tuning. Kaplan states that the team is "playtesting it multiple times a day" in order to get competitive play right and are also "looking into/debating putting up a public test realm for this feature so that we can test it in a larger environment before putting it live."
Overwatch's competitive mode still appears to be on track for a June release, though no update to the exact release date was provided.
What lies beyond competitive Overwatch, though? Well, at the moment, it appears that Blizzard is actively working on new implementing more heroes and levels into the game. On the subject of heroes, Kaplan states that there is a lot of prototyping going on at the moment and that it's a bit too early to talk about a release schedule for when new heroes may appear in the game.
"I don't want to set expectations and then have something come up and suddenly we're backing out on a 'promise' we never really made," says Kaplan.
So far as new maps go, however, the news sounds a bit more promising. Apparently, there is already a new map in the production pipeline and is currently being finished by the art team. Other maps are still being worked on as Blizzard attempts to perfect their production techniques. Aside from new in-game content, Blizzard is looking forward to improving Overwatch's broadcast, social, play of the game and brawl elements. Kaplan also expressed interest in implementing a custom game option, though he admits that his is merely a feature they are discussing at the moment.
It certainly sounds like Blizzard is dedicated to keeping the Overwatch experience fresh, and we are eager to hear some more details regarding when this new in-game content will drop and what new characters and maps we'll be cursing next.
