Overwatch Will Not Have Private Servers

Overwatch, Blizzard’s upcoming competitive first-person shooter, will not have private servers, but will have dedicated servers, custom games, and a spectator mode, according to game director Jeff Kaplan and lead game designer Geoff Goodman.

Speaking to Kotaku Australia, Kaplan and Goodman said that Overwatch will work entirely online through Battle.net, shutting down any hopes of playing the game through a local area network (LAN).

“Overwatch will run completely on Blizzard servers. With that said, and when we do matchmaking it will be in a Blizzard pool, we are looking at regions and IPs and doing the best to minimise any sort of ping issues,” Kaplan said.

“We definitely are going to have a custom game option,” he added.

“We’ll allow you to set up some of those things that traditional dedicated servers allow you to do. Basically give you a safe place to go play a match to play with your friends and not go into the big matchmaking pool, we’ll have a setup that will allow for that as well.”

Kaplan also mentioned that players will be able to spectate friends matches in Overwatch, saying a version of the feature has already been implemented.

“In fact, you can see the seeds of it when you go back and play — there’s the kill-cam and if you press escape or space you can get out of the killcam and that will put you in a spectating mode,” he said.

“The way you guys were playing the game was in what we call Show Mode, which is setup for Gamescom or Blizzcon, where you don’t have a friends list, you don’t have all the show features. But in the beta if someone has someone on their friends list and they just want to watch their friend play, they can go in and spectate if the spectate slot is open for them.”

Overwatch will be launching next year on PC, but a beta is scheduled for some time this year.

Source: Kotaku Australia