Overwatch Future Maps, Heroes, And More

Overwatch had become quite the popular MMO video game from development team Blizzard Entertainment, however, it has left some gamers wondering what the future of this title holds. Taking to the official Battle.net forums, user Taturana asked simply that and as luck would have it, game director Jeff Kaplan gave a nice detailed post of what the development team has planned for Overwatch next.

Competitive Play is one of the top priorities for the development team right now with Overwatch. After the beta play of this feature, it became apparent that fans wanted to see Blizzard Entertainment take a different direction with the game.

“Our big focus right now is Competitive Play. We did a big push on this feature in beta and got some really amazing feedback. We were hoping that from the beta version of Competitive Play, we would need to do some polish and iteration and then release the feature but we felt like the feedback we got was basically asking for a different direction. So Competitive Play is quite a big effort for us this time around — almost as much work as the first version.”

It’s no surprise that new heroes are being worked on regularly and it’s even mentioned within the post. Jeff Kaplan notes that there are plenty of heroes being tested right now, but they won’t be teased simply because there are heroes that work great and some that just fall to the wayside during playtesting.

“We’re also working on new heroes right now. We have some that are very far along and others that are just getting started. We also have some prototype heroes that may or may not ever see the light of day. We do a lot of prototyping… I don’t think we’re at a point where I can really talk openly about the release schedule for the new heroes because 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… if that makes sense.”

Lastly, its noted that there are a few new maps within the production pipeline, but only one of them will be releasing in the near future as the development team had enough time prototyping it. Other maps are still in the works, but developers still have to work around various issues.

“We’re also working on a few new maps right now. One of them is “officially” in our production pipeline as it has passed through enough prototyping and playtesting that we feel confident in it. So that map is in the hands of our art group at this time. They are busy making it look awesome and while they do that, we keep going back and playtesting it to make sure nothing changed between the early level design blockout and the final “artified” version of the map.

We have a few other maps that are in prototype and playtest phases right now. Some of them will become real maps and some of them will be totally scrapped — so I can’t really commit to you on those. For example, we tested a map yesterday that was amazing yet a total disaster at the same time.”