Overwatch Director Talks Redesigning Symmetra
By Derek Nichols 05 October 2016
The director of Overwatch, Jeff Kaplan, opens up about redesigning Symmetra and some of the newer additions still to come to the popular competitive title.
Since launching last May, Overwatch has seen plenty of updates, enhancements, and feature additions to keep players happy and engaged. In the past month however, Blizzard has seemingly slowed down on these updates, leaving fans to wonder just what the studio was up to. In a new developer update, Overwatch game director, Jeff Kaplan, sheds light on the subject by addressing a number of key community discussion topics and giving a sneak peak at some new features currently in development at Blizzard.
For many, the biggest piece of information from Kaplan deals with the least played character in the game, Symmetra. While fans knew that the support hero was getting a buff, Blizzard is apparently taking her back to the drawing board completely. While details surrounding her evolution are not solidified quite yet, the team is working to make Symmetra a viable choice for players within a lot more gameplay situations.
Kaplan made sure to stress that the Overwatch team isn’t planning on making her something she’s ultimately not. Her design philosophy is still very important, so fans shouldn’t expect to see her overhauled with a completely new move set or taking on a different role entirely such as a healer or tank. Per Blizzard tradition, no timetable has been placed on when this evolution would take place, though Blizzard is targeting sometime mid-November.
“It could be changes to some of her mechanics and just changing her overall feel through things like numbers and cooldowns. But we’re going to look at some other changes and explore some other things as well that might be a little more dramatic in terms of design vision for her.”
The developer update also contained a number of other topics including additional balancing coming for Widowmaker, quality of life updates, and a small mention of new maps and modes still very early in development. Blizzard is also catering to eSports fans as the highly requested Spectator Mode continues to receive improvements on the PTR server and broadcasting friendly features like camera bookmarking and a camera solely dedicated to the objective are being added.
Unfortunately, no concrete information was given in regards to upcoming characters. While fans continue to wait for the enigmatic presence that is Sombra, the update revealed that the team has a solid prototype in place and another character that is pretty far along being play tested on a daily basis. Again, Kaplan refrained from putting a date on this character or providing any details at all, but hinted that the hero may arrive sooner rather than later.
What are you hoping to see added to Overwatch in the future? Let us know in the comments below.
Overwatch is available now on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
Source: Blizzard YouTube
