Overwatch Dev Working on New Heroes and Events
By Alexander Pan 18 February 2017
Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan reveals that the development team is working on ‘multiple new heroes’, as well as numerous seasonal events and event-related content.
With season three of Overwatch‘s Competitive Play scheduled to end in a few days, all eyes are on Blizzard to see what new features and changes will be implemented to the game come season four of Competitive Play, which is set to launch on February 28. While a number of character balance changes are currently being tested in the PTR and are expected to come soon, players can expect more content in the form of new heroes and events in the near future.
In response to a question over at the Blizzard Forums regarding the lengthy waiting times between the release of new sitting emotes, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan revealed that the development team are busy working on “multiple new heroes“, as well as “numerous events and event-related content“, before naming prioritization issues as the reason behind why new character emotes take so long to come out. While the development team are working on a number of features at any given time, such as a highlights saving feature, Kaplan stated that Blizzard’s main priority is to deliver content that will make the biggest impact, hence why the team would rather focus on creating new heroes than creating sitting emotes.
“The emotes themselves don’t take months. It’s more on the order of days/weeks. It’s more of a prioritization issue. We have multiple new heroes being worked on right now plus numerous events and event-related content. We’re always asking ourselves “what would make the biggest impact for the most people” when we prioritize. Right now, we feel like introducing a new hero to the line up would be more impactful to the game.”
With only one week of downtime between Competitive Play seasons, it will be interesting to see what new content Blizzard will be able to implement into the game come season four. Since Kaplan stated that new heroes are the priority at the moment, players are undoubtedly curious as to who will be the next character to be added to the Overwatch hero roster. While there has been evidence to suggest that Doomfist will be an upcoming addition, Kaplan poured water onto all speculation by stating that “24 is not who you think it is” and in turn has stirred up a new debate over who could possibly be the next character to join Overwatch.
It’s not just new characters that players can look forward to as there will be a considerable amount of speculation over what Overwatch seasonal event will come next, especially since no Easter event is currently planned. Given that the recently-concluded Year of the Rooster event came as a bit of a surprise to some fans, perhaps Blizzard has another surprise event up its sleeve for the 25 million player community. With Kaplan confirming that the development team is busy working on a lot of new content, it will be interesting to see what will come next, whether it will be Doomfist, a new hero, a surprise event, or a long sought after Sombra sitting emote.
Overwatch is now available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
