On January 30, Overwatch Director Jeff Kaplan announced that Hero Pools and an experimental mode would be coming to the game in a future update. However, several other notable upgrades were quickly glossed over, which might make the game more enjoyable for players.
These quality of life changes include new functionality for the replay viewer. According to Kaplan, these improvements will be coming “pretty soon” and will allow users to “pin” one of their ten replays so it doesn’t get deleted.
He noted, however, that just like before, the old replays will still no longer be functional once a new patch drops.
The good news didn’t stop there: As it turns out, the team is working on letting players share their replays with others, so they can check out your games in their respective version of Overwatch.
“I think this will be really fun for content creators,” Kaplan noted. For instance, this should help coaches be able to analyze games without needing a YouTube video of the match.
The Blizzard VP went on to explain that there will be a major overhaul coming for career profiles in Overwatch 2, but a “light refresh” is likewise taking place for the current game.
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“Just kind of clean up some of those things that have been bothering a lot of us for some time,” he said of the fixes. An example Jeff gave was the ability to sort player icons, though he provided no further insight aside from the fact it is coming in the next few months.
Additionally, a “big Workshop update” is in the works, and more information on that will be available either as a blog or forum post at a later date.
It’s unclear what exactly this update could entail, but former Overwatch League pro Dafran did claim that a “map editor” would also be coming to the game. Could that be what Kaplan was referring to? Only time will tell.
While Overwatch 2 is still a ways off, it’s good to see that improvements are still coming to the standard game, and hopefully all these additions will be polished and perfected by the time the sequel launches.
Exactly when that is, however, remains up in the air.