As with any thriving online game, tweaks will always be coming to Overwatch sooner rather than later, but Blizzard's new shooter is planning for a raft of changes already.
The game's official forums are predictably stuffed with comments and suggestions applying to the length and breadth of the 21-character roster, but three characters have been singled out by the designers themselves.
In a post complaining about the power of revolver-toting Offense standout, McCree, Blizzard principal designer Geoff Goodman indicates that changes are coming. Referring to the character's ability to stun and kill many characters with a flashbang-fan the hammer combo, Goodman says:
"Its probably a bit too good at dealing damage to higher health targets such as Tanks and barriers. I don't have any concrete changes yet, but I'm going to be testing some things internally to see how he plays." He went on to say that the power of the fan the hammer attack is more likely to see changes, as opposed to the flashbang element.
Goodman took an opposite stance on D.Va, agreeing with comments that the mech-piloting Tank was a little underpowered, saying: "I do think there is some room for some D.Va improvements, but these are unlikely to take the shape of increasing her damage output significantly."
He added: "The goal is that she should be a viable aggressive initiation tank, much like Winston can be right now, rather than some sort of beefy flying assassin. So any changes will likely be helping her in that direction."
The last character to get an (albeit smaller) change, will be gaseous shotgun bastard, Reaper. Unlike most characters, the effects of his attacks aren't colour-coded depending on which team he's on, which can lead to a mild terror when you see a teleportation effect appear beside you, only to see a friendly character emerge.
Game director, Jeff Kaplan has said that a fix has already been completed internally, and will be released in mid to late June: "Our VFX lead, Nick, made a change so that allied Reapers will have blue coloring to their effects. It actually looks really cool - it's an overall improvement."
Characters aren't the only elements receiving changes, it seems. Kaplan also took to the forums to address the shortcomings of the game's Highlights feature, which archives up to five clips of your recent best plays. However, in the current version of the game, these can only be saved or exported by using console sharing options or third-party software.
"Our hope (and what we're working toward)," he writes, "is to allow players to save highlights or export them to a video format someday."
Finally, speaking to GameSpot, lead software engineer Rowan Hamilton has indicated that the team "constantly" look at how to improve the Play of the Game highlights that showcase important moments from the preceding match.
"It's a really hard problem to have a computer figure out what is cool", he explains. "They're not very smart [...] It's going to be an ongoing process, and hopefully we continue to improve it."
Complaints have focused on how offensive characters are more often shown off than support characters, but Hamilton makes clear that this is a major swing from the testing phase:
"At [one] point when we were tweaking it, Zenyatta would almost always get Play of the Game every time he popped his ultimate, because he would just do this massive amount of healing and the algorithm would almost always freak out, but it was just Zenyatta just sitting there floating."
As a frequent Zenyatta player, this writer would actually kind of welcome that back. Watch me float.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he watched a McCree get 54 eliminations the other night. Bring on the nerfs. Follow him on Twitter.
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