What Are the Future Plans for Overwatch? Director Jeff Kaplan Speaks!

In a post on the official Overwatch forums, the game’s director Jeff Kaplan revealed some details on the plans for the future of the first-person shooter. Some of the additions for the game later will include more heroes, new maps and Competitive Play, which is set to launch later this month.

Regarding new heroes that are coming, Kaplan stated the following:

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.

Also, according to Kaplan, a new map is in production now, and it’s now going through its prototyping and playtesting phase. So it sounds like Overwatch players will be getting a new map soon. Kaplan added:

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.

Blizzard’s main focus for Overwatch right now is on Competitive Play. Here’s what Kaplan had to say on the subject:

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. But it’s really far along. We’re playtesting it multiple times a day. We’re also looking into/debating putting up a Public Test Realm for this feature so that we can test it in a larger environment before putting it live. Even when it goes live, I anticipate our first few seasons will require iteration on the feature. We’re working very hard to make it awesome at release but there are some things you need to see and feel along with a large population before you can properly sign off on the feature. I anticipate Competitive Play will require a few season’s worth of iteration before we’re in the place we want to be.

Overwatch is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC.