Overwatch’s Director Speaks! Find Out What Was Said on the Tick Rate Issue and Cross-Play!

Eurogamer recently interviewed Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan, who had some updates and details on the future of the game. Kaplan also addressed the game’s tick rate and the future possibility of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One cross-play.

Speaking on the tick rate issue, Kaplan said there is “confusion” in how people don’t understand how the game’s netcode works. He stated, “For example, the server does tick at 60Hz, it’s the client update rate that is lower. That just shows a general misunderstanding.” The client tick rate for the game is 20.8 Hz. This is apparently the cause of the game not being quite as responsive as other first-person shooter games. He added: “One of the things that players are upset about is that if they get shot, where they perceive they were behind a wall, that this is a problem with server tick rate. Certainly there are contributions that could happen with both the server and the client update rates that could cause something like that to happen, but usually, in most cases, you’re talking about latency.”

Kaplan continued on other games not being as fast as Overwatch, saying: “You haven’t seen a lot of shooters that move as fast as Overwatch, with abilities like Tracer’s blink or Genji’s dash. There’s also not a lot of games using a killcam like Overwatch does, so it all sort of makes the problem more evident than I think it would be in other shooters. We’re addressing it in a number of ways.”

Regarding the subject of cross-play, Kaplan says there hasn’t been any progress yet: “There hasn’t been any progress [on PS4/Xbox One cross-play], but we’re still very open-minded about it. I know that Rocket League was coming out with cross-platform play between PlayStation and Xbox. I’m a huge Rocket League fan . I primarily played on PC, but I want to check it out and see how it feels. I also want to see what the fan reaction is and if they’re liking it. I have friends at Psyonix and I want to get their reaction too. We are very open-minded, but we’re going to wait and gather feedback from developers and from fans.”

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