New Maps coming; Season 2 Details for Overwatch

In a recent Twitch stream on user ster’s channel, Jeff Kaplan and a few other Overwatch developers shared some new insight on future content coming for the game including new maps.

Major areas of interest are that the team is working on four new maps for Overwatch. They are also working on fixes for new character Ana, who sometimes gives a friendly Zarya charge to an enemy. For a full breakdown of the stream, Reddit user MattRix gave a nice write up here (can also be found below):

Coming Changes

• In the next PTR patch, Mercy’s damage boost percentage is getting reverted back to what it was (instead of 50%). Discussion of the mercy damage boost happens starting at around 10:30 in the vid.
• They are looking closely at how Zenyatta feels in the PTR, and will reduce his total HP to 175 if 200 is too much.
• The bug with Ana shots giving a friendly Zarya charge is getting fixed
• New comic with more backstory about Ana is coming very soon
• They have 4 new maps being worked on right now, but note that not all of them may see the light of day
• The are working on new game modes, but the first new map (coming “soonish”) will have a standard mode
• New skins are coming before the end of summer
• It sounded like they may want to try hero stacking again in season 2, but they didn’t actually explicitly say that
• For season 2 they are getting rid of coin flip (I think this was already known)
• For season 2 they are also trying to reduce how long competitive matches take, which means you’ll probably have shorter attack times at the very least
• They are going to add the ability to see ally health bars for all heroes (but not silhouettes through walls). It isn’t coming in this next patch, but it sounds like they will do it pretty soon.
• They confirmed the hitbox changes, and said they were mostly trying to address how people could get hit when hidden behind a corner. They explained the reasoning for the big hitboxes, which is that in a game with such tiny fast-moving heroes and projectile weapons, it would be incredibly frustrating to hit those characters if they didn’t have bigger hitboxes, making the game feel bad (and making those fast/tiny heroes crazy overpowered!)

There you have it. Some new information to get you excited for the future of Overwatch.