Following the sudden and unexpected departure of Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan from Blizzard, assistant game director Aaron Keller took his place. Shortly after that, he was interviewed by Gamespot and the lengthy chat includes some very interesting tidbits about Overwatch updates that might be released soon.
Yeah, there are really big features and systems coming soon. As big as anything we’ve built for this game, and the amount of resources that we’ve poured into these has been massive across almost every aspect of our team to do it. Those will be coming out soon. I don’t have a date that I can announce right now. Hopefully, it’s something that we’ll be able to start talking about sometime in the near future, but I am very excited for them and I can’t wait to see people’s reactions.
Overwatch started out strong when it released. A year after its launch in 2016, Activision Blizzard proudly boasted that the new IP was now its eighth billion-dollar franchise. However, it wouldn’t be long until Battle Royale games like Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite stole the limelight from Blizzard’s team-based first person shooter.
That’s probably why the studio immediately set to work on a sequel that would have wider appeal, including the oft-requested permanent PvE modes. Overwatch 2 was eventually announced at BlizzCon 2019, though the game won’t actually launch until 2022 as we learned during the latest Activision Blizzard quarterly report.
Perhaps these new big features and systems mentioned by Aaron Keller will be an attempt to recapture the fanbase while the sequel undergoes the proverbial and lengthy Blizzard polish phase. Keller also said, in fact:
One of the values that Blizzard has is “commit to quality” and we’re always looking to make the very best version of anything that we make. But I think that there can be a tendency to cling to that, and maybe hold onto pieces of content or systems that we made longer than we should. So for Overwatch 2, I think this is a game that players really want to play, and it’s a game that I would like to get out to our community as soon as possible, so we’re going to make a great game and we are really committed to making it as amazing as we possibly can. And the last thing we want to do is to release it early before it’s ready.
But we recognize that it’s something that players are waiting for, and it’s something that’s important to put out there. So we are doing as much as we possibly can to accelerate the development process for it.
Stay tuned for more on Overwatch and its upcoming sequel.
