“The feedback that we were seeing was a little bit critical of some of the decisions we made, and we really took that to heart.”
Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan answered a number of questions in a Q&A video on Facebook yesterday. One of the topics he addressed was the expected arrival of Competitive Mode, which was pulled from the initial release for some fine tuning. He also answered the question of how much has changed in the mode as it prepares for release.
“A lot has changed. Competitive mode is the current focus of the Overwatch team,” Kaplan said. “And it’s the most important thing for us to add to the game right now. Players saw that we tried to get it in for closed beta, and we had a version in and working. The feedback that we were seeing was a little bit critical of some of the decisions we made, and we really took that to heart.”
“We said ‘we’re making this for the players, and if it’s not exactly what the players want we need to rethink what we’re doing.'”
Kaplan added that the “first big content update” for the game will be the addition of competitive mode. Kaplan was hesitant to promise a specific date, but it hopeful for a release in “middel to end of June.”
“We already have it in internally. In fact, we were playing it this weekend, starting to get a feel for it,” Kaplan added. “Some of the things that we want to change, one was the season length. We heard a lot of complaints from the community that they felt like one-month seasons were too short. We thought there was a lot of cool about one-month seasons. In particular Hearthstone does it really well. But we realize our game is different from Hearthstone, so we decided to go with seasons that are probably going to be more around three months. Even more specific than that, there probably be a two-and-a-half month actual season with maybe a couple of weeks off in between.”
Overwatch servers went live yesterday, May 23, on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
