Overwatch to be balanced differently for each console

During an interview with YouTuber Jeff “Th3Jez” Kaplan, the director of the upcoming Blizzard FPS, Overwatch, released some new info on upcoming changes to the game, as well as information about how the Overwatch team will be handling the game in the future. Among the topics discussed were how game balance would be handled between console and PC versions, future hero development, and progression rewards.

The most pressing issue for any shooter or multiplayer online game is typically how the game will be balanced. Blizzard as a whole is no stranger to the competitive scene, and since Overwatch will be released on both PC and consoles, the issue is compounded by the differences in control schemes – which in turn could lead to different characters having advantages based on the difference in player habits. When asked about this issue, Kaplan had the following to say:

“I think the most important thing to kind of put the community’s mind at ease is that we plan on entirely balancing the game separately for consoles and for PC. We don’t plan on balancing it different between Xbox and PlayStation[…] […] We don’t want to do anything that would harm consoles because of PC tuning, and we don’t want to do anything that would harm PCs because of console tuning.”

– Jeff Kaplan via interview

When asked about future heroes, Kaplan told Th3Jez that Overwatch will be receiving more heroes post-release than the original 21 revealed at BlizzCon 2015. While Kaplan did not reveal what these characters might be, he did state that there are already a couple heroes being internally play tested, and that they are considering more support heroes down the line.

Kaplan also briefly touched upon the game’s new Brawl mode, which adds special conditions and rules to ordinary matches to create new experiences weekly. While there are no benefits to playing Brawl over regular matches, Kaplan did state during the interview that the team is looking into ideas on how to make Brawl more enticing for players to try out. One of the methods discussed was adding a reward of a large pool of experience points, which in turn would be used to unlock skins and other in-game goodies.

Other ideas discussed included a PvE mode that would pit players against AI enemies. However, Kaplan stated that despite this being a great idea, the team might not be up to the task of creating a fully functional system to support this kind of gameplay.

If you would like to see the full interview yourself, you can watch the video below.