Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan recently spent quite a bit of time answering fan questions on the game’s forums. He touched on a variety of subjects, including an upcoming Developer Update and a Pharah adjustment.
Kaplan said the Overwatch team has been working on some Pharah changes internally, and that these changes should make their way over to the game’s test server next week. No specifics were mentioned, but fans won’t have to wait long, as Kaplan said more details should be released “later.”
Kaplan also briefly talked about a new Developer Update that “should go up next week,” but also provided no further details on this topic.
Kaplan did, however, provide some details about some BlizzCon treats. He pointed out that any players that pick up a BlizzCon virtual ticket with an account that’s linked to different platforms (PC and Xbox One, for example), will get the Demon Hunter Sombra skin on both platforms. You just have to make sure your accounts are linked up correctly using the same Blizzard Battle.net account.
Speaking of sharing content across platforms, Kaplan said elsewhere on the forum that Blizzard is currently working on coming up with solutions for skin transfers from console to PC for connected accounts.
“Yeah, we’re not crazy about that,” Kaplan wrote. “We’re brainstorming solutions. It’s complicated.”
Finally, Kaplan briefly discussed cheating, saying the team doesn’t actually need people to report players that are boosting.
“We have a whole crew here doing some pretty significant analysis to determine this behavior,” he said. Kaplan also pointed out that smurfing (creating a new account to rank up normally) is not cheating, but boosting and throwing from that account would still be against the rules.
It looks like Blizzard has a lot on the horizon for Overwatch, with the upcoming Developer Update and PTR patch. The game already saw the release of a new control map as well as some hero adjustments last week, including a slight change to Roadhog’s Scrap Gun.
Tank players that main Roadhog may have noticed a slight change to the hero’s trusty weapon, the Scrap Gun. Blizzard added an adjustment to the weapon’s damage fall-off, but forgot to add it into the patch notes. This change has since been confirmed.
Roadhog’s Scrap Gun now has a primary fire fall-off range of 15 to 30 meters, up from 10 to 20 meters. The weapon’s alternate fire, which previously had no damage fall-off, now has damage fall-off of 15 to 30 meters. Blizzard said this adjustment was aimed to make the alternate fire less powerful against far away targets.
“To balance out a slight power decrease, especially against barriers, we decided to push his overall weapon’s effective range out [a] bit further before damage fall-off begins to take effect,” Blizzard wrote. “The alternate fire fall-off begins from where the scrap projectiles are formed, not from Roadhog’s firing position.”