Overwatch: Improved Viewing Experience

Blizzard released new Developer Update video, in which they discussed importance of esports for the developer team and their plans on improving the viewing experience.

It is the general opinion that when you watch an Overwatch match it’s really hard to follow what’s going on, even for experienced players. Fortunately, Blizzard acknowledged the problem and are determined to improve the situation.

In the last Developer Update the Game director Jeff Kaplan talked about their plans on improving the esports viewing experience. First of all, there will be special team uniforms – for example, all teams qualified for the World Cup will get unique set of colours used on each hero, so it should be much easier to understand who is who on the battlefield. Moreover, there will be home and away uniforms – the home one will be darker, the away one – lighter. Besides that, these colour pallets will also be applied to visual effects, such as bullet tracers and explosions. Both of the above changes should make it very easy to understand what each team is doing in the fights.

In addition to the above, Blizzard will introduce a new top-down interactive map for casters and observers, which will provide information about every hero’s location, their ultimate status and many more. It will work as a 2D overlay displayed above the actual map. There will be some additional features for observers, such as third-person smart camera, which is capable of detecting the action happening on the map and follow it. The other new feature is instant replays during broadcasting, which is available from the kill feed. Also Blizzard created a fully automated tournament interface to minimize amount of human error. They also worked on many small but important things that will allow to improve the general quality of esports matches – for example, if a player gets disconnected, the game will be automatically paused.

It’s hard to not be excited about the upcoming changes if you are an Overwatch fan, especially considering the fact that Jeff Kaplan stressed that this is only the first step and that the developer team will work further on improving the esports viewing experience.