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Blizzard Vows To Improve Overwatch’s Play Of The Game, New Hero Teased

Blizzard's Overwatch has barely been on the market a week, but given its online multiplayer tenets, the developer is well aware that the coming months will involve an iterative process of tweaks, fixes and post-launch updates.

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Blizzard’s Overwatch has barely been on the market a week, but given its online multiplayer tenets, the developer is well aware that the coming months will involve an iterative process of tweaks, fixes and post-launch updates.

One area that Blizzard is targeting is the shooter’s Play of the Game, a post-match highlight reel that parades the game’s best move for all to see. But at least for now, the feature often favors those heroes who dish out the most damage (read: Torbjorn), and the studio has vowed to fine-tune the values that help determine the Play of the Game in order to ensure all characters are in with a chance of nabbing the accolade once the time limit expires. 

Word comes by way of GameSpot, where Overwatch‘s Lead Software Engineer Rowan Hamilton drew attention to the technical hurdles that the team currently faces, revealing that “from a technical standpoint, it’s a really hard problem to have a computer figure out what is cool. They’re not very smart. They take some numbers in, they put some numbers out. It’s hard to figure out what is cool there.”

Hamilton went on to state:

“We constantly look at Play of the Game, and we’ve got a whole bunch of data on Play of the Games are actually happening out there in the wild, and we can kind of see patterns about this character getting a lot of PoTG for these killstreaks, they’re getting a lot of damage, or they’re getting a Play of the Game for that.  It’s going to be an ongoing process, and hopefully we continue to improve it.”

In related news, it appears Blizzard is teeing up the reveal of an all-new Overwatch hero. That’s according to a blog post from the studio, which charts the history of the titular team and even alludes to a sixth founding member known as Liao. Can we expect an announcement during E3 next month?

Overwatch launched across PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC last week to rave reviews, and you can check in with our own verdict of Blizzard’s hero shooter here.