Continuing from the excellent addition of the Workshop, Blizzard is once again adding new major features to Overwatch. The latest PTR update brought a fully featured replay system to Blizzard’s hero shooter.
The replay system stores the last 10 games played on an account. This includes Quick Play, Arcade, Custom Games and Competitive Play. Once a game has been saved, you can select it from the ‘Replays’ tab on your profile and watch away.
Once a replay has loaded, you can stop and start the footage, fast forward, skip through the game’s timeline and switch between several perspectives. Perhaps the biggest benefit of the replay system is how it will impact those looking to improve. You can now easily look back at Competitive games and analyze any potential mistakes you made to avoid next time. There may still be adjustments made on the PTR before the live version is released.
Blizzard has also used this PTR update as an opportunity to tweak Overwatch’s current balance state. Surprisingly enough, given Overwatch’s ongoing GOATs crisis, this patch doesn’t change the likes of Lucio and Brigitte who are central to GOATs’ viability. Instead, Blizzard has opted to keep any changes on the safer side.
Baptiste
Biotic Launcher
Amplification Matrix
D.Va
Defense Matrix
McCree
Peacekeeper
Orisa
Protective Barrier
Symmetra
Teleporter
Torbjörn
Rivet Gun
Other changes tweak how everyone’s least favorite Assault, better known as 2CP game mode, works. The time awarded for capturing the first point has been reduced from 4 minutes to 3 minutes. This has been done in an attempt to make games not drag on. The other tweak is that now when you die after losing Point A, a shorter 3.5 second respawn timer will trigger. This should make snowballing into Point B less prominent.
