Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller provided some clarification today, Nov. 20, for something he said in a recent blog post about “experiments” that the team would like to run in season eight.
Last week Keller wrote about things that his team intends on trying out to see if they can make the game “more enjoyable to play,” and one of the things he pointed to was “drastically reduced” spawn timers. In a post to Twitter today, Keller suggested that his words may have been slightly misconstrued. “Faster respawn times was an example for short (i.e. limited time) experiments that we would like to run starting in S8,” Keller said. “These would not be permanent and would not affect all areas of the game, especially comp.”
Reading Keller’s original post last week, players noted that the team was looking to toy around with potential changes in season eight, but the ambiguous way that Keller worded it clearly confused many of us, who believed that the team was planning to implement significantly shorter respawn timers to the game, potentially including competitive play. However, the way Keller’s text reads is apparently intended to be hypothetical.
“We’re also excited about running some experiments aimed at making the game more enjoyable to play,” Keller wrote. “For instance, what would happen if spawn times were drastically reduced? Look for those to start in Season eight.”
Keller didn’t expand on any of the other potential experiments that Blizzard might do in an effort to enhance players’ experience, but he did say that whenever they do bring an experimental element to the game they will take precautions to make it “obvious” to players that there is an experimental feature in the game.
