Blizzard’s wildly popular first-person shooter game, Overwatch, has been gaining massive worldwide popularity since its launch back in May of this year. With the game’s competitive Play mode starting back in June 28th, Overwatch has only been attracting more and more players. However, despite all the popularity, there’s one feature that still has not been made available to players: full spectator mode and replays.
According to Gamerant, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan posted on their site’s forum that they’ve been working on releasing the two features for players to use at some point in the future. Gamers usually are given the chance to replay some of their previous matches so they can backtrack and analyze and critique their gameplay – what they did wrong and how to improve on it. Some gamers even watch other gamers play so that they can pick up on several tricks and cool tips. Multiplayer-focused games like League of Legends and Hearthstone both allow players these features. But unfortunately for players, Overwatch is still catching up to other games when it comes to this area. And the reason for this? Well Jeff Kaplan noted on the forum post that
Both have been on our schedule for some time but have gotten bumped for different reasons. The same people who would work on those features ended up being re-prioritized to working on high bandwidth server technology, Season 2 competitive mode changes and matchmaking improvements. We also have another feature request in front of the replay system – the ability to save highlights. Some of the work here is a step towards replays (another top requested feature) so it makes sense for this to come first when the time comes.
However, the game does have a replay option, to a limited degree. Through the “Play of the Game” system, once a match is over players can watch the best sequences. And from the main menu, players can also access “highlights” from their most recent matches, but this is limited in that players can’t ask for a replay from a certain sequence to be watched at a later time.
Until Blizzard and the Overwatch team release these two features, gamers will have to resort to clips posted on YouTube or Twitch. But for those competitive gamers or even pro gamers, a replay feature is vital to their improvement. With the announcement of the Overwatch Cup, it’s no doubt that Blizzard will not delay releasing a replay and spectator feature.