Future Overwatch Changes Will Improve Symmetra

Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan has said the development team is looking at ways to improve Symmetra, a hero that has fallen out of favour among players. According to Kaplan, the light-bending support character is "one of [the] least-played heroes" due to her very situational applications.

Speaking to Business Insider, Kaplan said changes to the character are "definitely on our list, but I don't think we'll see a change go live until probably some time in November." He went on to address the idea that Symmetra wasn't being used very much by players.

"You know, Symmetra's a really interesting hero to talk about," he said. "She's a hero who's very situational and she actually gets played a fair bit, but she gets switched off of. What happens commonly is players will play her on defense on the first part of a point, and then when they've lost that point, then they'll switch off of Symmetra. So, that definitely impacts her play time when you're looking at the stats."

The situational nature of Symmetra is something that Kaplan says is "not really desirable" to Blizzard, which is why the studio will be tweaking the character. He wasn't ready to talk about the nature of the changes, however.

"I don't have anything really specific to talk about right now, other than she is kind of an internal project right now," he said. "She is a hero we'd like to make some changes to. I think those changes wouldn’t see the light of day until November, though, because we want to do a bunch of internal testing.

"It’s one thing when we do something [minor]--like, we have a change to Junkrat on the [Public Test Realm] where his Ultimate activates faster, but it's a very incremental, safe change--whereas the type of changes we think need to happen to Symmetra require a lot more internal testing and discussion."

In related news, Blizzard recently announced it is transitioning away from with the Battle.net name over the next few months. Services on its digital platform will continue as normal, however.

"Given that built-in multiplayer support is a well-understood concept and more of a normal expectation these days, there isn't as much of a need to maintain a separate identity for what is essentially our networking technology," it said.