At long last, the next Overwatch developer update is fast-approaching, offering some relief to fans who haven't seen the game update in over six months. Jeff Kaplan, the director of Overwatch, announced the new developer update in a post to the game's forums, though the exact date of the update remains unknown.
After so much time passed without much communication between Blizzard's Overwatch team and the fans, worries began to emerge about the state of the game. Even though leaks have surfaced suggesting that an update was on its way, there were no guarantees until now, and the Overwatch community has been hoping for a little more direct contact between the dev team and its players.
Kaplan is known as the fact of the Overwatch team, being its director, and he's apparently been keeping an eye on the game's forums; after a thread was added to the general forums called "It's time for a new Developer Update. It's been 6 months," Kaplan responded to fan concerns by both confirming a new update and promising to be a little more reliable in the future. We recently recorded a developer update. It is scheduled to come out toward the end of the month," he wrote. "We’ll try to do them more frequently." The original thread was written to discuss the fact that updates used to come every few months, and have now lowered in frequency to twice a year--considering that the last update was on July 18, 2019. With the new update, fans are hoping that they'll get some big and long-awaited changes to hero bans, role queue system, and gameplay balance.
Although Kaplan didn't specify when in January the update would be going live, it's already January 23. Needless to say, the update should still be going up sooner rather than later, considering that there are only a few days left in the month anyway. A few days earlier, a leak suggested that the dev team had been working on a hero ban for quite some time, and the next update would be adding them into the game. In addition, Kaplan himself has shared some concepts of the Overwatch team's role queue system variations that are in progress, which should also get some more attention in the upcoming update video.
Whatever lies in store for future Overwatch updates, it looks like the dev team is at least aware that players are looking for a little more transparency than is currently being given. Hopefully, whether the game's next few developer updates come more frequently or remain few and far between, the team will keep its player base informed of future changes.
Overwatch is out now for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: Blizzard Forums