League skins and Blizzard World will soon be released! Overwatch announces update plan for 2018

Jan 2, 2018

Blizzard has announced their update plan for Overwatch in 2018 via Jeff Kaplan’s Developer Update video on January 2nd.

Kaplan sent his new year greetings and went back over the year of 2017 before going into details for the plans for 2018. He mentioned Oasis, the new map added in January 2017, and 3 new heroes, Orisa, Doomfist, and Moira, and several game modes including Deathmatch, commenting that he had a lot of fun.

He then moved on to explain the contents to be added in 2018- he revealed that the Overwatch League skins and the new map, Blizzard World, will soon to be added to live server. He also said additional work on the new hero and map is going well.

▲ Overwatch League skins and League tokens are soon to be added to the live server.

According to Jeff, the 27th hero is in middle of internal testing. He said he cannot reveal when the exact release date is, although they are working on getting it right. He also mentioned the 28th hero and a new map other the Blizzard World is planned for release.

Jeff soon followed with information on improving Competitive Play, which included both their long and short-term strategic fixes to improve Competitive Play.

For example, removing the performance-based SR metric from players above Diamond tier in Competitive Play Season 8 will be the short-term plan to improve competitive. For long-term, he disclosed that they have been discussing internally what Competitive Play should be like ultimately in Overwatch and will take player feedback into consideration to improve the game.

▲ The removal of Personal Performance SR Adjustments in Season 8 is part of the short-term plan to improve Competitive Play.

He also disclosed their plan for the upcoming time-limited events- Lunar New Year event for 2018 with the Year of the Dog and more details will be added soon. They are also in the process of planning the Uprising event again. As for Uprising, it is an event based on Overwatch game-lore, and they have big ideas to evolve the event.

As for the Anniversary event, they are planning new things for the 2 year anniversary. He said that along with new content, the dance emotes and Legendary skins from the last Anniversary event will also return.

Lastly, Jeff mentioned new content for the base loot boxes will be added as soon as possible, which is expected to be the skins in collaboration with other Blizzard games, revealed at BlizzCon 2017.