Overwatch 2's director says that controversial self-heal change shouldn't have been revealed on its own
Aaron Keller says it’s just part of a wider array of changes coming with season nine.
Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller has taken to Twitter to offer a bit of clarity regarding the passive healing abilities that season nine of the game will give to every hero. As it turns out, he reckons revealing that little tweak on its own might not have been the best idea.
If you’ve been living under a rock, or have just kind of stopped paying attention to Overwatch 2, in a recent blog post, Blizzard revealed that the season will see every character given a passive healing ability by default. While the tweak has had some supporters, it’s also been widely panned by players who think it’ll undermine the role of the game’s support heroes, whose job involves a lot of, well, passive healing.
Now, in a Twitter thread (thanks GamesRadar), Keller has addressed the controversy. “Clarifying a few things with [regards to] the self-heal, he wrote, “It's one part of a much larger set of changes coming to the game in [season nine].”
“Internally we're talking about, and targeting some of these changes at damage spikiness in game, the role of DPS in securing kills, and the strength of healing.”
The developer went on to acknowledge that announcing the change in a vacuum might not have been the best way to avoid causing confusion among players who ended up unsure of what exactly it’d mean for the game.
“It was a mistake to talk about this lone change out of context,” Keller said, “since it's a part of a much bigger set coming to [season nine]. Sorry for that, and I look forward to more discussion around [season nine] balance changes when we drop more details.”
So, now we wait to see what exactly those wider changes coming alongside the one involving a nice little bit of self-help will look like, and whether they do enough to placate the hordes of enraged Mercy and Moira mains who’ve had their rage alarms set off by the rather regrettable way Blizzard’s handled telling them that this big tweak is on the way.
Given that Overwatch 2 season nine doesn’t have a concrete release date yet - though it is anticipated to arrive some time around February - there could be a little while yet until more info about it is revealed.