Sitting right at the bottom of my most played hero stats, directly next to Zarya, Symmetra is someone that I have never enjoyed playing in Overwatch. She just hasn’t clicked with me, despite Support being my go-to class, as there just isn’t much to entice. Against everyone else, she just isn’t nearly appealing enough.
Luckily for myself and other Symmetra disbelievers out there, Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan has recently updated us all with a video on where we could see the Hero going next. Although he stops short of saying exactly how she will be given a makeover, there’s all the indications that it could be a “dramatic” one.
From the video:
I don’t think changes to Symmetra are as easy as some minor number tweaks that will have her available and ready to play in a changed fashion very soon.
“I think that the types of changes that we want to look at for Symmetra might take us a little bit longer than something like the Widowmaker scope change, which was relatively small and easy to do.”
Symmetra stands out as the only non-healer in Support, which means those that dare to play her might get some flak from teammates. Will this be the big change to Symmetra, could her gun come equipped with a healing ray of some sort before too long?
Nope.
“We’re not really interested at this time in exploring Symmetra as a healer. We know she’s been categorised as a support character, but that doesn’t necessarily mean to us that she needs to be a healer. If that means that we have to move her out of the support category, we’d rather do that than completely shift the character’s design to something she was never intended to be.”
if you’re interested to see the new and improved Symmetra, don’t hold your breath – Kaplan estimates that we won’t see anything until at least mid-November, again cementing that this isn’t a small tweak but quite a drastic change for the character instead:
“We don’t want to rush it, we’re probably going to do a lot of internal playtesting. Then we would go to the Public Test Realm after that. We are looking at Symmetra, I realise it might not be as quick as you like for changes, but it’s definitely on the list.”
Also in the developer update video, Kaplan (who I keep wanting to call Kapkan) very gently teased a new Hero, but was pretty tight-lipped:
“We’re actively working on more heroes right now. One hero is very far along. It’s coming together really well. We’re playtesting it internally across the entire company. We believe this hero will see the light of day sooner rather than later.”
It’s Halloween soon. That might be the most possible time that we see someone new.
In case you didn’t know, Overwatch is one of the best games of the year so far and we raved about it in our review. It’s a wonderful mix of tight gameplay, lovely visuals, and simplicity. Blizzard have been very active in keeping the fanbase happy, releasing a new hero called Ana and also a new map. Here’s hoping 2017 brings even more.
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