‘Overwatch’: Symmetra To Receive Buffs, Director Talks Character Use & Timing


Blizzard has once again revealed plans for the future, and one character, in particular, seems to be lacking.

Overwatch, Blizzard’s first-person shooter that features a plethora of characters who fulfill various roles, continues to receive updates on the regular. We’ve seen many changes since the base game was released, and players are having to adjust to the feedback that comes with the potential and use of each character. We’ve seen overpowered characters like McCree suffer nerfs and adjustments. This time around, it seems as though an unpopular character will be getting the attention.

According to Business Insider, Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan goes into detail about Symmetra’s use and popularity. We’ve heard Kaplan discuss other characters like McCree and Zenyatta, so it’s interesting to see his take on her overall in comparison to other characters. Kaplan suggests that players don’t make full use of Symmetra after a certain point in the game. Kaplan had this to say in regards to Symmetra’s ratings in Overwatch.

“You know, Symmetra’s a really interesting hero to talk about,” Kaplan begins. “She’s one of our least-played heroes, but you have to read the stats with a little grain of salt there: 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.”

It doesn’t appear that Symmetra has any ability or skill threshold that stands out. With this in mind, it’s highly possible that we’ll see some adjustments being made to the character. After all, other characters see play through the entire match. Blizzard may feel that with a character being situational, it could be an indication that they require tuning to fit a match’s length in conjunction.

Kaplan continued to weigh in on Symmetra, noting the flow of Overwatch matches.

“Now, a character being that situational is not really desirable to us, so even though I can kind of justify why it happens, that doesn’t mean that I believe that it’s right. So Symmetra is a hero who’s on our list right now to take a good look at and really investigate.”

While it seems that Blizzard wants to adjust the character, Kaplan also expresses that there are no specifics at this time in regards to what changes we’ll see.

“I don’t have anything really specific to talk about right now, other than she is kind of an internal project right now,” Kaplan admits. “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.”

iTech Post reports that Symmetra appears to be a character that players target early on for her support abilities, lending credibility to the fact that players may be using her only during certain situations. For those who use her primarily, November seems to hold promise that she’ll see more use during matches.

How do you feel about Symmetra in her current state? Do you believe that she deserves a buff? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

[Featured Image By Blizzard]

Share this article: ‘Overwatch’: Symmetra To Receive Buffs, Director Talks Character Use & Timing
More from Inquisitr