Overwatch: Jeff Kaplan Talks About Changes Made To Junkrat and Mercy

As players of Overwatch would know, characters Mercy and Junkrat have been subject to complains from a number of people in the past regarding optimization and online balancing. As such, the two characters went through a few changes recently to fix some of the most major issues people had with them. As per Jeff Kaplan, all the changes that were made to them were a direct result of feedback from fans and pros who play the game.

“The Mercy and Junkrat changes were based upon feedback that we had been feeling ourselves,” Kaplan said in an interview with YouTube channel YourOverwatch (transcription via Reddit). He went on to talk about how the massive Overwatch community doesn’t usually come together to agree on a lot of stuff, but did indeed do so for the issues they had with the two heroes in question. “I play a ton of Overwatch and I have very strong opinions about, you know, how those characters feel to both play and play against,” Kaplan said. “There’s the community at large whose very vocal, and at no one time do I try to lump the community into one bucket. I think there are thousands of micro communities is what we’re really talking about. There’s not how the community ever feels about things, but there was a surprising amount of alignment about where we were with those two heroes in particular. And then there was a lot of feedback from the pros about how they were feeling about both of those heroes as well. And again there was a lot of alignment.”

“Then we go ahead and look at things such as statistics and see how those heroes are performing,” he continued. “And everything is sort of in line at that point with how we felt, how the community or these thousands of micro communities were all feeling about things. How the pros felt, what the stats were telling us, it all seemed pretty obvious to us that some change was required in that direction.”

The transcription on Reddit (linked above) actually contains a lot of interesting stuff by Kaplan regarding Overwatch, so fans of the game might want to give it a read. Overwatch is available for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for continued coverage on the game.