Overwatch Will Be Balanced Separately Across Consoles And PCs

It’s been mooted at for some time, but Blizzard has now dispelled the rumours entirely: Overwatch on consoles will be balanced separately from the PC.

It’s been a suggestion going around for several months, and for good reason. Since Overwatch was announced, many of the new heroes added have a passive or active movement ability. That’s fine and all if you’re playing with a mouse and keyboard and can snap onto someone’s head at the flick of wrist. It’s another matter entirely when you’re running around and suddenly a massive ice wall appears and it takes a second before you can respond to the Hanzo sitting on top of the ice, taking pot shots at your face.


The game plays substantially different depending on what platform you’re on — although the technical performance on consoles is solid as it comes — so separate balancing makes sense. It’s also sensible given when patches can be published: Blizzard can push out updates as fast as they like through the Battle.net client, but any patches for consoles have to go through Sony and Microsoft’s certification process first.

Jeff Kaplan, the game director on Overwatch, also said prior to Overwatch’s launch that “we don’t want to do anything that would harm PCs because of console tuning”. That’s clearly

So the next question is: if you’re balancing consoles differently to PC, what do you change? I can imagine Bastion would be a high target for a slight damage decrease, only because most of the replies to Bastion outside of “just play Genji” are generally movement oriented.

But my gut tells me it’s the abilities that restrict or change movement that are more likely to be adjusted. That might be something in line with a slight increase in cooldown for Tracer’s blink or reduced time for Mei’s ice wall. Blizzard will probably look at the figures they can collect and they’ll talk about it, StarCraft 2 style, whenever a change is made.


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