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Blizzard: Overwatch replays working internally, but “not on immediate horizon” for gamers

Overwatch

Despite Blizzard having already gone on record with its intention to improve video sharing functionality within Overwatch, one cheeky gamer has dared to probe the studio as to whether replays are forthcoming. What’s more, he actually got an answer.

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Battle.net user ‘Prince’ asked Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan whether players would “ever have a replay saving/viewing feature”, adding that he’s been asking the studio to implement such a feature since the game’s beta. Not long after, the good man Kaplan replied.

“We very badly want to give players replay functionality,” he stated. “Our engine is built so that it works. It actually works internally, which sort of pains us because we know how badly players want the feature.

“Right now, even though the game was architected with replays in mind, it’s a non-trivial amount of work to make it a player-facing feature. What we have internally is not scalable to 10 million+ people.”

Kaplan added Blizzard has folks who have worked on other Blizzard games who may be able to help build in a replay feature, but noted that any such implementation won’t come any time soon. “Right now, our roadmap has us working on Highlights improvements first before attempting to tackle replays (same people work on those features),” he concluded “It’s a big goal for us but a tremendous amount of work so not on the immediate horizon.”

Back at the start of June, Kaplan confirmed that Blizzard is working on helping PC players to save highlights and export them to video for sharing, though once again claimed that there are “big technical hurdles” to clear in order to reach said goal.

“The game will temporarily archive five highlights from your last play session,” he said at the time. “Playing only one game will only result in one highlight. Highlights are not currently saved if you close the game and come back.”