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Overwatch to Include Replay & Highlights Sharing Feature; No New Items Likely Before Season 5

Overwatch Tracer

Blizzard is working on a replay and highlights sharing feature for its game-of-the-year-winning shooter Overwatch, game director Jeff Kaplan has confirmed.

The news comes several weeks after gaming highlights video site Plays.tv announced its own, unofficial solution for Overwatch players to natively replay and export video clips of their multiplayer matches.

In response to a fan request for a replay feature on the official Battle.net forums, Kaplan replied: “This is a feature we very much want as well. It’s a very challenging and large feature from a development standpoint. We’ve done a lot of the groundwork to help make this happen. We’re really hoping to get it in someday, work is being done, but it’s not on the immediate horizon.”

Interestingly, the developer made a distinction between a fully-fledged replay system and the ability for players to export their in-game highlights, adding that the latter “is actively being worked on”, and will be rolled out before the former.

Separately, Kaplan also commented on the possibility of new items being released during the course of the currently ongoing competitive season three. He explained that while “at some point [Blizzard] would like to add some more rewards to the system”, the studio didn’t want to “over-reward players for playing competitive”.

Kaplan added: “We don’t want to put so many amazing rewards to the system that it attracts players to competitive who wouldn’t normally be playing there.”

When pushed for further clarification, he stated: “New items are not going to happen at all for Season 3. Probably not for Season 4 either.”