Out of Overwatch's entire roster of playable heroes, Symmetra is perhaps one of the least picked. Her mostly close-range weapon, defensive mini-turrets and teleporter ultimate ability don't lend her to being an essential part of most teams. Though she can do well in certain scenarios, overall it seems most players would rather choose another character.
Blizzard is aware of Symmetra's woes. In an interview with Business Insider, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan says the team is looking at making some major changes to how Symmetra plays in the future.
"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," Kaplan says. "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."
That's not exactly what the Overwatch team wants, so they've got her in their sights when it comes to improvements.
"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," Kaplan says. "So Symmetra is a hero who's on our list right now to take a good look at and really investigate."
Kaplan goes on to say that because any changes made will likely be extensive, Blizzard will need to internally test the changes for a longer period of time before it rolls out to players. With that in mind, he says fans aren't likely to see any Symmetra changes until at least November.
"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," he says.
A number of changes have come to various Overwatch heroes in the months since the game's release, but none so dramatic as what Kaplan seems to be proposing for Symmetra. Characters like D.Va, Ana, Mercy and others have had slight tweaks to make them a little more powerful, but no major changes to their mechanics. What exactly does Blizzard have in store for Symmetra? It sounds like they might not even know yet, but it should be interesting to see how they can possibly transform one of Overwatch's least-played characters into something a little more special.
