‘Overwatch’ High Bandwidth Update Released By Blizzard; Not Coming To Consoles At This Time

A new Overwatch patch was published over the weekend, delivering the promised networking changes for Blizzard’s ultra-popular team shooter, which should cut down how frequently Overwatch players feel like they’re falling victim to poor netcode instead of overwhelming skill.

There have been no shortage of complaints about Overwatch’s connectivity, in the three months since the game debuted, ranging from poor netcode to a low tick rate on the game’s servers. It’s been the topic of endless discussions, and an excuse for thousands (if not millions) of player deaths, but Blizzard is hoping it can bring an end to that particular narrative with the release of the Overwatch High Bandwidth update. And it wouldn’t be Blizzard if we didn’t get a short video explaining exactly what the new patch means for the PC community.

According to Blizzard, the new update should significantly reduce the Overwatch servers’ reliance on interpolation delay, which (in essence) is a system that predicts players movement (for the purposes of displaying that information to others) based on current speed and direction. The system was implemented to created a smoother gameplay experience between players with good and bad network connections. Going forward, those with strong connections will rely on interpolation delay less than half as frequently, while those with weaker connections will now be put into a different matchmaking pool.

Unfortunately, the High Bandwidth update is only available on PC and Blizzard doesn’t have a timeline for releasing a similar update on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One at this time. The studio still hopes to correct many of the same issues for console players; however, Blizzard says the company is “still investigating” how to accomplish those goals on PSN and Xbox Live.

For more information, take a few minutes to check out the trailer for this week’s High Bandwidth update, then head down to the comments section and let us know if all the reason changes (bandwidth update, new level, Season 2, etc) convinced you to give Overwatch another shot.

Overwatch is currently available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.

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