Overwatch Has Significant Upcoming Changes to Loot Boxes and Highlights

Bliz­zard announced today sev­er­al changes com­ing to Over­watch, but for now, all play­ers who log into the PTR (pub­lic test region) can try out these new changes. PTR is for PC only and any Loot Box­es you open on PTR will not trans­fer to your live account. 

On the Over­watch Twit­ter account the game’s direc­tor, Jeff Kaplan, post­ed a 5 minute video explain­ing the changes they had made. First off, loot box­es were pro­duc­ing too many dupli­cates. So they dras­ti­cal­ly reduced the amount of dupli­cates play­ers received, but to com­pen­sate for the loss of cred­its from those items, loot box­es will also be giv­ing out more cred­its. So you will be receiv­ing just as many, if not more credits. 

As for High­lights, there were sev­er­al major changes made. One of the biggest being you can actu­al­ly save you High­lights per­ma­nent­ly. You can see all the impor­tant changes below:

High­lights

• The game will con­tin­ue to auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate high­lights for you based on your recent game­play. These auto-gen­er­at­ed highlights—now cat­e­go­rized as “Today’s Top 5”—will be sur­faced on a dai­ly basis and per­sist for a full 24 hours (or until the game client is patched, whichev­er hap­pens first).
• Play­ers can now gen­er­ate their own high­lights! The abil­i­ty to cap­ture 12 sec­onds of your own game­play has been added to the game, and can be bound to a sin­gle but­ton of your choice (or a but­ton per high­light slot) in the Options menu under “Request High­light.” These play­er-gen­er­at­ed high­lights will be saved under a new sec­tion called “Recent­ly Cap­tured” and will per­sist until the game client is patched. Play­ers can have up to 36 recent­ly-cap­tured high­lights stored at one time.
• With the above, play­ers can now record any of their “Top 5” or “Recent­ly Cap­tured” high­lights, export­ing them as a video file to their gam­ing platform’s des­ig­nat­ed media library (on con­sole) or direc­to­ry (on PC). On PC, play­ers will also have the option to select the qual­i­ty at which these high­lights are export­ed, sup­port­ing up to 4K at 60 FPS for Win­dows 8 or high­er oper­at­ing sys­tems, and up to 1080p on Win­dows 7.