"Overwatch" gets ‘high bandwidth’ patch for PC, not PS4 and Xbox One as the free weekend continues. (Photo : Getty Images/ Sean Gallup)
Last week, Blizzard said that it would host a free play event for "Overwatch" on Xbox One and PS4, and now, fans are still enjoy the free weekend. During this "Overwatch" free weekend, players can now download "Overwatch" to their consoles and play until Monday, Sept. 12, at 4 PM PT.
"Overwatch" players will be able to find the game on the Xbox Store under "Overwatch Origins Edition Free Weekend" (15 GB download) and on the PlayStation Store under "Overwatch Free Weekend" (9 GB download). Players will not need to be a PlayStation Plus subscribers to enjoy the event on PS4, but they will need an Xbox Live Gold subscription to play on Xbox One, Game Spot reported.
Meanwhile, Blizzard is aiming at improving the quality of online play in "Overwatch," and that is the main reason behind its next patch.
The studio is upgrading Overwatch's netcode to a great-bandwidth mode that will see data get updated 60 times per second instead of only 21 times per second on PC. According to Venture Beat, this patch will ensure that servers reflect player actions more accurately, this could also reduce instances where players do one thing and see another in the replay of their elimination.
Unfortunately, this feature works only with players who have enough bandwidth on their connection to support it. But if they do not have, Blizzard has built in a dynamic tool that will automatically return them to the old update rate.
"The net result is that you will be shot around corners less and you will manage to predict escape moves better," Tim Ford, "Overwatch" lead engineer explained in a video presentation. "It should, in general, feel great."
"Overwatch" senior engineer Philip Orwig noted that the Blizzard team is still investigating how it can do this on console. This means that PlayStation 4 and Xbox One players will have to wait before they join the fun. Everyone else should enjoy a much better experience.
In "Overwatch," the interpolation delay currently has typically hovered around 60ms. Now, after setting the high-bandwidth 60hz tick-rate update, that number will be closer to 20ms for many players. That will be a huge improvement and is close to the minimum time that it takes the human brains, eyes and limbs to process visual information.
"Remember, all of our stuff is still predictive," said Ford. Adding that while this update is bringing fans more in line with the temporal authority of the server, there will still be cases where it mispredicts. Such cases will happen for instance, if there is really high latency, or even if there is low latency but someone acts within a 20ms window, that prediction will fail.
For now, fans will have to wait for zero-latency quantum computing to come in and fix all these problems, and probably, Blizzard is already working on that.
Since its launch, "Overwatch" has seen considerable success. It has appeared on a number of top-selling lists and has surpassed more than 15 million players.
Watch a video of the Developer plus High bandwidth Update of "Overwatch" here:
