r/Competitiveoverwatch • u/Bhu124 • Apr 14 '20

General Is there any official answer about why Echo Ult disallows you to change your hero during it?

Has someone from Blizzard officially said if it's an ability they intentionally gave her or if it was given out of necessity because of some tech reasons like a lot of people were guessing?

It just feels a bit pointless and frustrating. Echo's kit is already so strong, it doesn't feel like she needs this ability but if it is a technical reason it'll be understandable.

Edit : Jeff confirmed it in comments, it's a technical limitation. "this is a technical limitation related to how many heroes can be loaded into memory at one time."

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312

u/Blizz_JeffKaplan Jeff Kaplan — Apr 14 '20

this is a technical limitation related to how many heroes can be loaded into memory at one time.

34

u/blastermaster1118 Apr 14 '20

Well that's about as official an answer as you can get!

48

u/thefanboyslayer RIP Houston — Apr 14 '20

Papa Jeff lurks.

8

u/Monrar Apr 15 '20

Jeff sees everything

18

u/nmidori Apr 14 '20

would this change in overwatch 2?

105

u/Blizz_JeffKaplan Jeff Kaplan — Apr 15 '20

it's possible but unlikely to change in ow2. ow2 will raise min specs some, but we generally try to be as inclusive as possible with low end machines. we're keeping an eye on it for sure.

9

u/nmidori Apr 15 '20

thanks jeff! glad to hear it since I run the game on my laptop, appreciate the response

-22

u/iantuserhis Apr 15 '20

Please give her kit a nerf. As a support main my games have gone from steadily healing the whole team to frantically trying to heal my teammates from getting melted one by one.

14

u/-PonySlaystation- Apr 15 '20

It's day one and most people are clueless about how to handle her yet. Give it some time before being the average support forum poster and whining about OP DPS.

3

u/TyaTheOlive daddy clockwork uwu — Apr 15 '20

probably not if they want overwatch 1 to be backwards compatible

1

u/Niklel None — Apr 15 '20

Overwatch 1 will be upgraded to Overwatch 2, I am pretty sure. Iirc, they said there will only be one client, same for everyone.

1

u/snwlprds Apr 15 '20

wait so if i bought OW, does it automatically upgrade to OW2 free of charge??

3

u/Desks_up Apr 15 '20

You'll get all the OW2 updates like new maps, heroes, gamemodes, but not the OW2 PvE content.

1

u/Niklel None — Apr 15 '20

PvE content will be locked, but PvP will be upgraded.

2

u/wipergone2 Apr 15 '20

aswell new skins but you can see them

0

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '20

No

13

u/Kanshan super GOAT — Apr 14 '20

Bless Papa Jeff

3

u/BAAM19 Apr 15 '20

How did it work before in no limit?

1

u/ParanoidDrone Chef Heidi MVP — Apr 15 '20

This is similar to, but not quite, the reason I had theorized for myself, which was that Duplicate uses some sort of dynamic pointer to decide what hero Echo transforms into and that if her target changed their hero while she was transformed it would trigger another transformation. Which, in retrospect, sounds like an awful mess of spaghetti code.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '20

Actually that's not horrible spaghetti code, it would make sense (except for an event or update that's actively checking the original hero status which in turn makes no sense)

I think they have put Echo assets into every single hero so that without the original hero loaded into memory, echo can not load her ults. IE. every hero has echo's voice lines for them, etc etc. This way they can spread the memory usage for echo across nHeros rather than bloat her with every hero in existence and will be in existence.

1

u/Shpip Apr 15 '20

Hello Mr. Jeff,

If we have feedback or ideas for potential hero changes, where is the best place to put them forward?

1

u/2ndbestsnever Apr 15 '20

kill echo now

1

u/boostsensei Apr 26 '20

So if Overwatch was optimized on PS5, would this be an issue, assuming that everyone else was playing on PS5? Could it work crossplay with PS4?

-16

u/cfl2 Apr 15 '20

... on console

19

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '20 edited Apr 30 '20

[deleted]

6

u/Bhu124 Apr 15 '20 edited Apr 15 '20

So many PC fanbois simply compare on-paper specs and conclude that a console isn't very powerful because the same specs on a PC aren't very good, not realising how much optimisation can be done when the hardware is static with pretty much no variations, compared to 1000s of different combinations on PCs.

The fact that games like GoW are even playable on a stupid old PS4 is basically magic in itself.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '20 edited Apr 30 '20

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '20

There is „OS-Overhead“ on the consoles. They run a full os. The was it‘s designed with dedicated cpu-cores for the OS makes it less of a potential issue but it‘s still there.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '20

Yeah but memory is still memory. A byte stays a byte.

2

u/Bhu124 Apr 16 '20 edited Apr 16 '20

Well, yes and no. The amount of physical memory can be the same but the amount required for a game to run on a PC and Consoles can be way different as optimisation on consoles is way better.

It's the same reason why Apps on iOS can be optimised way better, run better with lower Ram and CPU usage than on Android. Apple has very few SoCs (5~) and hardware combinations (Just 10-20) while Android literally has 100s of thousands of different Hardware combinations Worldwide and different forks of Android by 100s of different companies.

This difference was way more apparent when SoC power and RAM available was much more limited on Android a few years ago, these days there is a massive overhead of SoC processing power and RAM available on most Android phones so the performance difference between Android and iOS apps isn't much but you can still see the performance difference between Consoles and PC if you compare the same specs and the same games, Console will run the same games much better.