Due to how these things usually work out, Overwatch fans may have been expecting new character Orisa to arrive on the game’s live servers quite soon, but it appears as if Blizzard still has some fine tuning to do before it’s satisfied that the quadruped robot is ready to leave the shooter’s Public Test Realm. Following several teasers, the character was finally revealed in full last week and made available to try out on Overwatch‘s aforementioned test servers, but for those playing on Xbox One or PlayStation 4, it looks like you’ll have to wait just a little longer before she’s out in the open, so to speak.
Per a comment posted yesterday over on Battle.net (thanks, VG247), game director Jeff Kaplan said that Orisa won’t be releasing this week or next, as the development team still wants to evaluate feedback as well as fix a few bugs.
Just to clarify, we’re leaving Orisa on the PTR for a little while. We’re getting great feedback and fixing a lot of issues. I know this feels a little longer than other PTR periods, but we think it will be for the better. We know how anxious you all are to have Orisa join your ranks… and she will soon… but most likely she will go live later in the month rather than this early.
Understandable, really. While it’s crucial for Overwatch to receive new blood on a regular basis in order to keep the meta feeling fresh, there’s no need to rush Orisa out the door before she’s ready. While Blizzard does a tremendous job of tweaking existing characters in the live game based on trialling the changes in the PTR, such proposals are never pitch perfect. The recent improvements it made to Bastion, for instance, are an example of such, with many believing the bot to be too powerful in his current form.
Orisa’s already seems to be great fun to play as, though, so we’ll see what Blizzard has in store for the character in the future following yesterday’s PTR update.