
Blizzard is making some huge changes to Overwatch with the latest “Highlights” update. Right now all of the changes we’re about to list for you are live in the PTR if you’re playing on PC, otherwise this should all unfold in an update on consoles very soon.
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The biggest change in this update will be the way that highlights are handled. Right now when you play Overwatch the game will creative five highlight clips for you, which you can view any time you’d like. When you shut down your console or PC, however, those highlights will go away. There’s also that really pesky feeling when you pull of some incredibly sick double kill or resurrection to secure a victory for your team at the perfect moment, but then the play of the game goes to a Bastion sitting stationary in a corner mowing down attackers.
The Overwatch team is making sure you can save the higlights you want to. Those five automatically generated highlights that we mentioned earlier? Those will now stick around for 24 hours so you don’t have to worry about losing them when you decide to take a break. Additionally, Overwatch will soon add a “capture” button that you can press whenever you do something really awesome in a match, and you want to make sure that it gets saved as a highlight later on. These will be stored like the automatically-generated highlights, and you can have up to 32 of them stored in the game at any time.
Now the next part is where things get really interesting, and really cool…
Save Your Highlights Forever

Don’t own a capture card and wish you could save some of your better highlights forever? Now you can do that. After the Overwatch highlight update drops, you’ll be able to save your highlights as separate video files. When you do so, these will be stored wherever media files are stored on your PS4 or Xbox One. If you’re on PC, then the files will be stored in a directory in your game file.
In this way you can set aside mp4 files of all of your best moments to do whatever you want with. I can’t speak for the Xbox One, but the PS4 has a video editing program you can use to splice together multiple clips and make little highlight videos. Now you can do this with your Overwatch highlights and make a little highlight reel for yourself.
On PC, the news is even better…
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Save Video Highlights in 4K / Ultra Settings

If you’re playing on PC, then Overwatch team has an especially exciting treat for you. Overwatch is a beautiful game in its own way, and it’s also not incredibly demanding. This means that it can be played on a wide range of hardware, and no doubt some of you are playing this thing on a toaster. Just because you’re playing on a lower-spec PC doesn’t mean your highlights have to look like crap.
Jeff Kaplan revealed that with the new highlights features, when you decide to save a highlight as a separate video on PC, you can tweak the settings to process and export your file in top-spec form. In other words, even if you have to run the game at its very lowest settings, when you pull off something special, you can make Overwatch process your highlight to run at top settings, 4K, 60 FPS. That’s pretty awesome, and a real treat for players on older machines.
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Loot Box Changes

There are also some big changes coming to Loot Boxes, and we’ve got more good news for you guys. Kaplan stated that once this update goes live, players will notice significantly less duplicates coming out of Loot Boxes. He says that the difference will be immediately noticeable, so expect to unlock a bunch of new stuff once you hop back in.
But duplicate items are also your main source for credits, right? So how is that going to work? Kaplan stated that players will be getting a much larger amount of credits through Loot Boxes after the update, so things should even out. He said that you can expect at least as many credits as you were farming from duplicates before, if not more, so don’t worry about that.
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