No, really; the next update is going to force a full reinstall of the Overwatch client.
Big video game patches are nothing new. Nowadays, nobody bats an eye when they have to install dozens of gigabytes of patches – often at the point of release – just to play a game.
But for a patch to require players to reinstall the game entirely? That one’s a little different.
Blizzard has announced – via its forums – that the next major Overwatch patch will effectively perform a full reinstall of the game. Players themselves won’t have to manually uninstall and reinstall Overwatch, but in a nutshell, that’s what the automated update process will do.
“The next major patch will have some pretty fundamental changes to the game client. The number of back-end changes we’re putting in is substantial enough that we can’t just patch over the current content efficiently,” writes customer support rep Drakuloth. “As a result, when the next patch comes out, the client will fully reinstall itself to handle these changes.”
Overwatch itself currently stands at a 30GB install size (from a download roughly half that size) so while that isn’t a large size by modern standards, this is potentially going to cause some bother for players.
“We know that this isn’t ideal for people on metered connections,” Drakuloth continues, “So hopefully this announcement helps you prepare for this coming update.”
When a game is built and iterated upon over as long a period as Overwatch, there’s always a chance something like this could happen. That said, it’s usually the sort of thing that we only see during Early Access campaigns, and is relatively rare for a post-release change.
There are no details on when the next patch – and the forced Overwatch reinstall – will release just yet, but we’ll let you know nearer the time.
