Overhauled highlight system currently in testing on the Overwatch PTR.
In an upcoming patch you’ll be able to – finally – download in-game highlights to your PC as video files. The feature is currently being tested on the Overwatch PTR.
The news was confirmed by game director Jeff Kaplan, speaking in the most recent developer update. You can view it here, but we’ve summarised the basics of how the new system works just below:
The basics
- Firstly, the game will still continue to automatically collect your highlights after each game, and suggest the top 5 for you.
- Under the old system, these top 5 highlights would disappear if you shutdown your computer or logged out of Overwatch.
- The top 5 suggested highlights will now remain in your library for 24 hours.
- There’s a new section called ‘Recently Captured’, which allows you to manually store highlights that you’ve chosen to save. It can store up to 36 highlights in total.
- If an incredible moment happens during a game and you want to capture it – now you can. On PC, you can bind multiple keys – by default there’s one set to F9 – that instantly captures the preceding 12 seconds of gameplay.
How to capture highlights
- You can capture up to 3 highlights in total per game.
- Each key can be bound to an individual highlight slot, for example: F9 for slot 1, F10 for slot 2 and F11 for slot 3. Pressing one of these keys will capture footage to that particular slot.
- You can overwrite footage that’s already saved in one of these three slots, simply by pressing the key again.
- After the victory or defeat screen, your captured footage is registered and all you need to do is navigate to the new ‘Recently Captured’ section within your highlights library.
How to export highlights
- In order to download or discard a specific highlight, you need to hover your mouse over it and click on the little arrow that’ll appear at the top right of the box. It will give you the option to ‘Record’ or ‘Dismiss’.
- Click ‘Dismiss’ if you want to permanently delete your captured highlight and free up space.
- Clicking ‘Record’ will take you to an options screen where you can tweak quality settings like frame rate and resolution. Once you’ve chosen your preferred settings, you can then go ahead and save the footage as a video file to your desktop.
- Your downloaded highlight can be found in your Overwatch directory in Windows.
The Overwatch community has been asking for an overhauled highlight system since the game’s inception. It’s fair to say that the developers have delivered on all fronts, and it’s going to make fans extremely happy now that they can share and edit highlights with ease.
