PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A !!!COMMENT!!! THEN GIVING A LIKE TO HELP US GRAB DEVS’ ATTENTION AND ADDRESS THESE ISSUES!
(This is how this forum works: threads with a higher reply and like ratio will receive higher priority! )
Most of these problems appeared with the Season 9 crosshair update patch. It was a great patch that added a few new features, but OW team also needs to acknowledge that it introduced some issues and fix them.
Although there have been a few posts about these crosshair issues, many players who encounter them don’t usually visit the Bug Report Forum, most of them might not even know this forum, let alone take the time to make a post about these issues.
Even so, the update still triggered a wave of reports on Reddit and X (Twitter), but sadly nothing has been addressed since.
The low outline visibility issue, in particular, has been reported by many players since OW2’s release.
THIS IS A BIG DEAL. This is extremely important for regular players, and even more critical for players with visual impairments!
(Fixing these should not require too many resources, since these are all small changes, and some of the issues could simply be solved by reverting something. Back in OW1, the crosshair outline was much more visible, why are we moving backwards?)
Here is a list of the identified issues:
1. Blurry crosshair outline
Please let us able to set crosshair’s outline completely opaque for better visibility
- make the outline completely opaque when the outline transparency is set to 100.
This would greatly enhance the visibility of the crosshair and this would also solve the issue where players crosshair gets even more blurry on high res monitor (such as 1440p, or any res between 1080 and 4k) with scaling ON.
using high res displays with scaling ON, the crosshair becomes even more blurry.
since the release of OW2, the crosshair outline’s been semi-transparent and blurry. (Even back in OW1 the outline was significantly darker)- increasing the “outline thickness” doesn’t do much, it only makes the outline into a thicker, blurrier mess since you havent increased outline’s opaqueness.
2. The “Dual Layer outline” issue.
- The current crosshair outline code design seems to incorporate a “dual-layer outline”: Occurs when the outline thickness is set above 1. Instead of increasing the thickness of the existing outline layer, it appears to add a second outline layer on top. The two layers also have different transparency levels, which makes the issue even more noticeable.
- Since it’s an additional layer of outline, it doesn’t apply to all types of crosshairs, such as Hanzo’s default crosshair etc. (outline thickness and shift do not work at all)
3. Crosshair Center Gap Bug
- The center gap only displays correctly when overall Reticle Thickness = 1 (with outline set to 0). When thickness or outline are increased, the game incorrectly factors those values into the center gap calculation.
It seems like you have added the code designed to prevent crosshair lines (including outline) from overlapping when the gap is too small, while this might sound like a good idea, but this change only made IMPOSSIBLE to remake some of crosshairs.
as part of the customizable crosshair system, We can adjust the gap to make them not overlap ourselves, now you are just forcing us to have this non adjustable weird gap.
The center gap should remain an independent value, only accounting for the actual pixel gap between reticle lines or the circle — completely ignoring the outline or any other elements.
4a. Center Dot’s size also breaks the reticle or circles center gap.
- Now the dot always has a reserved space in the center when using reticles or circle crosshairs. This behavior is likely caused by the same Center Gap bug described above. Please revert this change. This broke the “Show accuracy” option as well (see 4b).
The dot layer used to overlay the reticle and circle crosshair layers before the season 8 update.4b. For instance: Hanzo’s crosshair with the weapon spread on, you can simulate this using a circle or reticle crosshair WITH a dot in the center.
While charging your arrow, you used to be able to verify if the arrow was fully charged by the spread animation. Once the animation stopped, the arrow was fully charged. (Here we just used Hanzo as an example, other chars have been affected as well.)
Now, players can’t visually determine if the arrow is fully charged based on the weapon spread because the reticle now touches the dot and stops the spread animation when the arrow is only halfway charged. This change means that players who used to shoot fully charged arrows based on the reticle spread information can’t do so anymore.
The “Outline Shift” setting feels like it was added as a workaround for underlying problems rather than as a genuinely useful feature. It is barely useful in practice and can even introduce other issues. Honestly, if all the bugs above were fixed, this setting could be removed entirely. A new feature should be added only after the fundamental features are working properly, not to mask an existing flaw. (adjusting this setting would make reticle crosshair color dimmer, and making it become less visible.)
Overwatch is a game full of colorful visual effects, yet right now, most players are forced either to set the outline to 0, sacrificing visibility just to get a “normal” crosshair, or get a super FAT crosshair for extra visibility.
For a major esports FPS game, the crosshair system is extremely important—a fundamental and vital component of an FPS game, directly affecting both the overall gameplay experience and even in-game performance for many players (not to mention that is even more important for players with visual impairment)…
I sincerely hope you can take some time to address these issues, as no other FPS, TPS games nor even third-party crosshair overlays from little studios have this kind of issues.
These issues were on the “Known Issues” list after the season 8 update, but somehow they have disappeared from the list and have never been fixed.
Something Extra:
just another feature request:
Could we have something like crosshair preset profile slots?
Similar to what other major esports FPS and even TPS games offer, I believe this feature could be particularly useful in OW, given the variety of characters with different aiming styles.
For instance, I could create a profile named “Hitscan” for all my hitscan heroes, and once I make a small change, it would automatically apply to all heroes assigned to that crosshair profile. Perhaps having 5 to 10 profile slots would be ideal?
and other profiles for my projectile heroes etc.
We genuinely hope that if any dev member comes across this post, please please feel free to contact us. We are more than willing to assist. These are straightforward and simple design changes, but we have found it very challenging to convey our feedback directly and accurately to the development team…
