As anticipated, Blizzard had something new up its sleeve for BlizzCon 2014. No, it isn’t Warcraft 4 or Starcraft Ghost or any of the many other predictions shopped from the company’s idea graveyard and jumbled with wishful thinking.
It's Overwatch, a brand-spanking-new team-based shooter the company took the wraps off at the first day of its annual games convention at the Anaheim Convention Center in California.
The game is the first totally new Blizzard property in 18 years (after Diablo in 1996). The shooter takes places in "a technologically advanced, highly stylized future earth." Art-wise it looks a little like Disney's Big Hero 6, continuing Blizzard's trend echoing Disney's art vibe.
Kotaku reports that Overwatch is what became of “Project Titan,” Blizzard’s long-ago-outed massively multiplayer game. Blizzard announced that it was scrapping that game in September, because, according to CEO Mike Morhaime, it just wasn't fun enough. The timing of Overwatch's release just a little over a month later, combined with Senior VP of Story and Franchise Development Chris Metzen's statement that the game is "nearer than you think" (this from a company that can take half a decade to deliver an announced game), certainly bear that report out.
This is also Blizzard's first attempt at a first-person shooter. Morhaime is pitching the team-based blastathon as "more accessible to a much wider audience while delivering the action and depth that shooter fans love." Imagine the United Nations with a mandate to scour the planet for malefactors and jackanapes, waging heavy peace and putting down major conflicts. Then imagine that same group in decline, which is where you come in as Overwatch kicks off, looking to ramp up with squadrons of humans sporting mechanical angel wings, bionic gorillas and faceplate-masked mercenaries. Players band together in six-person teams, then do battle in futuristic versions of global hotspots, capturing or defending points and shlepping (or attacking) payloads around various maps. Blizzard says battle locales will be vertically volatile ("fights can shift from streets to rooftops to open skies") as well as include design elements that complement each character's special abilities.
Hero types revealed so far include an acrobat who can teleport, drop energy bombs, and reverse time (Tracer); a tank-like character who can charge enemies, pin them to walls and knock them to the ground with a rocket hammer (Reinhardt); a ranged class who can scale walls, illuminate enemies for the team and conjure a mass damage-dealing dragon spirit (Hanzo); and a tech who uses light as a shield and a weapon or teleport allies to the front lines (Symmetra).
The BlizzCon demo loaded onto some 600 computers at the event includes 12 playable heroes, but Blizzard says new heroes and maps will be coming as development rolls forward. Look for the beta test sometime in 2015.
