Overwatch May Come To Consoles In The Future

Remember that Overwatch trademark filed by Blizzard Entertainment many months ago that we reported first? Well, yesterday it was officially announced during Blizzcon 2014. It’s a team based first person multiplayer shooter which clearly draws inspiration from Valve‘s Team Fortress 2, although the flavor of heroes is very much reminiscent of other Blizzard games.

Overwatch is already playable at Blizzcon and there are twelve heroes right now, although it was already confirmed that many more will be added. We’ve embedded the first gameplay footage below, but a lot more information came out from the following panel; for example, the developers are intentionally making a less lethal shooter than your average FPS, meaning that TTK (time to kill) will be higher, allowing players to interact with each other more.

Team size will be 6 vs 6, as they found out that with a higher player count single team members would be too inconsequential, while on the other hand with a lower player count they would be too important. There won’t be any pure deathmatch mode in Overwatch, as gameplay is all about team cooperation; two modes mentioned are Payload and Capture Point.

There won’t be any gameplay customization, as Blizzard found out that there are too many heroes in Overwatch; however, there will be some sort of long term progression. Interestingly, you can change hero each time you die; heroes are loosely grouped in offense, defense, tank and support roles, though every hero will do his/her role very differently.

 

It was also confirmed that some elements of Titan have been moved to Overwatch, though they eventually decided to make a game about heroes, which changed everything. In terms of business model, they don’t know yet if it’s going to be F2P or B2P; obviously the release is initially scheduled for PC (with a beta coming in 2015), but they’re open to bring the game on consoles in the future, as we hinted in the title.

It’s been 17 years since Blizzard announced a new IP, which means that yesterday was quite important in gaming history. What do you think of Overwatch so far? Tell us below!