Blizzard’s new project Overwatch, a team shooter, is currently in Alpha. Initial reports are now surfacing.
PC Gamer shares their trip into the world of Overwatch. It confirms the impression one received from the game at Blizzcon: It is supposed to be a shooter for those who generally do not like shooters.
Just as Blizzard created a more accessible version of Magic: The Gathering with Hearthstone and a lighter version of Everquest with World of Warcraft, they now aim to tackle a new genre and apply known design principles. Blizzard’s designers want to make the team shooter appealing to a broader audience.
At the forefront is the aim to remove the “ugliness” and “mean-spiritedness” from the genre, Chris Metzen from Blizzard’s creative team is quoted. Everyone should feel like they can contribute to the victory without feeling like they’ve completely messed it up. It should be a positive experience. An experience for everyone. Never should metrics like the kill/death ratio matter.
They will approach the shooter genre with humility. They know how much PC gamers love it.
Overwatch: Design Goals and Ideas
- Overwatch should be accessible, allowing players to jump right in.
- It should be crazy, exaggerated, and highly stylized. They even started the presentation with Winston, a talking monkey. The characters often represent “cliches”, pop culture prototypes, and are designed accordingly: The cyborg, the samurai, the guy in a rocket suit, the modern knight.
- The battlegrounds are also “exaggerated representations” of familiar places on Earth: In London, there is the typical red double-decker bus, in Egypt the Sphinx and dog-headed Anubis statues, in Japan the cherry blossoms. Overall, this design idea reminded the tester a bit of Street Fighter.
- However, they do not want to be brutal or mean-spirited, but instead depict positive characters in a fight, without bloodshed. With humorous dialogue and a colorful aesthetic.
- The longest kill streak in the game will be shown to everyone again as a “Play of the Game” after the match ends.
- The game aims to be spectacular and the individual combinations of characters should allow for synergy effects: In the payload mode (inspired by Team Fortress 2), it makes sense to place a turret on the payload to be protected by another hero through a bubble: Voilá. A mobile, armored turret.
- As with Hearthstone, players should be able to tell stories about their matches afterwards.
- According to Blizzard, the game lends itself to eSports, but the community needs to decide that. They definitely aim to make it fun to watch a match.
Currently, the game lacks much fine-tuning and balance according to the tester. The use of different weapons did not always feel satisfactory. Also, the lags cost a lot of the gaming experience. There is a lot to be done before the start of beta in 2015.
Blizzard knows this as well. As Chris Metzen says, they have years of experience in designing multiplayer PvP titles, but this is their first shooter.
There is still no release date for Overwatch.
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