BlizzCon isn’t just about familiar names like Starcraft, Warcraft, and Minecraft, and…wait, nevermind. Anyway, Blizzard have announced their first new IP in what seems like forever, Overwatch, a team-based multiplayer first person shooter.
Overwatch from the get go looks to have a similar team-based concept as Team Fortress 2, with players selecting from a huge array of characters that have their own abilities, strengths and weakness.
The announcement included two trailers, an animated trailer and a gameplay trailer. The animated trailer, which one could easily mistake for an upcoming Pixar movie, gives us a solid idea of Overwatch‘s colorful universe, which seems to be filled to the brim with nearly every idea, character and trope from action games ever. You have the skintight-suit wearing sniper, a cheerful action girl type who teleports at will, a hooded, handcannon wielding reaper who probably hasn’t laughed in ages, and a battlesuit-clad talking Gorilla doing battle in a museum of sorts.
The trailer shows Overwatch to combine the diverse and varied characters that have cropped up in videogames with the family-friendly sensibilities of a Disney movie, the latter of which is quite apparent from the fact that, in spite of the chaos wreaked by all four characters, none of them really manage to harm each other.
The gameplay trailer, meanwhile, shows off the game’s fast-paced, off the wall action as well as more its characters, such as a steampunk-ish dwarf engineer who goes insane when one of his beloved deployable turrets is harmed.
It’s interesting to note that many of Overwatch‘s characters draw influence from a huge variety of cultures and ethnicities, with a pair of characters with Indian origins, a samurai, and the afore-mentioned action girl who has a very distinct Australian accent. Indeed, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said that “Our goal with Overwatch is to create an awesome FPS experience that’s more accessible to a much wider audience while delivering the action and depth that shooter fans love.”
Blizzard are, of course, no slouches when it comes to making games, so even though it’s only just been announced, there’s some reason to believe that Overwatch will be a terrific and unique experience. The game is currently available to play at BlizzCon, but a beta will be arriving next year.