Blizzard announces new IP: Overwatch

Well, it happened. After 17 years of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo (and crossovers of them), developer Blizzard is making a new franchise. It’s called Overwatch, and it’s set in a futuristic world where cybernetically enhanced heroes and villains are a reality.

Blizzard unveiled the game at the opening ceremonies for its BlizzCon event today. It showed a CG trailer where heroes and villains battled in a museum dedicated to a group of characters called the Overwatch.

The publisher then showed gameplay footage. Overwatch is a team-based shooter, similar to Valve’s Team Fortress 2, where each cartoony character has different abilities. The maps looked like variants of famous locations like Egypt, Japan, and London.

President Mike Morhaime answered questions about the game at a post-keynote interview during the Virtual Ticket broadcast.

“I don’t know how we kept it a secret for so long,” he said. “It’s a hero-based game. Every game is 6-v.-6, all the maps are objective-based. It’s not a hard game to play, but it’s very deep. It’s hard to be good at it.”

Players who are resurrecting are in safe areas, he said. “That allows you to tune your vulnerability based on your skill level.”

But he postponed the question of whether the PC game would also be available on consoles. “That’s not something we’re really ready to talk about.”

Overwatch enters a beta test in 2015. It is playable at BlizzCon.

Heather Newman contributed to this report.