Last week during BlizzCon 2014, Activision Blizzard revealed Overwatch, the company's first new franchise in 17 years. The game will be a team-based first-person shooter that anyone can pick up and play, pitting six players against another team of six. Overwatch is scheduled to go into beta sometime in 2015.
Game Director Jeff Kaplan recently spilled a few details about the upcoming shooter, revealing that it will not have a single-player campaign. Why? Because such a campaign may get in the way of the multiplayer component, which is the game's foundation. Each character was not only designed for the multiplayer area, but to work alongside other characters, not on their own.
"I don't think we would ever do a single-player campaign, because the way these characters work... they're cool when you combine them together," explained Kaplan. "Some don't play well alone, either. Unless we built a campaign around supporting somebody else, a support character like Mercy probably wouldn't do well."
Kaplan said there will be a story, and the characters will bring it to life thanks to scripted in-game chatter in each match. As previously reported, players will have twelve to choose from: Reaper, Widowmaker, Winston, Pharah, Torbjorn, Bastion, Mercy, Zenyatta, Tracer, Reinhardt, Hanzo and Symmetra. They each will have their own set of abilities, weapons and armor. However, these won't be the only player characters in the field.
According to Kaplan, the team is hoping to churn out additional characters in the future. He said that Overwatch is an "infinitely expandable universe," but don't expect to see 800 characters on the roster.
"What we're excited about is that there's no shortage of ideas or space to explore that would risk homogenizing any of our current characters," Kaplan said. "We don't have characters that do 'X' versus 'X plus one.' If we ever hit a wall where we felt like we were cannibalizing and homogenizing, we would definitely back off."
He admitted that Blizzard wasn't sure if Overwatch will be free-to-play, and he added that the developer doesn't want players to feel ripped off. What could be possible here is that Blizzard will sell the game and provide multiplayer servers at no additional cost. Or the studio may provide the game for free and allow players to purchase new characters, gear and so on.
The full interview with Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan can be read right here.
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