Once the organized hordes disguised as lines of people were let on to the Expo Hall on the first morning of PAX East 2015, it only took five minutes for there to be a two hour long wait for Blizzard Entertainment’s demo for their new IP, Overwatch. Fans sardined themselves against other eager gamers waiting patiently, some with their morning coffee still clutched in their hands. It were as though many gamers trekked through the blistering cold of Boston to attend PAX, while many others trekked through the blistering cold of Boston to get their hands on Overwatch for a short period of time.
Overwatch is a first-person shooter, an unusual genre for Blizzard Entertainment who are most famous for real time strategy games like the Starcraft series and of course the insanely popular MMORPG World of Warcraft. And yes, it’s looking like Overwatch is going to claim a population of gamers large enough for it’s own nation just like it’s developer’s predecessors. So far, two modes of online play have been revealed that involve two teams of six players. Set in the future, players will take control over one of twelve heroes who are celebrated for their bravery and courage in standing up for humanity by ending a previous catastrophic war.
Two of those heroes were revealed today. One is McCree, a bounty hunter straight out of a futuristic western who sports a revolver and a belt buckle that says “BAMF”. The other, however, is a direct response to the much needed diversity in games that’s caused so much discussion in the last few years. Her name is Zarya. She is Russian, she is androgynous, and she would make your grandfather confused about the things he’s feeling.
This brings the total number of revealed Overwatch heroes to 12 (chances are this isn’t the final number). Screens were hovering over the lucky players who’d paid their dues in line displaying either the matches they were in the middle of or helpful explanations of how to use specific characters such as this one:
You can find videos like this for the rest of the characters on the game’s official website.
When I finally got my hands on the game, we were thrown into Point Capture: one team must attack and capture the other team’s defense area. I immediately chose Hanzo, an assassin who wields a bow and arrow. Not only am I a fan of bows, but this guy can also detect enemies behind walls and summon two dragons made of lasers without the use of a European electro duo.
Alas, it could have been the coffee, but the patience and precision it takes to be rewarded for his play style was simply not in my power at the moment. So I switched characters as soon as I could. Luckily, this can be done anytime you die and are waiting to respawn simply by pressing ‘H’ on your keyboard.
I switched to what seemed to be a popular choice: Tracer, a character who’s been showing her face since the announcement trailer. Tracer uses dual pulse pistols to take out her enemies but more interestingly, hitting the ‘shift’ key teleports her a short distance in whatever direction you’re aiming. In addition to having pulse grenades at her disposal, she can also teleport ostensibly back in time to a previous point on the map with the same health and ammo she had at that moment. I found a lot more success with her, bringing myself from penultimate last place to the royal seat of . . . well, fourth place. You do the math, I don’t want to talk about it.
Near the end, I chose Zarya in a panic. With 500 hit points (Hanzo has 200 and Tracer has 150), she’s a tank and if you could tell from her tutorial above, she has a load of crowd control and defense buffs to work with. But before I could do some serious damage, my time was up.
What I loved most was each of these characters felt incredibly unique. Not only with the ones I controlled but the ones I reacted to as well. Seeing Winston and his Hulk-like disregard for jumping in the middle of flying bullets was a sure sign I needed to retreat. On the flip side, finding an enemy Zenyatta show his face around the corner all alone gave me the confidence that I could simply out-maneuver him and take him out. The controls were extremely intuitive; not once did I feel like I needed a tutorial for how I was controlling the character.
So, not only has Blizzard created a FPS that feels great and is easy on players new to the genre, but Overwatch succeeds at something previous shooters have only mildly touched on even with something like 4 to 6 different characters. It’s taken the character uniqueness equivalent of fighters like Street Fighter and implemented that same strategy in a shooter. Not only that but this game is insanely fun to watch! I wasn’t the only one who waited patiently in line while staring at the current matches going on only to be tapped on the shoulder and have my attention shifted to the large empty space in front of me where more attentive people had moved forward from. I could say this game is going to be a behemoth and feed you all kinds of hype. But that honestly wouldn’t add up.
No release date for Overwatch has been announced yet, but what was announced today is that there will be a closed beta scheduled for the end of 2015. You can sign up for that here.