Overwatch Watch: Another 35 Minutes Of Blizzard's FPS
MOBA-tinged TF2
Blizzard are jolly good at observing trends in games, noting what other developers are doing, then reworking existing ideas to repackage into a polished and accessible game of their own. EverQuest and other MMORPGs became World of Warcraft, Hearthstone riffs heavily on Magic: The Gathering, Heroes of the Storm is one of the few interesting League of Legends/Dota-inspired doodads, and Overwatch [official site]... hm. I'm not sure Overwatch is working out so well.
More long gameplay videos showing complete rounds are arriving, and the more I see, the more I think Overwatch looks like an iffy attempt to combine MOBAs and Valve's Team Fortress 2.
Here's gunslinger McCree playing a round on a Payload mode map (escort a self-moving MacGuffin by standing near it). Somehow he makes a revolver look boring, and y'all know how much I like FPS revolvers.
Over here we have Hanzo, an archer whose wall-climbing does look pretty fun.
And here's Mercy, a Team Fortress 2 Kritzkrieg Medic who of course wears tight armour highlighting her tracts of land.
I'm really not digging it. The characters are very MOBA-y and pretty disparate, which is more noticeable when folks fill the whole screen. The environment style has TF2-ish clean painterly texturing in places, but then fills the levels with props and guff. From what these videos show, the flow of battle looks... I don't like it. It just looks a bit of a spammy mess.
Also, this 'London' accent is ear-splittingly awful.
No word on a release date yet, but you can sign up for the beta.