Category: Overwatch News

Jeff Kaplan stars in the latest Developer Update that goes into a bit more detail about the upcoming competitive mode.

Overwatch feels like a sort of natural evolution of the Team Fortress formula. Blizzard’s taken the basic idea of Team Fortress 2 and managed to modernize it with gameplay elements from the MOBA genre. It’s a hard locked six vs. six affair and there are way more characters (21, to be exact), but they’re ultimately pretty similar games with similar game modes.

Chinese game developers have no shame when it comes to cloning hit games in other regions. The latest is League of Titans, a fervent effort (if poorly executed) to copy Overwatch for mobile devices. They say a picture speaks a thousand words so we’ll just leave you with this video.

Overwatch Game Director Jeff Kaplan has posted on the game’s forum about some of the future plans for Blizzard’s 10M player juggernaut. Kaplan writes that getting competitive play has been the primary focus as the team has been working to implement some of the community’s feedback into the forthcoming update.

Just a couple weeks past release and Blizzard’s Overwatch juggernaut continues to grow, expanding half again from its 7M players on launch day. As of today, Overwatch has scored 10M active players. That’s pretty impressive by any measure.

A fan-made video is creating a stir in the Overwatch community. Styled after typical anime opening sequences, it takes footage from the Overwatch short films, teaser videos and more. It’s fantastically done and worth watching. Check it out!

If there’s one thing that is an immutable fact, it’s that players will find diverse and innovative ways to play games. In one of the more entertaining Overwatch player videos, Team Genji takes on Team Genji in an epic badminton match with Junk Rat as the referee and a pair of Mercys creating the ‘net’. It’s a fun look and one of those “who’d have ever thought of something like this” moments that bring a good laugh.

When asked whether or not there would be cross platform play, @PlayOverwatch, the official Overwatch Twitter account, responded by saying that there were none at this time, though the development team would be keeping an eye on console cross platform play. It is possible that XBox One and PlayStation 4 players could take one another on in Overwatch, but there are no plans for PC and console cross play due to “balance and competitive issues”.

Just over a week after release, Activision-Blizzard has announced that Overwatch has over seven million players taking part in FPS action around the world. In that single week, players have logged over one hundred nineteen million hours of gameplay action.

Blizzard had to take to Twitter to staunch the Overwatch flames that erupted after a tweet went out indicating that competitive play would be coming out “before the end of next month (July)”. Late yesterday afternoon, @PlayOverwatch corrected the error with, you guessed it, another tweet.