Blizzard Entertainment, the juggernaut behind the WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo franchises has been known to stick to their three most well-known names. Even their most recent efforts into the free-to-play genre, Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone take from their own universes. However, back in the old days when they made console games more regularly, they had multiple different properties.
Their most recent announcement, which came from the ashes of Project Titan, Overwatch, is a shooter that is in a completely new universe. The beta recently launched, and it seems that the feedback from it is overwhelmingly positive. Similar to Team Fortress 2, Overwatch is a first person shooter that focuses on many different characters with unique weapons and abilities, fighting over various different game modes. Currently, it’s unknown what the actual business model will be, whether it’ll be free-to-play or a full priced release, but what we do known is that for now it’s only been confirmed on PC.
That all may change, as the community have been doing some digging and reckon it’s coming to the newest generation of consoles too. The evidence is as follows; the user interface of the beta is particularly console friendly, and each character has only a handful of abilities, which would be easy to map to a controller. Controller support is already integrated within the game, which is unusual for a PC only shooter these days, when Mouse and Keyboard tend to be more accurate and can outplay anyone using a controller. This could indicate that Blizzard have always had consoles in mind.
One of the best pieces of evidence uncovered comes from Blizzard’s European website, which mentioned consoles in its source code for a brief time, along with authentication checks for PlayStation Network and Xbox Live hidden within the code of the game itself. Adding more to these rumours, Microsoft is working with Blizzard to get their opening ceremony of Blizzcon (Blizzard’s sometimes yearly, sometimes absent convention) live on Xbox One.
Now, US retailer GameStop has begun taking pre-orders for Blizzard’s new shooter on both new consoles. The game will reportedly be a full priced release, without any free-to-play aspects. It’s unusual for a retailer in the US spilling the beans like this, and it’s a huge bit of evidence that an announcement may be near.
Blizzcon is set to open this Friday and runs through the weekend. It’s expected that the long awaited trailer for the WarCraft movie will be shown, as well as announcements for their main franchises, including a rumoured expansion that is coming to Diablo 3 (currently available on consoles via the Ultimate Evil Edition.) It will be interesting to see if we do hear the announcement that Overwatch is coming to consoles, but we will definitely hear more about the game this weekend.
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