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Blizzard Announces Overwatch, a First-Person Shooter
Today at Blizzcon, Blizzard announced its first new franchise in 17 years: Overwatch. It's a first-person shooter, a type of game Blizzard hasn't made before. It seems to be based on team deathmatch combat, with a number of characters/classes that all have different abilities. The beta test will start sometime in 2015 (you can sign-up here at the official site, unless it gets crushed by traffic). Game director Jeffrey Kaplan (a.k.a. Tigole) said one of their big goals is to make it an approachable game in a way shooters often aren't. A cinematic trailer is available, as is a gameplay trailer. Blizzard has set up stations for players at Blizzcon to play Overwatch this weekend, so more details will be coming soon.
Hmmm, let's see:
- Autoaim
- Regenerating HP
- Tons of ammo
- OP weapons
- HUGE hitboxes
Thanks, I think I'll pass...
Let me guess, if you don't send your SSN and fingerprints you'll get locked out of your own game?
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Blizzard just hasn't been the same since Activision
Looks like team fortress 2, albeit with less hats.
Looks like Team Fortress to me. This one is a fail. Sorry, Bliz. You have a great track record, but this one is a dud.
Hey, remember back when Sony had the big PS4 announcement, and they brought Blizzard on stage. During this time, Blizzard said they would be showcasing a brand new IP at the following PAX East... and it turned out to be a fucking card game.
So is this what they were SUPPOSED to showcase a year and a half ago?
Looks like a sloppy TF2 clone. Probably pay to win as well. Nothing to see here, keep playing TF2. Another nail in the coffin of what use to be a great game company.
Looks like WoW themed Team Fortress 2 to me. Maybe they want in on that sweet sweet F2P money without letting their cash cow out of the pasture.
It looks like one of the modded versions of Tribes I used to play in the late 90's. Definitely improved graphics and such, I wonder how the game play will be different. As a person who was a true Starcraft junkie, I rarely dismiss what Blizzard creates.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Looks more like Team Fortress 2 than Destiny to me. I'm just surprised it's PC only. They sure as shit aren't going to get Destiny numbers if they're releasing it PC only.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Don't humor yourselves, slashdot editors. We don't have enough traffic to take down a small conservative blog anymore, let alone a web page hosted by Blizzard. They know what they're doing, at least when they put up a website.
Have any sites gone down in the past 12 months from too much slashdot traffic? I haven't heard of any. We didn't even take down any of the small-time gun 3D printing sites, which are practically the bread and butter of this site now.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm not sure Destiny is going to last.
It's pretty awesome, I'll give it that, but it's also pretty repetitive, and a lot of its players are already off to the next game -- which incidentally was COD:AW.
Yes. That's exactly it. 3 days ago they read that exact announcement and said, "Oh shit, we better make ourselves a sci-fi FPS!"
I was thinking the same thing. It looks a Lot like Team fortress 2... with a bit of anime thrown in.
F2P is already dead. It was clever at first, but those of us that railed against it (myself included) ended up being dead right about where it would lead to. Ripoff and ripoff, until you couldn't trust any developer at all. Culminating, of course, in the penultimate pay-to-win ripoff, ElderScrolls online. Where the games $60 upfront. AND there's a $15/month subscription just to play. AND there's a cash store so you can pay to win. It's easily the biggest flop of the year... maybe even the decade.
What was the last game Blizzard made that was PC only?
So yet another first person shooter from a formerly innovative game company.
No thanks.
Fired for continuing a proven winning strategy?
Wow? Clone.
Warcraft? Clone.
Diablo? Clone.
Starcraft? OMG clone.
Hearthstone? Clone.
These are the games that made them billions of dollars. They didn't get put on the map by being experimental; they take a proven (or in some cases, dead and expired) genre and steal all the best bits from everyone else and give players what they want.
Starcraft II.
It definitely has a TF2 look (and absolutely some copied aspects), though I also see some almsot LOL style strategy play (assuming the balance it properly). I agree the gameplay trailer made most characters seem a bit overpowered, but it was made in a way that is more like a trailer than actual game play. I'm intrigued but certainly not sold. I'd like to see how they plan to allow match development. All in all, it looks nice, and if blizzard can get the mechanics solid it could be a very interesting game.
Warlords of Draenor... which is being released on November 13th. Before that would have been Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm in 2013.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I suspect 'PC only' was intended to rule out consoles, not Mac.
A Mac is a PC and Overwatch will be released for OS X just like basically every other Blizzard game.
They are so overbearing toward their customers and fans, they simply aren't worth it.
Someone bring back Tribes already.
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It's not actually the last PC only game they released, but I think the answer you're looking for is World of Warcraft.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I'm not so sure about that. I play Warframe which is F2P and have yet to see anything I'd have to pay money for if I didn't feel like it. It's a great game too.
And yet Tera would disagree with you about F2P models. Almost everything is cosmetic, and as for the P2W item that people birch about (PP Bolster for crafting) is a waste. EME let's you have 10 accounts per IP. All the top tier end game gear requires 1 or two types non tradeable, non bankable items to craft. Sure, I've made enough gold to buy the other mats 10 times over, but i still have to grind line everyone else. Oh yeah, and DotA 2 and LoL have some words to say about F2P being dead.
While I generally agree with you about Blizzard being a company that refines genres rather than creating them, I do think this is a little different in terms of the age/maturity of the genre in question.
When Warcraft was released, there was really only one other game that we would traditionally think of as something approaching a modern RTS (yes I'm familiar with earlier games like Mule but don't count them here) and that was Dune 2 by Westwood (who went on to make Command and Conquer). So while Warcraft was not the first RTS, the modern RTS genre was still young and very much shaped by the work of Blizzard (and others like the aforementioned Westwood).
When WoW was released, the biggest MMO's were games like Everquest and Ultima Online along with a smattering of indie games. Again, the MMO genre was still relatively young and was forever reshaped by the release of WoW.
I think similar arguments could be made for Diablo, although I'm not as familiar with the predecessors to speak of the specific lineages. Although most successors are still compared to Diablo.
Starcraft was more of a sequel to Warcraft rather than a real clone. Heck, the derogatory term for early public showings was "Orcs in Space...." before they overhauled into what was finally released.
Hearthstone and the upcoming Blizzard DotAlike game are two cases where I would agree that the genres were both relatively mature before Blizzard took a swing. These are also the only truly new games (not sequels or expansions of existing games) that have come out since the Activision acquisition so that is kind of telling of a strategic shift in Blizzard's game development practices.
Ultimately though, the FPS genre is positively elderly in comparison to most of these genres. I'm just not sure how much Blizzard can do to really put their stamp on it and the gameplay trailer itself, while cool looking, doesn't really show me anything that turns FPS games on their head.
pc does actually stand for something you know. Just because it's been shorthanded to "windows" doesn't mean the original definition isn't still valid. Also, the newest definition is being delineated in the pc vs console continuum vs the pc vs linux vs mac continuum.
what was the last Blizzard game released on Consoles?
personally i don't have a problem with that.
I really would like someone to make a good wolf ET clone. that would be baller.
World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
Diablo 3, though before that it was Starcraft for N64 and Lost Vikings 2 for PS1.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
WoW is not the last game that was not released on a console
I know, that's why my comment opened with
It's not actually the last PC only game they released
It was, however, only released on Personal Computer platforms, including Windows, OSX, and a Linux beta.
It is also what the person I was replying to was looking for as an answer, to make a point about PC only games being able to attract large userbases.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
>Your entertainment should serve you, not the other way around.
You're not talking about personal entertainment, you're talking about hanging out with your friends. It's never been possible to DVR friendship so you can hang out on your own schedule instead of everyone's. You're just not making sense.
Where's the Pizza Planet Truck?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
They did, and it failed. Tribes: Ascend.
hold the phone professor. What cash shop are you referring to in ESO? Other than.. paying for a horse? or race choice?
F2p is more like "buy this potion for 2 hours of quadruple experience!" or "buy this uber sword of slaying!" ESO was selling fluff. The monthly fee + box sale is.. well maybe a bit outmoded, but it's been the norm for MMO's for quite sometime. Until, interestingly enough - the *actual* F2P games came out.
More like Incredibles themed than WoW themed, but with "technology" instead of superpowers.
And why does it have a backstory shoe-horned into it away? How is that supposed to translate into "capture the flag" or whatever?
Wrong. I play SC2 on my mac ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
What does PC stand for again?
Umm, didn't Blizzard just recently can a game they were working on? I can't remember the name off-hand, but I'm fairly sure this wasn't their first attempt at a new IP in the past 15+ years.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
If you install Windows on a mac, does it turn into a "PC"? What's a "PC" called if you install Linux on it? It seems like a pretty useless definition.
What?
I've noticed the usual slew of comments along the lines of "I won't play because of Blizzard DRM", "This is a failed idea because Blizzard has dumbed-down the genre too much," etc..
But I'm keeping in-mind the first few words of the summary: "Today at Blizzcon". "Blizzcon". Not "E3", not "PAX". This is a gaming company that has a large enough fanbase and IP that they run their own convention on a semi-yearly basis. They're a juggernaut.
Somehow, I think Blizzard is going to produce a solid game with this. Maybe it'll have fundamental flaws at first (Diablo3+auction house), but the company's shown a willingness to learn from atrocious mistakes and turn-around their failures (D3expansion nixing auction house and soulbinding most items, including gold, and firing Jay Wilson).
Also, on a slightly different subject... Looking at all these comments about DRM just makes me feel like the majority of Slashdot commenters are becoming out-of-touch with modern gaming. The "always-connected DRM" ship has sailed for modern, highly-polished gaming experiences. If you want to play a modern blockbuster, you're going to have to put up with always-connected DRM. There's no need to tell us that you're not playing X because of the DRM - yep, we get it, you don't play popular games anymore.
(Or maybe you've pirated it to avoid the DRM -- but you didn't do that out of anti-DRM principle; you did that because you didn't want to pay for the game.)
Hardly useless when it makes perfect sense.
The game play trailer looks like there's third-person perspective, too? Which would be great for those of us who puke when playing FPSs
Bark less. Wag more.
You can just pay them 30 USD to unlock everything. Basically either buy the game or slowly unlock everything for free.
http://www.hirezstudios.com/tr...
There's already a game called "Overwatch"
It's a mod for the DayZ mod.
That's the problem, it doesn't make sense. When talking platforms, you'll distinguish by processor/instruction set or by OS family. Can you show an example (other than when installing OSX) where your definition of PC is better than using the OS family?
What?
That was truly epic shit eh? And what about city raids? Ah, I miss that.
"Wrath of the Lich King was the last expansion that was mostly completed before the acquisition"
Yep. It would have been nice to see a change of direction in WotLK. Arthas was pretty epic, and I said then that I didn't think they were going to be able to top it. They should have let that remain the end game, and move away from the level cap increase expansion model. You're the only one getting $15 a month; Blizz makes the Mormon church jealous with the loyalty of it's parishioners. Leverage that. That gives you a lot more freedom to grow the game than the competitors.
So, here's the corporate board meeting where the Activision PHB says:
"We've got 20 million subscribers, the biggest possible smashing success that an MMO could dream of."
"So, what we're going to do is, make big changes. We're going to throw away or trivialize the countless hours of work and investment in the content that got us here, combined with literally destroying large parts of the game world, while alienating the creators and players with a passion for the game.
Also, we have a new dragon, and later, there's pandas."
The board claps and says, "Yea."
You can't make that shit up.
And if you don't count the gorilla, there's an equal number of playable ladies & dudes. The body-type on the ladies is a little cookie-cutter for my tastes, but it's a heck of a lot better than almost any other shooter I can think of in recent memory.
The term PC was invented by IBM to describe the original IBM-PC.
Windows PC's are the descendants of the IBM-PC. Macs aren't. Which is why "PC" implies "Windows PC" everywhere and always in the software business unless it is prefixed by "Linux" or "Chrome".
The logic of what "PC" should or shouldn't mean is irrelevant. Language is a system of practice, not logic.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Damned kids.
A personal computer could be an Atari, an Amiga, a DOS box, a Sun workstation, ....
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Maybe I'll eat my words if the game play is an improvement over TF, but this reeks of design-by-committee. I thought Dialbo III might have just suffered from putting the WoW team on it, but now it really does look like Blizzard has jumped the shark.
for a cooldown in the trailer? You know, you don't have to show the boring part where you balance gameplay in the *bleepin'* trailer...
While I'm on the subject, did Pixar do the trailer? If not they should sue. It looks so much like the Incredibles I was genuinely disappointed when nobody in red tights showed up.
It does look like it's gonna be another generic class based shooter though. It's gonna be hard for blizzard to pry users away from Valve. Funny, because they usually are on the other end of that equation with WoW.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Damn kids, thinking all computers are PCs.
And why does it have a backstory shoe-horned into it away? How is that supposed to translate into "capture the flag" or whatever?
Incidentally, TF2's backstory when it came out was:
Two companies that each control half the worlds governments are secretly controlled by one person who force them to fight each other over useless objectives to keep up appearances.
It wasn't until the first Halloween update (a year after the game came out) that that any semblance of a real plot involving the Mann family and Saxton Hale came about. Which is funny since the Mann family plot started as an excuse to have a ghost on the then-new Halloween map.
The TF2 backstory is now... complicated. And entirely unnecessary to just play the game.
On a side note, TF2 lore is separated into 4 sections: Original Game (back story prior to most of the game's modes), The Australium Saga (happens between original game and the DoomsDay map), Blood Brothers (happens between the Australium Saga and the MvM game mode), and Ring of Fired (post-MvM story and likely ties into the Asteroid map currently in beta). This is ignoring the non-canon Halloween storylines.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
That is nonsense. ...
PC might imply Windows for laymen.
Pros use the OS, hint read some "requirements" for professional software (and games count as that): operation system, processor, ram, harddisk, graphics
No one writes 'PC' because most certainly the software will run as well on a work station, mini computer, laptop or even tablet as long as the above mentioned speccs are honoured.
If you 'believe' otherwise, you are certainly NOT a pro.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Game director Jeffrey Kaplan (a.k.a. Tigole) said one of their big goals is to make it an approachable game in a way shooters often aren't
This is likely just meanless talk for the stockholders. But I highly doubt that is a good idea. The problem with modern shooters, especially consoles, is the skill ceiling is so low that it becomes random chance for anyone over the few months of play mark. This just won't work well for PC gamers who still play CS in large numbers everyday. Even Team Fortress was not really casual. Only casual relatively and it inherited a lot of people from the older smaller video game crowds and it's player base can not be called casual compared to a Halo or Call of Duty 'press F to pay respects' crowd.