Overwatch may not have a traditional narrative, but Blizzard’s making up for it with some killer short films.
Dragons tells the background tale of Hanzo and Genji, a pair of master assassins who once belonged to the criminal Shimada clan, in Japan. One is concerned with proving he’s the deadliest killer in the world. The other is trying to come to terms with being a cyborg. And the thing is, you won’t actually get much if any of this from playing the game.
Overwatch is a team-based, competitive, multiplayer, first-person shooter that does not feature a single-player campaign. The game has deep fiction in terms of Earth’s history and the origins of its 21 playable heroes, but it has no narrative the way we traditionally think of story in games. For Overwatch’s story, you mostly have to turn to these animated shorts.
And Blizzard being Blizzard, i.e. a studio that doesn’t half-ass its work, the Overwatch shorts continue to be quite good.
Other multiplayer first-person shooters like Brink and Titanfall have tried the same strategy as Overwatch, focusing entirely on competitive play and eschewing a single-player campaign. It didn’t work well for Brink. No one seemed to care with Titanfall, because the multiplayer was excellent.
Overwatch is also making a clear play to become the next esport, which suggests that players really might not care about whether there is or isn’t a story in the game.
We’ll find out soon. Overwatch will be released for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on May 24.