Overwatch is a team-based first-person shooter developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in May 2016. The game, while having several different play modes, generally features two teams of six players each, selecting pre-made heroes from the game's roster, to either attack or defend various objective points on the game's maps. The game supports casual game modes as well as ranked competitive play. Since release, Overwatch has been both critically and financially successful, with a player base of 35 million players as of October 2017.
The development of Overwatch started in the fallout following Blizzard's decision to cancel continued development of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Titan around 2013. After most of the rest of the team was transferred to other projects, the remaining team members, led by director Jeff Kaplan, came up with the concept of a team-based shooter that borrowed elements from other online shooters like Team Fortress 2 and multiplayer online battle arenas. Many of Overwatchs early assets were borrowed from Titan to obtain a proof-of-concept to greenlight further development. The consequences of Titans cancellation also led into creating a narrative of an optimistic near-future setting for the game, taking place some decades after the formation of the peacekeeping Overwatch team, created in response to a robotic uprising known as the Omnic War.
Since release, the Overwatch developments continue to produce more content, released free for all, for the title, including new hero characters, maps, game modes, seasonal events, customization options for the characters, and external media such as digital comics and shorts to help support the narrative and character's backstories. Blizzard has also made changes to make Overwatch more compatible for professional esports, including support for its Overwatch League that started its first season in January 2018.
Development Concept Development of Overwatch followed after the cancellation of the ambitious massively multiplayer online role-playing game Titan, a game that had been in development at Blizzard for seven years since around 2007. Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan said that Titan was a class-based shooter game, with each class having a core set of abilities that the player would expand upon via a skill tree progression; these skills got more powerful the farther the player progressed, and Kaplan said that it ended up being "very cluttered and confused". Blizzard co-founder Michael Morhaime stated that with Titan, "We didn't find the fun. We didn't find the passion." even after re-evaluating the project.
Titan was canceled internally by May 2013 in what became known as the "White Chair Meeting", where management had set up white chairs in their longue to announce the cancellation. The large Titan team of 140 members was broken up: 80 were permanently relocated to other divisions in Blizzard, twenty put on loan to other Blizzard projects, and the remaining 40 tasked to come up with a new project within six weeks, otherwise they would be assigned to other groups within Blizzard. Among ideas tossed suggested by this time was Crossroads, an MMO set in an outpost in space that would have been a crossroads for many different alien species. This game would have featured several different character classes, upwards of fifty, which Kaplan thought would be difficult but remained a core concept of Crossroads. They also considered developing a tie-in to the Starcraft universe, focused around individual characters within that universe.
Creative director Chris Metzen noted that to avoid the same failure that Titan became, their group had to rethink how Blizzard's more successful games had come about, ignoring the scale and business opportunity of the result and instead understand what tools and skills they had already to build from. In brainstorming ideas, the team thought about the current state of first-person shooters (FPS), a genre that many on the team had played throughout their careers, which has enjoyed many groundbreaking titles but still has a potential for innovation, according to Kaplan. Kaplan stated that some of the ideas in the current FPS they wanted to emulate were the use of in-game maneuvers like rocket jumping and grappling hooks that helped players move with fluidity across maps and team-based shooters such as Team Fortress Classic and Team Fortress 2. At the same time, multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games were starting to take off, which required players to cooperate with others to successfully win the match. Kaplan said that their team considered how to adapt the large-scale and fast-paced gameplay of Team Fortress 2 with the smaller scale and cooperative nature of MOBAs, forming the basis of Overwatch. Metzen also commented that the concept of teamwork in Overwatch was partially influenced by their own team's current morale following the cancellation of Titan. Metzen said that during Titans development, the team was highly fractured which impacted the project's cancellation. On starting Overwatch with a smaller group, they all wanted to come together and support each other to make their next game a success, "a redemption story for us as people and as craftsmen". Morhaime described Overwatchs intention as to "create an awesome [first-person shooter] experience that's more accessible to a much wider audience while delivering the action and depth that shooter fans love." On the FPS nature of the game, Kaplan commented that "the real focus of the shooting in the game is not to chase realism. We don't have real world guns in the game. You're not playing a soldier in a present-day military conflict." Simplicity of design was a high-value goal, taking cues from the success of the simple approach used in Blizzard's Hearthstone.
From a narrative and artistic standpoint, Overwatchs approach came out of emotional impact of the failed Titan development. Kaplan said his small team was "very nervous about our future" when tasked to come up with a new game concept, but this soon solidified into the idea of "a future worth fighting for", which had also been a phrase used internally for Titans development. This gave them the idea to set the game in a near future, and started evaluating other games set in the same period, including recent Call of Duty and Battlefield games as well as The Last of Us and Fallout 4, but found all these titles presented a dark version of the future. Further, they were aware that of the various expansions for World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, had some of the least-visited areas, which they attributed to the oppressive visuals. Instead of these darker futures, they wanted to present a narrative and world that was more optimistic with brighter visuals that would help draw in players.
With core ideas down, the remaining Titan team began putting these together as a prototype to present to management under the codename Prometheus, according to Aaron Keller. They took the classes they had made for Titan and remade these as Heroes, giving them core abilities from the Titan skill set they believed worked best together, and developing backstory and personality for the heroes. Existing art assets from Titan for the various player avatars were also reused and refined to create the appearance of the heroes. The initial gameplay used maps they had developed for Titan along with Tracer, one of the reworked Titan heroes; at that point, they had not included any animations so Tracer would fire by shooting lasers out of her eyes. The prototype proved successful within Blizzard, and the team was given the greenlight to proceed. Keller said that when they showed the image of the heroes that they had redesigned for Prometheus to management at an October 2013 pitch meeting, that was "the moment where the room transformed from doubtful to excited about what this game could be." Overwatch became Blizzard's second attempt at launching a new franchise since StarCraft in 1998. Some of the additional heroes came from the classes they created for the Crossroads concept as well as the Starcraft tie-in that they brainstormed prior to settling on Overwatch.
Technical development Once greenlit from the October 2013 pitch meeting, the team had about 13 months to complete a version of the game to announce at the November 2014 BlizzCon. Initial development of the game began with creating the first Hero character, Tracer, who was based on a character from Titan with similar time-manipulation abilities. They used Tracer and a single map based on the Temple of Anubis, to test how well the core mechanics played, according to assistant game director Aaron Keller. They added three more Heroes—Widowmaker, Reaper, and Pharah, all of whom had been developed from Crossroads classes—to start polishing the gameplay mechanics, which even at this stage Keller stated that it compared very closely with what the released game would present. They had even considered releasing Overwatch with a limited set of heroes at this point, as they had felt the game already had a finished feel to it.
Instead, they spent about two years on developing out the rest of the characters, gameplay balance, and graphics. Characters were generally added to the game for one of three reasons: to introduce a new gameplay mechanic or balance gameplay, to incorporate a new character design created by their artistic team, or to help support Overwatchs narrative. Some characters were adaptions from the Titan classes: Reinhardt had started as the "Juggernaut" character from Titan, for example. In addition to character balance, the development team needed to find ways to balance the characters with the various maps, wanting to provide areas across the maps for each character to have an area where they could be effective. The number of characters in the game was not fixed; though released with 21 different heroes, Kaplan stated the team played around with various goals, potentially as high as 40 unique heroes and across six different classes. Kaplan knew they had to have more than nine heroes as to separate themselves from Team Fortress 2, which featured nine distinct classes. Kaplan credits Geoff Goodman, a veteran designer in Blizzard, for figuring out the right number of heroes, classes, and balance between the characters. Keller noted that as the cast approached 15 characters, the team started to worry that there were too many for players to learn and may dilute the experience, but they strived to assure both uniqueness and balance across the slate of Heroes. The team felt the game was ready for release in November 2015 after adding the last two characters, Mei and D.Va, to the roster.