Blizzard’s Overwatch Won’t Have Singleplayer

While Overwatch will have plenty of overarching story bringing the characters and world together, it won’t have a singleplayer campaign.

The “big reveal” of Blizzcon this year was undoubtedly Overwatch, a multiplayer shooter which is the company’s first new IP in nearly two decades. Blizzard were pretty good with details, providing us plenty of images and info on the game’s classes, maps, and game modes, but of course, we still had questions. Kotaku recently sat down with Blizzard to have some of these questions answered. We now know that while the game will have plenty of overarching story bringing the characters and world together, it will unfortunately lack a singleplayer campaign.

“I don’t think we would ever do a singleplayer campaign, because the way these characters work… they’re cool when you combine them together,” explained game director Jeff Kaplan. “Some don’t play well alone, either. Unless we built a campaign around supporting somebody else, a support character like Mercy probably wouldn’t do well.”

He explained that the game’s story will instead unfurl between the in-game chatter of the characters, as well as how they react to maps and other in-game elements. He also added, “I can’t tell you where it’s going, but I can tell you we have a great cinematics department and they’re fired up to have this new universe at their disposal.”

Kotaku also asked some questions about the nature of the game, such as whether or not it will be free-to-play, and if it will be getting new playable characters added in the future. Kaplan remained pretty tight-lipped on the game’s pay structure, but did say that adding new characters is something they want to do. “We kind of see this as an infinitely expandable universe. Now I doubt it’ll have, like, 800 heroes. But what we’re excited about is that there’s no shortage of ideas or space.”

Furthermore, while Kaplan had nothing to announce at this time regarding the game’s modability, he stressed that “I hope fans trust that we’ve embraced modding,” citing the fully-moddable nature of previous titles such as WarCraft III and StarCraft II.

Lastly, hats? “I don’t think you’ll see Team Fortress 2 hats,” replied Kaplan. “That’s been the big question, but I don’t think we’re gonna do hats. I don’t know how we’d put a hat on the Reaper. Put a hat on the hood?”

Source: Kotaku