Overwatch Leads 2016 s Game Awards Winners

After a few minutes, it was clear that Blizzard’s biggest goal when creating Overwatch was to instill a sense of inclusivity, and this extends beyond the ethnicities of the playable characters. Aside from characters that originate from countries such as Brazil, China, Japan, India, the United Kingdom and more, Overwatch features a nice mix of both female and male characters. And while plenty of the female characters resemble the traditional female body types seen in games, characters such as Mei and Zarya buck the trend of tall, slender females. There’s also a couple of robot characters and a highly-intelligent gorilla, which just showcases Blizzard’s creative abilities even more.


Yesterday evening (December 1st, at the time of writing this) was the night of the annual Game Awards show, a lavish live-streamed spectacle where the best and brightest of the video games industry gathered in Los Angeles - in order to receive awards voted on by industry peers and journalists, celebrating the year in gaming. It was a good night for big-name hits like Uncharted 4: A Thief's End , the reboot of DOOM and Blizzard's mega-selling team shooter **Overwatch ** , as well as respected independent titles like That Dragon Cancer - and it was a chance for those in attendance to show off all-new trailers for upcoming tit

The game also does its best to highlight the contributions of all players, regardless of playstyle. In-game kills, captures, ‘blocks’ and defends are handed out quite liberally, and your contribution to taking out an enemy (for example) is rewarded with points and an on-screen message, regardless of whether you landed 1 point of damage or 100. A single ‘play of the game’ is shown off at the end of a game, and these highlights often include players in support roles, who didn’t contribute offensively. An MVP system between matches also allows players to cast their vote for an MVP, rewarding a player based on conditions such as kills, captures and damage dealt, along with more defensive plays like ‘most healing’ or time spent freezing enemies. It’s an excellent addition that de-emphasizes the importance of pure offensive play, and it helps (in addition to the other aforementioned design choices) to cultivate a sense of team play, rather than a lone wolf approach to victory.

Winston's first ability, his Jump Pack, functions both as a way deal massive damage and a method for increasing mobility. This ability allows him to launch a large distance based on whichever direction the reticle is facing. Not only does this allow Winston to escape battle or get to an objective quickly, but it also gives him the power to harm any enemies in the immediate vicinity of his landing spot. While new players will often just launch forward, more experienced players know that vertical boosts will allow for localized damage.


It’s not surprising that Overwatch would be multiplayer-focused - it is, after all, from the company that made the most successful online RPG in history - but considering their high-quality single-player experiences offered in Diablo , Starcraft , and past Warcraft games, the complete absence of any single player mode aside from tutorials is a bit of a shock. There isn’t even a way to play multiplayer matches offline, as fighting teams of AI players still requires a whole team of other people. As good as the multiplayer is, the game certainly wouldn’t lose anything from some sort of dedicated single-player mode. If it told more of the story alluded to in Blizzard’s incredible trailers and shorts, it would further cement Overwatch as a phenomenal g
Perhaps the slowest character of the bunch, Roadhog is a tank in every sense of the term. With 600 hitpoints, Soldier 76 Skin Roadhog has the highest health count of any of Overwatch's heroes, and he puts that to good use with his Scrap Gun, a shotgun-like weapon with diminishing power based on range. If you choose to play as this beer-gutted savage, you're going to want to be right up in the action at all times, as one shot from point-blank range will take out pretty much any other hero. Of course, this also means that he's fairly vulnerable to snipers, as he's a massive target that can't really fight back against enemies that are out of range of his weapons and abilities.


Overwatch is easily the goofiest of Blizzard’s main franchises, and as such there’s a big amount of tongue-in-cheek humor snuck into the game. One map features an arcade with nods to Starcraft and Heroes of the Storm . One of the game’s playable characters, mech pilot D.Va, is a competitive Starcraft 2 player. Swedish cyborg dwarf Torbjörn’s ultimate ability, Molten Core, shares a name with an infamous raid from World of Warcraft (one so famous that it might even appear in a sequel to the Warcraft movie. ) The Hollywood map features even more obscure references, with the names of characters from Blizzard’s Lost Vikings appearing as Hollywood St

Overwatch was released earlier this week to critical acclaim and it’s not hard to see why. Blizzard’s newest title is a slick online shooter that manages to be both incredibly deep on the strategic side, but widely accessible for newcomers who don’t have a lot of experience when playing shooters or MOBA-style games. Like most games from Blizzard, it’s also incredibly polished and runs well on both consoles and low-end PC systems.