Blizzard's Overwatch Won't Have Singleplayer

Steven Bogos

The Taco Man
Jan 17, 2013
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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 Kotaku [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/138476-Blizzard-Reveals-Overwatch-at-BlizzCon-2014] 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 [http://kotaku.com/overwatch-has-a-story-but-no-single-player-1657036638]

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shintakie10

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Sep 3, 2008
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Thank god for no hats. I'm totally with Yahtzee on this one. The hats from TF2 just totally fucked up the aesthetic of the game. I like the character designs as they are and havin ridiculous shit like random fez's and towers of hats would totally ruin it for me.

Not worried about the lack of single player either, though I do hope there is somethin akin to the co-op mode that was added into TF2.
 

Erttheking

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Is this really a surprise to anyone? Did anyone watch the trailers and gameplay and think anything other than "Multiplayer only"?
 

-Dragmire-

King over my mind
Mar 29, 2011
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Just yesterday...

-Dragmire- said:
A single player campaign would be nice but I get the feeling that won't come to be.
Sad, but I saw it coming so I'm not too bummed.

[small]*sniffle[/small]
 

Makabriel

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erttheking said:
Is this really a surprise to anyone? Did anyone watch the trailers and gameplay and think anything other than "Multiplayer only"?
Apparently 008Zulu did. Which baffles me.
 

Mr.Mattress

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Jul 17, 2009
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No Hats? Then no buy. Seriously, many of the hats in TF2 are awesome (Such as the Beep Man), and over half of them show how skilled the TF2 Community is (As they are submitted by the Community). Overwatch, which already looks a lot more complicated then TF2, should at least have fun things to get.
 

Baresark

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A strange announcement that didn't really need announcing. I mean, it immediately looks like TF2, which doesn't have one. I don't even know how you would put SP in to a game like this. I mean, I love SP way more than MP, but it would be deluded to think that this game could even work with SP.
 

StriderShinryu

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I have to admit finding the desire for a single player mode to be rather strange. It's clearly designed as a multi player title and any single player would almost definitely just be a tacked on afterthought.

Isn't that the sort of thing that gets blasted to high heaven when it's done in reverse (aka a tacked on afterthought of multiplayer in a clearly single player experience)?
 

Denamic

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Everything I've learned about this game screams multiplayer. I guess a sort-of campaign a la Quake 3 could have been made, but no one actually played Q3 for the campaign. If they did, they were confused and a little bit sad. Much like Q3, or the more apt comparison, TF2, this is clearly a multiplayer game and tacking on a singleplayer campaign won't do it any favours.
 

IllumInaTIma

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Feb 6, 2012
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Is anyone surprised?

I'm just glad they are going to support the game's lore with some supplementary trailers, which is cool.

Also, I'm hoping that instead of hats they are going to implement skins. I really enjoy them and they allow for some wild creativity from the designers.

The main question right now is what kind of model they are going to use. I have hopes that it is not going to be LoL's or Smite's model because they won't make sense due to two reasons.
1)Forcing new players to play limited heroes would completely wreck the gameplay. Can you imagine a match in TF where all players are locked in Pyro or Heavy's role?
2)There are simply not enough heroes to implement this kind of feature or any sort of weekly rotations.
 

Ticklefist

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While this should have come as a surprise to absolutely no one I was not surprised to see that the first comment was negative.

The Escapist.
 

RicoADF

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Jun 2, 2009
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1Life0Continues said:
No single-player, no sale.

*shrug*

No loss, really.
Same here, this whole always online bullcrap can stick it where the sun don't shine there's no excuse. All because they want total control over your game so they can kill it when their sick of supporting it.
 

WhiteTigerShiro

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Am I the only one who read this article and immediately wanted to see Reaper wearing a top hat on top of his hood?
 

Steven Bogos

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Jan 17, 2013
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Ticklefist said:
While this should have come as a surprise to absolutely no one I was not surprised to see that the first comment was negative.

The Escapist.
Tell me about it...
 

Phrozenflame500

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RealRT said:
No SP, no sale. No MP game ever deserves to bear the full price.
Good thing the game just screams F2P for me, I'd be seriously surprised if they took it in any other direction considering the way the game seems to be designed so far.

I'm pretty sure that most of the "No SP no buys" are coming from people who don't seem to realize that this is basically TF2.5 developed by Blizzard. A SP mode would be incredibly out-of-place.
 

Gordon_4_v1legacy

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I could see that this would be the case, but I really can't deny there's some great action-comedy potential in this IP, it could have been everything Overstrike could have been


Oh what could have been......