Have you watched the Pixar-esque cinematic trailer of Blizzard’s latest shooter, Overwatch? How about the gameplay trailer?
Well, those two trailers have generated a ton of online buzz – mostly eager and positive.
The question here is just how did a hitherto unheard of title manage to tickle pink so many jaded, hard-to-impress players?
Engaging Trailer
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a game trailer – much less one for a shooter – that looked and felt right at home with Pixar movies.
That trailer was just so much fun to watch, from an eager young boy nagging his brother on a visit to the museum to extremely memorable characters duking it out in the said museum.
Winston, the gentleman gorilla with glasses, is just so cool to watch rampage around – as is Reaper the badass wraith who uses dual pistols to pepper the battlefield with bullets.
Simply put, that trailer was a masterpiece of cinematic marketing right there.
Remarkable Pedigree
One word: Blizzard.
This is the company that curb-stomped the MMORPG market with World of Warcraft, the competitive RTS market with Starcraft II and the CCG market with Hearthstone.
Diablo III was panned at launch, but improvements to game mechanics and the trading system have brought it back into the spotlight.
Now it’s tinkering not just with MOBAs (Heroes of the Storm), but also with team-based shooters.
No surprise then that Overwatch would get so much attention, coming from such an illustrious game developer and publisher as Blizzard.
Creative Plays
And last but definitely not the least, the game puts lots of emphasis on creatively having fun – not just in shooting and blowing stuff up but with experimenting with mechanics that subtly but essentially change the way you play the game.
This is something I have experienced while playing Heroes of the Storm, where certain heroes play very differently from the usual MOBA champions.
Murky, for example, is a hero that laughs in the face of death – actually embraces it – because he respawns from an egg three seconds later to piss off the enemy team some more.
Looking at the gameplay trailer of Overwatch, I see that same potential with characters like Hanzo, Tracer and Pharah.
Hanzo’s ricocheting arrows trains you to shoot behind people – not at them – while Tracer’s teleportation forces you to think laterally in a combat situation.
Pharah, on the other hand, is all about finding the right overwatch position (heh) to rain down missiles on exposed targets.
Of course, the hype train is still running full-steam here.
Epic cinematic trailers don’t automatically mean the game will be good (ahem, Dead Island), and we really won’t know if the gameplay is actually good until enough players are able to provide feedback.
Until then though, we can only wait in eager anticipation until Blizzard releases the beta of the game sometime in early 2015 – which you can apply for right now.
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