For the first time in many years, Blizzard announced a new franchise today: Overwatch, a team-based multiplayer shooter with Pixar-like graphics.

The game looks great. It’s a PvP shooter with classes, very reminiscent of Team Fortress 2. Here’s the cinematic trailer:

And, more importantly, here’s gameplay footage from the newly-christened Overwatch, which really does look fantastic:

Here’s Blizzard describing the game in a press release:

The action of Overwatch takes place in a technologically advanced, highly stylized future earth. In a time of global crisis, an international task force of soldiers, scientists, adventurers, and oddities known as Overwatch had come together to restore peace to a war-torn world. After many years, the group’s influence waned, and it was eventually disbanded. Overwatch might be gone now . . . but the world still needs heroes.

 

With an emphasis on accessibility and pure fun, Overwatch brings Blizzard’s signature easy-to-learn, hard-to-master gameplay to the FPS genre. Harnessing the power of their hero of choice, players will join forces in teams of six and battle each other across a range of futuristic global locations, from the hologram-lit streets of London to a bazaar in the shadows of a high-tech Egyptian pyramid. Every battlefield is iconic and built to highlight each character’s unique abilities, and fights can shift from streets to rooftops to open skies within the span of a breath.

 

“Overwatch is our take on a vibrant, near-future universe with amped-up characters and action-packed team-based gameplay,” saidMike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “With every new Blizzard game, we look at our favorite aspects of a genre and put our own spin on things. Our goal with Overwatch is to create an awesome FPS experience that’s more accessible to a much wider audience while delivering the action and depth that shooter fans love.”

 

The heroes of Overwatch each bring their own distinct weapons and superabilities to bear. Here’s just a glimpse of the numerous heroes that will ultimately fill Overwatch’s rosters:

 

– Tracer, a former British test pilot who shrugs at danger, can execute impossible acrobatic assaults thanks to her ability to teleport, drop energy bombs, and even reverse time.
– Reinhardt, a hulking German soldier in battle armor, can charge great distances and pin his enemies to a wall or slam the ground with his rocket hammer to knock them off their feet.
– Hanzo, a bow-wielding Japanese mercenary, has the ability to scale walls with his bare hands, fire off a tracking device that illuminates nearby enemies for his team, and unleash a huge spirit dragon that does grievous damage to all enemies in its path.
– Symmetra, an Indian architech, manipulates light and energy to shield her allies and damage her enemies—and she can turn the tide of any battle by building a device that instantly transports her teammates to the front lines.

The beta will be out in 2015 and you can sign up HERE!

Overwatch is a reworked version of the PVP portions of Blizzard’s Titan, the long-in-development MMO that was overhauled in mid-2013. Despite reports earlier this year that Titan had been cancelled, the game was actually turned into Overwatch last year, according to a person familiar with the project.

In a hat trick of Blizzard’s crackdown on Hearthstone botting in the last week or so, the most popular Hearthstone botting program out there – Hearthcrawler – has been shut down by the tool’s creators.

Apparently the creators contacted Blizzard themselves according to the goodbye message which is now all that remains of the site at warcrawler.com; and have chosen to willingly shut down the tool before they get into big trouble with the game developer themselves.

“This is our last official announcement. The recent ban wave in Hearthstone hit a lot of users.

 

After discussing this with Blizzard, it’s clear we have to take off our services/products now. Please note that we’re not going to be commenting further on this.

 

Thank you all for being part of our community. We are very sad about this but you also know botting is against the rules and we all knew that the day when our products doesn’t work anymore would come.”

The recent bans come after the cheating and using third-party programs to automate play was revealed to have penetrated all the way to the top of the ranking ladder with at least two users having admitted to win trading as well to reach Legendary rankings. Thousands of accounts have either had temporary or permanent bans from the TCG already and Blizzard have said that any further culprits caught will have harshly punished as a result.

Blizzard’s legendary MMORPG World of Warcraft will have a 20th anniversary, according to lead developer Ion Hazzikostas. Speaking with CNET, Hazzikostas said he had no doubt that there will be a 20th anniversary for WoW. He also mentioned Blizzard is hard at work planning for future expansions.

“I definitely can’t tell you what our 20th anniversary is going to be. I can tell you there is definitely going to be one. I have no doubt saying that,” he said. “We’re definitely planning into the future, talking about what the next expansion is going to be, and what the one after that is going to be, just in terms of big picture storylines, how can we start setting things up now, where do we want the game to go.”

The game has changed significantly over time. Hazzikostas said the World of Warcraft today isn’t the same game that launched in 2004. He mentioned different graphics, different combat mechanics, and the game’s overall engine is far different.

“It’s clearly not the same game it was 10 years ago, right? The engine is different, all the graphical assets are different, a lot of core combat mechanics have changed,” he said. “It’s hard to pinpoint one turning point when it changed, but we definitely have taken an incremental approach to the pressing problems the game has that we feel we need to solve and what we can add to it that will make it better and deliver the most value to our players.”

World of Warcraft began Nov. 23, 2004. It has gone on to become a cultural phenomenon through board games, books, action figures and plenty more.  According to the latest subscriber count, there are 7.4 million paying subscribers for the game at the moment. That count is expected to grow to over 8 million with the release of expansion Warlords of Draenor.

Warlords of Draenor will release for PC and Mac Nov. 13. Temporary world events are currently going on in-game to lead up to the release of the new expansion.

Blizzard announced the cancellation of Project Titan, an MMORPG project that was in development since 2007, back in September. Titan was supposed to be Blizzard’s next big MMORPG to stand beside – or even surpass – World of Warcraft, but the project suffered creative problems.

“We didn’t find the fun,”

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said.

“We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no.”

BlizzCon 2014, a convention for all things Blizzard, will be held in Anaheim, Calif. on Nov. 7-8 at the Anaheim Convention Center. The event is expected to reveal additional details concerning Heroes of the Storm, the upcoming Warcraft movie and additional details for Warlords of Draenor.

So what do you think of WoW being around for another ten years?

Earlier in the year, Youtube announced plans to update the site to support 60FPS in videos, which would make a difference to videos of gameplay especially, even if you think that 60FPS is unnecessary.

Today they’ve begun the rollout of the new system. Currently it’s only supported by Google’s own browser, Chrome, which mean if you use a different browser you unfortunately lose out for now. It should hopefully come to other browsers eventually though, so if you’re able to wait we should all be able to see 60FPS videos eventually. You also need to watch the videos in HD if you want the bigger framerate.

Are you excited for the new bigger framerates for videos?

Whether you think the Oculus Rift is the next big thing or not, you can’t deny that it’s done stuff with VR that has pushed the entire idea forward quite a bit in the last few years. It still has a way to go to be wildly successful though, and the creator of Facebook (who now own Oculus) thinks that its going to have to shift in fairly large numbers to do so.

He thinks it needs to sell “50 million to 100 million units before it will really be a very meaningful thing as a computing platform. So I do think it’s going to take a bunch of years to get there.” adding that it’ll probably take a few cycles of the device to get it to the point where it is selling in large enough numbers.

He considers the acquisition of Oculus as a long-term investment in the future of technology and computing as well. “Every 10 to 15 years, a new major computing platform arrives and we think that virtual and augmented reality are important parts of this upcoming next platform. This quarter, Oculus continued to make progress towards this vision.”

The consumer beta for Oculus’ second Rift device could be available as soon as April of next year. Already the DK2 development kit has proven popular enough that Oculus has had to stop unscrupulous buyers bulk-buying just to sell them on with a markup.

Do you think Oculus is a good long-term investment? Tell us below.