Blizzard just released another cinematic trailer for Overwatch and in true Blizzard fashion, it looks fantastic. Whether or not you're interested in the game, I think it's worth watching for the animation quality alone.

I'm glad that they're putting in effort to flesh out the world of Overwatch prior to release. I'm hoping that this short (of which there are more coming) and the comics will in some respect make up for the lack of any real single player in the game. It's reminiscent of how Team Fortress 2 had the "Meet the..." videos. Heck, I hope that the Warcraft movie does okay so that we might someday see Blizzard make a full-length animated feature.

So, what did you folks make of the short? Has it changed your interest in the game?

As a big TF2 player, I am oddly excited for Overwatch at this point, and am strongly considering a pre-order. I have really dug what I have watched of the game so far, and it's encouraging to see that a few of the big community TF2 players (ster, jerma and muselk) seem to be quite into it as well. Getting into the closed beta and enjoying my time with it would seal the deal for me.

I am so hyped for this game, more so than any other game in the past 5 years. I have over 2000 hours in TF2 but stopped playing for a couple of months in preparation for the launch of Overwatch. I've watched over 20 hours of streams. Not being able to play the beta is killing me.

I always liked the TF2 shorts and this was just as good, the character design is really varied and I look forward to seeing more shorts from the Onlywatch team.

Happy as hell they're doing animated shorts like this. It was one of my favorite things about TF2 and I've always been surprised more games don't do something similar, seems like a great way to market the game and keep the fanbase invested. Curious to see how much of an actual narrative they have in the game, though. (And if they do focus on one, I wonder how good it'll be; Blizzard has always been better at worldbuilding than they are at telling a story.)

I've had a lot of fun with the beta, though I haven't played quite often enough to stay competitive, everyone else has played a frigging lot.

If the short would be of any indication of an actual single player campaign being in the game, this definitely would've raised my interest. It was still nicely made, but I kinda have a feeling that it's similiar to those TF2 shorts and only acts as an extra flavour to the game. The game itself does look interesting as well, though, but I haven't had a chance to get into any of the betas yet, so meh.

I love these kinds of cinematics because they give you character interaction that you normally wouldn't get in a multiplayer game. I hope Blizzard can release these shorts faster than Valve did with theirs.

"I'm not a monkey. I'm a scientist."

Terrible writing? Yep, this sure is another Blizzard game.

I really wish they would change tracers voice. I get that this is going for a Saturday morning cartoon vibe but they could dial the mockny back a bit.

Yeah, that part was a bit cringy. But nice animation none the less.

Can we get an entire short dedicated to all the glorious booty in the game? Specifically, Widowmaker? Hell, why only limit it to a short? Go for a feature length film!

In all seriousness, i thought this was pretty cool. Yeah, dialogue was a bit cheesy at times, but I thoroughly enjoyed it overall. I hope they do a lot more of these.

I thought it was excellent. I want more of these to come out. I honestly don't care much for the game, but I'm loving the cinematics they're putting out for it.

Damn, Blizzard is killing it with these shorts. I think I like Recall more, but this one was still awesome. A tad predictable, but the action was thoroughly entertaining. Are they doing these for everyone or just the popular characters? Because my girl Mercy needs more love.

They've said that there will be 4 shorts in total released before the game launches, alongside 6 digital comics. I'm almost certain one of the last two shorts will involve the feud between Genji and Hanzo (it featured heavily in the shorts preview) but I can't speak for the other one.

This game is, essentially, a 60 dollar multiplayer only Team Fortress clone, right? Even with Blizzard behind this, I'm surprised they're trying something like this with a new IP. When is the last a new multiplayer only IP succeeded with a full retail price?

God dam blizzard hire some better writers/ VA, the character design and animation deserve so much more.

The animation is nice but the voice acting is terrible. (that Tracer..) I'm glad they're fleshing their world out more but this just makes me wish it was a different kind of game. Impossible to please I know.

I'm no screenwriter, so hey, maybe I'm talking out of my ass.

The new short is alright, but every line is so painfully generic as to be almost cringy. Cringy in a real 'I can't believe someone probably got paid a lot of money for this' kind of way. I don't know how someone read this and thought it was good enough. And I feel like I'm going nuts, because no other forum except for this one really seems to notice or care how poor this writing is.

Have you ever played a Blizzard campaign? This is pretty par for the course. I love the hell out of pretty much all their games, but it's like they go out of their way to hire bad writers. Or maybe they just don't spend the resources to explore their characters and universes to the depth they deserve so their "lore team" just farts out a script whenever their told to with no encouragement to flesh things out in meaningful ways.

That said, these shorts are doing their job and making me excited for Overwatch, though the never-to-be-realized prospect of them making some kind of series/movie with some actual talent behind it has me more excited.

@adequatelyprepared: I think it's less people not noticing and more it being pretty much what they expected. I think the cheesy pixar-lite stuff is exactly the right fit for Overwatch.

And the writing being kinda bad isn't that surprising either is it? Isn't it Blizzard's dirty little "secret" that most of their writing is kind of subpar? I didn't even think it was thaaaat bad tbh, just incredibly generic like you said.

@noval: @yi_orange: I think it's a shame too, because there some neat characters in Overwatch. A lady that has been uncoupled from space-time and so has to wear a stabilizing harness to exist. A robot monk. Two brothers from a ninja clan. A cowboy with a prosthetic arm. And yet the dialogue so far doesn't go far beyond 'Me good, you bad, let's fight'.
For comparisons sake, just watch the 'Meet the...' shorts from TF2 (as well as some of the other stuff). The cast of TF2 is FAR closer to what one would consider to be generic archetypes, and yet the writing in those shorts gives them a level of character that I have yet to really see in Overwatch's cast.

I guess it's telling that I played through Diablo 3 recently and really can't tell you much about what happens in that game story-wise.

A) These shorts shouldn't affect people's desire to play the game whatsoever, since the only thing they have in common are the characters
B) It's ridiculous how much effort went into making this considering how little bearing it has on the actual game. The suggestion that they should have put even more into it is kind of silly.

That was entertaining as all hell. Blizzard's animators know what they're doing.

tracer really needs to stop punctuating sentences with the word love. we get it blizz, she 's british.

@spaceinsomniac: $40

The only disappointing thing about Alive was Zenyatta not getting in on the action.

I refuse to watch these until they remove every outline of a bottom from a female

These are really good. With Riot and Blizzard getting these things out I can't help but be hyped to play the games. Hope Riot releases a new one soon, they are due

I love these shorts, don't even mind the video game-ass video game writing.

And put them into your secret cloud drive folder?

it's like a comic book..... a comic I wouldn't read.

I just checked Amazon, and they'll be selling it for $60.

That's for consoles and that's the Origins Edition with skins and other blizz game fluff. Standard Edition is $40 on battle.net

Ditto

@grulet Too many female butts in this video, they should probably take it down.

Really liked the new short; did a great job or showing you their powers in interesting ways.

Also, can we please not turn this thread into more sarcastic Overwatch-butt remarks.

Butt why shouldn't we? I don't mean to be anal or anything here, but lets get to the bottom of the issue. This is Blizzard's own fault. They poorly handled the situation, and upset a lot fans in the end. Their opportunity to not look like an ass has slipped through the cracks. They're the butt of many jokes now, although I have confidence they'll eventually be able to put this behind them.

Is there a 40 dollar retail option? Because that's what I was talking about, although I suppose it matters a little less if there's a PS4 and Xbox One downloadable 40 dollar version. Is that even the case, though?

It's a fun short but it really begs the question of why bother making all this story for what is essentially a team shooter? I suppose the answer is that this is Valve and because they can afford to pay animators to do this stuff and because they just feel like it.

Then again, the whole butt situation really did open my eyes to how many people actually do care about the lore in this game.

Butt Lore! And it's Blizzard ;p but they too can get away with throwing money at seemingly pointless things.

Probably because the game seems to follow the TF2 format so closely, and TF2 had all those shorts that were great.

Overwatch's videos are naturally of a much higher quality to the TF2 stuff, just by courtesy of how much time has passed in between the two games. Though despite that I think the TF2 class videos are still significantly more entertaining (Meet The Spy OP) and have bucket loads of personality. Overwatch's stuff basically resembles any other sort of run-of-the-mill CG family friendly bleh.

And fuck Tracer. She's such a blatantly pandering ''look at 'ow English I am!'' archetype that it wouldn't surprise me to learn if all of her in-game dialogue revolved around cups of tea and crumpets.

I would still rather just play TF2 than a TF2/HotS crossover. The animation was nice at least.

Not when you take into account that this was going to be their new MMO. I'm sure they've got tons of stuff to put into this game lorewise, so I can see why people would want more.

I can't help but feel that last short was a tad too much on the generic side.

I also found the TF2 videos way better, the writing is just much more on point in the TF2 videos. Frankly I find the Overwatch videos kinda dull, and the characters uninteresting.

Honestly, I don't care about the lore of this game. I don't care about this game. I don't care if a character turns her back to the camera revealing her tightly fitting pants or not. It adds nothing to this game. What I care about is that someone pretty much literally said "won't somebody please think of the children" about a game where you do nothing but kill each other, and caused the developers to express their deep regret at their initial decision to have a character turn around while wearing yoga pants.

More so, rather than a simple "that was a placeholder, and it's going to change anyway for a character unique animation." We had to hear:

We'll replace the pose. We want *everyone* to feel strong and heroic in our community. The last thing we want to do is make someone feel uncomfortable, under-appreciated or misrepresented.

Well, guess what? They failed, and if they would have just ignored the forum post, nobody would have noticed or cared. Instead, they ignored a large percentage of their community* who are sick of content being changed because someone was offended. Blizzard doesn't want people to feel uncomfortable or under-appreciated? Well then, perhaps they shouldn't insult them and their opinions, especially when it comes to heated issues regarding gender politics.

Again, they could have gone with a PR answer that would have pleased most people, or could have ignored the forum post and made the change anyway without making some speech. Instead, they went with "you're right, they're wrong, and we'll try to do better in the future."

Instead of being concerned with some very mild sexuality being displayed by a character in a video game, I'm far more concerned raising a generation of children who are repeatedly told by society that they should be offended by things like this. I view this situation much like running children who fall in front of their parents, but don't actually start crying until mom or dad start freaking out from concern. They are raising children to be hurt by things that should not hurt them, and that they wouldn't have cared about or noticed if it wasn't for their intervention. It's a road to hell being paved with good intentions.

That is how I feel about this topic. Many don't feel that way, and that's fine. It's a very subjective issue. That forum member had every right to share the fact that they were offended. That is also fine. But a company taking sides on an issue that they didn't even need to comment on? That is not fine. That is a company telling a large portion of their potential customers "you're wrong," when they didn't need to say anything. It was a needless insult, that should never have divided their community, and it has certainly made me feel uncomfortable and under-appreciated.

* http://strawpoll.me/7212830/r

Anyhow, as far as the video goes, I'm not too surprised that the writing is bad. Diablo III was awful in that department. Now that I think about it, maybe Blizzard is better off staying away from story campaigns.

@spaceinsomniac: Hey man, I fully agree with pretty much everything you said. I thought the entire situation was pretty dumb and a little sad. She always had the super tight pants on, nothing has changed about this. It's not like that pose was sexual either as much as it was a cocky stance.. I don't even really want to get into it. What I was getting at is that a lot of people brought up "lore" to justify their arguments which was a shock to me because I had no idea Overwatch had lore. I thought it was just TF2 with a new cast. Honestly even TF2 seems to have a more coherent world and character set than Overwatch which is all over the place.

I actually wrote out an entire paragraph about the current trend of victimization in gaming but realize thats neither here nor there and this is a thread about these fun little movies and not videogame politics. So yah I agree, and yah this viewpoint isn't very popular these days, and yah an entire company bending to something so trite and silly makes me wonder - but hey at least all the people who have been writing articles and blogs about bettering games and all that got a win in their books so good for them. As silly and dumb that I think this whole thing was it's not like I'll be spending any sleepless nights over "Trace" not having a dumb pose in the game.

Thank you for summing up my thoughts more eloquently than I was able to.

What I care about is that someone pretty much literally said "won't somebody please think of the children" about a game where you do nothing but kill each other

This in particular on face value makes the whole issue ludicrous! And ultimately it's got nothing to do with the pose itself, just the mentality behind the actions that were taken and what that says about what Blizzard actually thinks of its community.

That said, this was probably a bit off topic in this thread.

@spaceinsomniac: Nope. The $40 standard version is only PC download. http://us.battle.net/overwatch/en/buy/

@spaceinsomniac: Titanfall?

These accents are real bad, ya'll.

Whatever, Blizzard gonna Blizzard.

A goddamned goldmine of chuckles this was and continues to be in particular!

And what's more, it doesn't include any empty, stomach-churning 'messages' or whatever the fuck like baby Winston and the glasses and ughhhh