The Kings Row was available to play at Blizzcon © Blizzard Entertainment

Seventeen years. That's how long it has been since Blizzard announced a game that wasn't already part of an existing franchise. Since Blizzard has been anything but the firm of StarCraft , WarCraft, and Diablo.

It wasn't just the fact that Blizzard's newly-announced Overwatch represents a new universe and game idea from a company that's become known for its painstaking work on a few mega-franchises. It's that Overwatch itself is a complete departure from everything Blizzard has done before.

With Overwatch, Blizzard are finally making a team first-person shooter. A company known for MMOs, role-playing games, and real-time strategy is now stepping into the ring with games like Team Fortress 2, Battlefield, and even Call of Duty .

Fun and Firepower

Overwatch takes its cues from Team Fortress 2. Rather than offer another spin on soldiers fighting thinly-disguised versions of today's modern wars, Overwatch takes place in the kind of cartoony, cheerful universe that you might expect to find in a Disney Animation feature. It's a universe where the bullets don't hurt the characters, and characters can get thrown and blasted hundreds feet into a wall, and come up shooting.

The fanciful universe also serves a gameplay purpose: Overwatch's characters are not bound by the laws of physics or reality. Want a scout / assassin kind of character that can teleport at-will, or snap-back through time and space to the place she started from? Tracer (the English girl with goggles in the trailer) can do all that and more.

Reaper (the guy that looked like the Grim Reaper, naturally) can shift into a ghostly "Wraith Form" in which he cannot be harmed, or summon himself to another location almost instantly. When his ultimate power, the Death Blossom, finishes charging up, he turns into a whirlwind of destruction as fires his guns in every direction.

What it all adds up to is a shooter where the familiar roles of scout, tank, DPS, assassin, and support find many different expressions in the various characters, and all of them feel more like a superhero than a shooter character. Playing a character in Overwatch often feels like being one of the Avengers, not like a meaty bullet-sponge just trying to capture a point.

Balance Is Key

At this point, everything Blizzard touches seems to find a second life as an eSport. Even World of Warcraft has a robust competitive scene at this point, and Blizzard had no sooner launched Hearthstone than it became an obsession for professional gamers of all stripes.

This kind of track record promises great things for Overwatch as a potential competitive game. The most important thing in creating a successful eSports is to have a lot of people invested in playing and watching a game, and Blizzard make the kind of games that people devote their lives to playing.

Overwatch, with its over-the-top characters and humorous approach to violence and fiction, is a complete blast to play. But some of its own strengths might make it difficult to sell as a competitive shooter.

Right now, Overwatch feels a tad unbalanced. It wasn't unusual to see games jam-packed with people playing Tracer, while the more support-oriented Symmetra seemed to struggle to find her place in a firefight.

More importantly, the attack-oriented characters all seemed super-charged, while tankier and more defensive characters were getting mowed down right and left. It could be that they simply require more understanding and subtlety to play, and thus don't perform well at a trade show where everyone is a newbie. But still, it's going to be difficult creating a cast of memorable, superpowered characters who are also all equally valuable on the battlefield. Team Fortress 2 solves this problem by limiting everyone to nine classes, but Overwatch appears to be going in more of a MOBA route.

Finally, the game mode that Blizzard showed at Blizzcon was basically the familiar Payload from TF2, where one team tries to push a cart through a level while the other team tries to stop them. It's a fun and accessible mode, but a balance nightmare because of how easy it is to exploit certain parts of a level with different classes. Overwatch will probably need to showcase more competition-friendly modes like territory domination or capture-the-flag.

Still, Blizzard has already done the hard part: they've created an exciting new shooter that everyone at Blizzcon seemed really excited to play. If the audience materializes from Overwatch, and Blizzard takes care to develop competition-friendly game modes and characters, then there's every reason to think that Overwatch could become the shooter alternative to more serious games like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike.