The game itself is team-based, similar to games like Team Fortress 2 or the upcoming Battleborn. But unlike many games, the genre had little influence on the story of Overwatch; Blizzard has big plans for Overwatch and this shooter is just the first introduction to this new universe.

"We decided to try to do it another way."

"Overwatch is currently two different things," Metzen explains. "Overwatch is not a group-based shooter by itself. That is simply the first video game expression of what Overwatch really is, which is a big, breathing, mighty, compelling franchise. I say all of that in hopes that we achieve that. But that’s what we’re aiming for. Warcraft is not World of Warcraft. It’s a big, sprawling idea that’s comprised of something like 12 distinct video games. Warcraft is not an RTS, it’s not a MMORPG. Soon it’ll be a movie. That’s how Blizzard thinks about its franchises."

That’s a big shift from previous franchises, where the initial game helped define the world around it. StarCraft, for instance, features three distinct races because the game’s designers wanted three different types of armies for players to control. They wanted one with weird aliens, and one with psychic powers, and so the narrative team built out the story based around those constraints, crafting the Zerg and the Protoss to give more depth and interest to the races and their abilities. "With Overwatch, we decided to try to do it another way," says Metzen. "Which was, don’t start with this huge backstory and all of this specificity; we wanted Overwatch to really be achieved through these characters. So as a new character idea comes up — whether it came from a drawing or a design instinct — [senior story designer Michael Chu] and I have tried to stay on our toes relative to letting the world be shaped by these characters."

That’s part of the reason why Overwatch even has a story. Multiplayer-focused games, whether it’s a shooter like TF2 or a strategy game like Dota 2, aren’t exactly heavy on narrative exposition. Few people play League of Legends for the story. But because Blizzard views Overwatch as one part of a bigger universe, it’s adding in narrative elements to help tie it to all of the other versions of Overwatch that do and could exist. There might not be another game in the works (or at least announced) just yet, but Blizzard is still fleshing out the universe in other ways. Last week it released the first in a series of Pixar-like animated shorts detailing individual characters, and later this year Blizzard will launch a graphic novel called First Strike

Since the game will largely only hint at the bigger universe it takes place in, these supplemental materials are meant to appease those looking to learn more. The idea is to appeal to multiple kinds of players. "For those that really don’t care about a lot of narrative context in their game, they can jump into Overwatch and not be burdened at all by needing to know who is who, or the intricacies of the relationships, or the history of the world," Metzen says. "At its most conservative, the game does not demand that you know much of anything in terms of lore."