The short answer to the article title is: yeah, kinda. The longer answer requires some exploration.

Overwatch is Blizzard's foray into the hero-shooter genre.

Hero-Shooting 101

A hero-shooter in disguise?

Ultimate Hero-Shooter

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Shooter aficionados are pretty familiar with genre blurring. For a long time now, role playing game (RPG) mechanics have been a staple of the shooter experience, if only in terms of multiplayer. Character, kit and weapon customisation; progression systems; and even loot drops have become standard tropes in the shooter space for aiding players in role-playing their somewhat personalised shooter experience.But lately a new shooter subgenre has emerged – the so-called ‘hero-shooter’ – which seeks to delve even further into RPG mechanics. While the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA for shortsies) is, itself, a subgenre born of the real time strategy (RTS) space, it’s more accurately a fusing of RPG standards with strategy principles. The MOBA digs deeper into RPG territory than the RPG-lite mechanics of your average mainstream shooter (first-person looters notwithstanding).In light-on, entry-level terms, the hero-shooter is already quite popular. Overwatch The same is technically true of Rainbow Six Siege, which you’d be hard-pressed to classify as a hero-shooter, despite the presence of hero substitutes called ‘Operators’ that feature particular MOBA-like stats in terms of armour, movement speed and restricted weapon selection, as well as unique special abilities. Siege is undeniably a shooter first, because core skill-based shooter tropes such as high accuracy, fast reflexes, and intimate map knowledge are primary to the secondary considerations of ‘hero’ selection, even if certain Operators are essential inclusions for attacking or defending teams.On top of this, Siege’s high-lethality, which equates to a low time to kill (TTK), pushes it away from the low-lethality and high time to kill of MOBA territory. Dirty Bomb steps closer to MOBA ground in this regard, with a comparatively high TTK (next to Siege, specifically), while unashamed hero-shooters Overwatch and Battleborn also feature higher times to kill, albeit with a catch.Both hero-shooters boast powerful ultimate abilities, which dish out the kind of damage that can negate the hit-points of even the tankiest damage-soaking archetype. By design, there are also particular heroes in both games that are squishier, which drags the average TTK down beyond, say, your average bullet-sponging tank class.It’s at this juncture that the hero-shooter subgenre separates itself from the traditional shooter space. Where your average team-based FPS class is ranked in terms of offensive, defensive or support capabilities, the hero-shooter follows the MOBA logic of class delineation in terms of long-distance ranged combatants, close-quarters melee characters, healing and passive damage-dealing support heroes, and damage-resistant tank avatars.While there is an overlap in terms of support class titles across genres, bear in mind that ‘support’ in shooter terms still has active damage-output capabilities, whereas it’s not a necessity in the MOBA space. In terms of class distinctions, it would be easier to simply define hero-shooters such as Battleborn and Overwatch in terms of the ordering of their subgenre heading. That is to say, they embrace the MOBA-inspired “hero” part of the categorisation as primary, and the “shooter” component as secondary.To put this into contemporary context, Ubisoft Massive admitted that third-person looter (totally a genre) The Division was designed as an RPG first and a cover-based shooter second, which means that if push came to shove during development, decisions were made based on what made a stronger RPG over what made for a better shooter.