Above: An early look at some of the online comics.
Complementing the comics will be a series of animated shorts that, like the debut trailer, tell standalone stories. This isn’t the first time Blizzard has done this with its games. In the past, the cinematics team made videos based on World of Warcraft expansions — The Burdens of Shaohao for Mists of Pandaria and the Lords of War series for Warlords of Draenor — and the most recently released Reclamation, a brief prequel to StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void.
Blizzard already has a few videos about some of Overwatch’s characters, including one on Soldier: 76’s origins, and a faux reality show covering Junkrat’s and Roadhog’s crime spree.
“So we do have a precedent for telling story outside of a game, which is really exciting for us because it unleashes us to do anything we want,” said co-storyteller and VFX supervisor Jeff Chamberlain during the panel. “We know that Overwatch is a very, very rich universe and we just have a lot of stories that we want to tell. So it’s nice to be unbound in that way.”
At BlizzCon, the company showed a behind-the-scenes video of what to expect from the upcoming shorts. Among other things, the videos will show Winston’s early life as a baby gorilla living on a lunar base, and a battle between Tracer and Widowmaker.
Enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at the making of our new Overwatch animated shorts, arriving in 2016!https://t.co/DJ3ErEDKDS
— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) November 7, 2015
“The cinematic legacy of Blizzard — we began to build these really great cinematics over the years that, historically, are always embedded in the gameplay,” said Metzen. “I think we’ve done some awesome work. … But playing it this way and finally allowing these ideas to breathe outside of the constraints of gameplay has been really liberating. We’re kind of growing and learning and, with any luck, becoming better storytellers.”
Though it seems like Blizzard already has a good idea of what Overwatch is about, it still has a lot of work to do. During a Q&A portion at the end of the panel, fans asked questions that Metzen, Chamberlain, and other developers couldn’t answer because they just haven’t figured out the whole story yet. One person asked what the British did during the Omnic Crisis. Metzen responded by saying they have no idea, but he promised they’d come up with “something awesome.”
Another fan brought up how the first trailer mentioned a few characters (Soundquake and Doomfist) who haven’t shown up in the game yet. Senior game designer Michael Chu answered that with a simple, “You’ll just have to wait and see.”
“[Overwatch] is a multigenerational tapestry of characters and relationships,” Metzen said after delivering a complicated answer to a question about the different Overwatch agents. “It’ll feel much better when we get the story done.”