It looks like Blizzard is already working on a new game.
As shared by user timur222 on Twitter, a Blizzard developer has made this disclosure on LinkedIn. The developer has worked on Blizzard for four years.
In the last five months, they have been at their latest position of senior director of product management. In the broadest terms, product managers manage the development cycle of a game project, from conception and beta testing, all the way to release and version updates.
Most importantly, this developer has been at this position for two games, one of which is clearly identified as Overwatch 2. The other game is listed as “Unannounced AAA RPG-FPS Title.”
That’s as intriguing a product description as it gets. What is this AAA RPG-FPS title that Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 team could be working on in parallel? Is it possible that this is related to the Overwatch franchise? Or is it a completely original title?
Earlier this year, Blizzard fans were in for a shock as the studio revealed they would be taking back their promises of a giant roadmap for PvE content in Overwatch 2. There was huge demand for this PvE content, partly because players wanted to have that team experience akin to what Destiny 2 or Helldivers 2 offered. But fans were also hoping that this could expand the narrative of the franchise as a whole.
The reasons for this rollback have been the subject of a lot of speculation, and much of it is credible. Depending on the source you believe, either Blizzard got in over their heads and the project was overrun by scope creep, or the PvE content they did release was not profitable enough for them to keep going. Or it could be something of a combination between the two.
It is natural to suspect that developers working on Overwatch 2 now could be working on an Overwatch spinoff. But there is reason to believe that that isn’t the case. We can speculate that they have scaled such a project back to be more feasible, but we can also accept that this is just something else.
Overwatch itself has been the first original idea that Blizzard has had in years, so an entirely original and new AAA RPG-FPS is certainly another exciting prospect. If Blizzard isn’t making this to compete with Overwatch, than what could it possibly be? That seemingly specific genre still encompasses a wide variety of games from different developers, including Fallout, Borderlands, Deus Ex, and Mass Effect.
If this game has also only been in development for the five months our source has been at their new job position, than it will definitely be some time before we get even so much as a hint of an announcement. And that’s if it progresses far enough to get announced at all. So maybe it’s too early to even be hyped for it, but that doesn’t mean we should just pretend we didn’t see it.
