Overwatch’s digital comics are a part of the game’s storytelling. Without them and the animated shorts, we’d know little about Overwatch’s world and its characters.
Blizzard’s Overwatch storytelling sets the game apart from other first-person shooters. The game’s importance is not only within the game itself, but the surrounding media, too. The developer is constantly experimenting with how it tells Overwatch’s story, and will continue doing that into 2018, Overwatch lead writer Michael Chu told PCGamesN.
Related: Reinhardt is the star of Overwatch’s new animated short
“I can say that we have a general goal on the comics side,” Chu said. “We’d like to do longer comics. We feel like that will enable us to do more in-depth stories, let some of them breathe a little more. That’s definitely a goal for us going into the next year.”
A full-length graphic novel was once on on the docket for Blizzard, but it was canceled in November 2016. Called Overwatch: First Strike, the comic was to be published by Dark House and tell the story of Overwatch’s founding during the Omnic Crisis.
It’s unclear if Blizzard still intends to eventually tell that story through comics, or if the team has alternative tales to tell.
Likewise, Blizzard wants to expand its breadth of animation techniques. “This year we tried something new with Doomfist, with 2D animation,” Chu said. “The team was just so excited because we always felt that Overwatch would be great realized as kind of a 2D cartoon.”
Chu didn’t have any more details about future Overwatch content. For now we’ll have to make do with the developer’s latest animated short, Honor and Glory. The moving story shows Reinhardt in his younger days, and was released during BlizzCon.
