14 DAY TRIAL // Great news everyone, Blizzard has filed a new trademark for something called "Overwatch," and of course, it's filed under the appropriate computer gaming category to make us all excited.
Although nobody knows what the project will be about for now, the term overwatch is typically defined as a tactic employed during modern warfare, consisting of the state of a military vehicle supporting another with immediate fire.
XCOM fans will no doubt recognize the term, prompting speculation related to the nature of the new Blizzard project. It may be a team-based tactical game, maybe even the resurrection of StarCraft Ghost.
Traditionally, Blizzard devotes all its resources to large teams working on huge releases, new iterations in its key franchises, with games such as World of Warcraft having more than a hundred dedicated developers at work at any given time.
The latest trend with Blizzard seems to be focusing on more accessible and smaller scope creations built by smaller teams, in parallel with the big franchise titles that the company has built its fame on.
The company has revealed on multiple occasions that it's breaking off smaller teams from its bulk, in order to work on new kinds of games with a fast turnover, such as Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, the newly released collectible card game.
"We started up a new development team because we kind of recognised that we needed to have this ability to be more experimental, experiment with different types of games than what we were doing with our big, core franchises," Jason Chayes, Hearthstone's production director said.
The trademark filing is indicative of something good happening in the near future, even more so since the job openings page on Blizzard's website has been updated with a new sub-category, Unannounced Game Title.
Even the outline of the opening for a future lead producer sounds promising, stating that Hearthstone marked the revival of Blizzard's tradition of creating "small and nimble game teams" and that the company is following the newly arisen trend.
"As part of our team, you will join in the leadership of a small but mighty band of developers and exert your talents to help craft our processes, organization, goals and execution," the position description reads.
Overwatch definitely has a modern military sound to it, and might be benefiting from the input of some serious talent. Diablo 3 director Jay Wilson left the action role-playing game team in order to work on something completely new, and Mike Booth, former Turtle Rock CEO, has also joined Blizzard in 2013, in order to work on creating "Blizzard's next awesome game."
Blizzard has also been working on a new massively multiplayer online game for what seems ages now, the mysterious and sci-fi flavored Titan, which has been shelved since last summer.