No Folks, Overwatch Won’t be Free-to-Play
Overwatch, Blizzard’s highly-anticipated team-based shooter game, won’t follow the free-to-play model of current generation MOBAs, said Blizzard in an announcement at BlizzCon, last Friday.
Fans who have been following the development and news of Blizzard’s stylized shooter game speculated that the game will be released as a free-to-play game with in-game purchases to acquire the many different heroes in the game, similar to Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends.
Instead, Blizzard unveiled three pricing categories for the Overwatch game: Base, Origins Edition and Collector’s Edition.
The Origins Edition will include all 21 heroes currently in the game and five skins that call back to the backstories of various characters in the game, like an alternate timeline version of time-traveling pixie girl Tracer (Splitstream Tracer) and a warped transforming mecha-turret, Overgrown Bastion. The Origins Edition will also include tie-in content for Blizzard’s other games, like a World of Warcraft pet modeled after Overwatch hero Winston.
The Overwatch Collector’s Edition will include all of the above and bonuses in the form a bronze statue of Soldier: 76, the game’s official soundtrack and sourcebook for the game’s artistic properties.
The base game will cost $40 on PC, while the Origins Edition will cost $60. The Collector’s Edition for Overwatch is currently listed at $129.99 on multiple retailer sites like Best Buy, Amazon and GameStop.
Interested? Blizzard announced that players can now pre-order the game via this website.
Asked about why the company decided to price the game differently from Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard said that the game’s intrinsic gameplay mechanics of being able to switch out heroes on the fly ran counter to the free-to-play’s model of purchasing one hero at a time. In an effort to preserve Overwatch’s unique core gameplay, Blizzard has decided to supply of its heroes upfront for a cost.
Overwatch is slated for release in the Spring of 2016 and is currently in closed beta.
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