Over the weekend and during BlizzCon 2015, Blizzard confirmed that the reports were true and that Overwatch would be making its way onto the PC, Xbox One, and the PlayStation 4. Given that we’ve seen Blizzard attempt to break onto consoles with Diablo 3, and with Activision having extensive experience in console shooters like Call of Duty, this didn’t really come as a surprise.
However the bad news is that if you were hoping for PC-console cross-play support, you will be sorely disappointed. According to a report from Polygon, it seems that there will not be cross-play support for the game. This is because all three platforms have their own ecosystems, such as Xbox Live and PlayStation Network for consoles, and Battle.net for the PC.
Once again this shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise when the same thing happened with Diablo 3, in which the console version would not have anything cross-play with the PC version of the game. Overwatch’s game director Jeff Kaplan also revealed that the game was designed to be playable on the console at the start, even though there weren’t any signs to suggest so until recently.
According to Kaplan, “When we started to make Overwatch … it was our goal from day one to have this game playable on console. Designing the game so it felt great on a console controller almost put this forced design elegance on us.” In the meantime Overwatch has been pegged for a release in the Spring of 2016 and will also be skipping OS X.
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