Game · Tertiary · since 2016

Overwatch

Blizzard canceled an MMO called Titan and built this out of the wreckage: a team shooter where nobody has the same gun, and where switching character mid-match is not a reset but the actual skill. Six a side, then five, and a roster designed so that every problem on the board has an answer somewhere on the bench.

The strange part is the fiction. Overwatch has one of the most fully realized casts in games and told almost none of it in the game itself: the story lives in animated shorts, comics and voice lines, which is either a masterstroke of restraint or a decade-long unforced error, and people are still arguing about which.