The Overwatch franchise, a series of first-person shooter games developed by Blizzard Entertainment, consists of 54 playable characters across both games . The original 2016 game, Overwatch, featured 21 playable characters known as heroes and several supporting characters as part of the game's narrative, which is told through animated media and digital comics outside of the game. Its sequel, Overwatch 2, was released in October 2022 and replaced Overwatch. However, as Overwatch 2 had been developed to be a faster game with five-versus-five teams rather than six-versus-six, several of the characters had tweaks or major rebuilds within Overwatch 2, as well as different character designs. Overwatch 2 was rebranded in February 2026 as simply Overwatch with an increased focus on developing narratives and heroes to support the ongoing story.
The story of Overwatch takes place on Earth in the "near future" in the years after the "Omnic Crisis", a period in which robots (called "omnics") rose up in rebellion worldwide, and the United Nations formed an elite group called Overwatch to combat them. Overwatch continued to protect the peace until it was disbanded years later under a cloud of suspicion, but its former members have returned to the force in light of new threats to humanity, including the terrorist organization Talon. Blizzard wanted to create a diverse set of characters to reflect a positive outlook on this near future, incorporating non-human characters and non-standard character traits. Besides in-game content, the game's narrative and heroes' background are told through online animation and videos, and both written and graphic novels published by Blizzard.
Background Overwatch, now completely replaced by Overwatch 2 and later rebranded to Overwatch, was an online team-oriented first-person shooter, and an example of a "hero shooter" where players select from one of several pre-designed hero characters with their own unique abilities. Overwatch included casual play modes, competitive ranked play modes, and various arcade modes with special rules applied to the base play modes. Most game modes featured two six-player teams competing in one of several objective-based game types: Control, assault, payload, and hybrid.
Overwatch 2 retains most of its predecessor's gameplay and content with some changes. People play on two teams of five rather than six players and the game type "assault" was removed after much criticism from the player base. Heroes were given new designs, with some of them receiving entirely new abilities.
A match starts with each player selecting from one of the available hero characters. The game's characters are divided into three role classifications: damage, tank, and support. Damage characters are often doing the most damage and help the team with the majority of kills. Tank characters can absorb large amounts of damage for the team, and support characters can heal their teammates and provide status effects for the team or against enemies. The game will warn teams if they have an imbalance in their general role selection, and many game modes require players to select a certain amount of heroes from each role. Players are able to switch between heroes mid-match after they are killed or if they return to their team's base.
Each hero character has fundamentally different attributes such as health and movement speed, at least one basic attack, and at least one unique skill, collectively referred to as a skill kit. These skills can be used repeatedly after waiting out the skill's cooldown period. Each character also has at least one powerful ultimate ability that becomes available once its meter is charged, either slowly over time or through other actions such as killing opponents or healing teammates. Once the ultimate ability is used, the player has to wait for the meter to fill again. All characters have a close-combat, low damage melee attack that can be used at any time.
In the original Overwatch, winning matches earned the player experience towards levels in the meta-game. The player earned a loot box on reaching a new experience level, which contained a random assortment of character skins, emotes, voice lines, and other cosmetic items for each character without altering gameplay. Players could also purchase loot boxes with real-world money. Blizzard provided free post-release content for the game, such as new maps and characters. Blizzard also introduced limited-time seasonal events, offering new cosmetic items in loot boxes, themed maps, and gameplay modes. In Overwatch 2, the loot box system was entirely scrapped in favor of a battle pass system. After playing a game, the player would earn points that contributed to their progression in the battle pass, unlocking new cosmetics along the way. At the launch of Overwatch 2, new hero characters could either be acquired through purchase and completion of the battle pass in some seasons, or later by completing specific challenges; since early 2024, Blizzard has scraped this approach, making all new heroes available to all during specific seasons. Blizzard also brought back loot boxes as means for earning cosmetic items in February 2025, though such loot boxes are only learnable within game or through promotions, and have fixed odds at rare or more exclusive rewards to mitigate gambling concerns. The February 2025 update also saw the introduction of perks, two sets of two skill modifications for each character they can gain during a match. At a new tier level during a match, a player can select one of these predefined perks from the pair.
Overview Overwatch originally featured 12 characters at its November 2014 BlizzCon convention announcement, but expanded to 21 by the next year's convention. The game is character-driven, and reviewers noted Overwatch emphasis on the individual differences between characters in the same role (e.g., between two snipers) as a departure from dominant class-based shooter paradigms. Critics widely praised the game's accessible and detailed character design and its role in the game's overall success.
Similar to Valve's initial launch of Team Fortress 2, in the absence of a dedicated story mode, Blizzard tells the backstory of Overwatch plot and characters through media outside the game, including animated shorts, character press events, tweets, and webcomics. The game's story centers around a technological singularity in which humanity assembles a team of its best heroes, Overwatch, to fight off a rogue artificial intelligence and its robotic army of Omnics in an incident called the "Omnic Crisis". After winning its battle, the Overwatch kept the peace for about three decades before infighting led to its disbandment. The game takes place approximately sixty years in the future, during a time period in which the world is slipping into disarray, and former Overwatch members, along with new allies and enemies, are being called on to help protect the peace in their respective favor. Among Overwatch's enemies are Talon, a global criminal network seeking wealth and power.
With the relaunch of Overwatch 2 as just Overwatch in February 2026, Blizzard aimed to introduce a stronger narrative, with multiple chapters across each year. In the first year of content from this relaunch, "Rise of Talon", Vendetta overthrows Doomfist, the current leader of Talon, to seize control of the organization herself, and changing it from a clandestine operation to a more aggressive one seeking global domination. She sends off her associates to draw in support from other non-aligned groups, including the Deadlock Gang, the Hashimoto clan, the Junkers from Junkertown, and Vishkar Industries, stealing equipment aimed to attack Overwatch.
In early 2016, Blizzard released media kits with granular character detail for fan artists and cosplayers. Preceding the game's launch, PornHub reported a surge in searches for pornography including Overwatch characters. An intellectual property security firm issued multiple takedown requests to sites featuring such videos and other erotica created in Source Filmmaker.
Development
Overwatch was developed by Blizzard following the cancellation of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game Titan, a project that had been in works for several years. A smaller team from those on Titan were given the role to come up with a new project, and they came onto the idea of a first-person shooter that emphasized teamwork, inspired by Team Fortress 2 and the rising popularity of multiplayer online battle arenas, as well as their own development team unity they found to keep their morale high following Titans cancellation.
The development team settled on a narrative of a near-future Earth setting following a global-scale catastrophic event - the Omnic Crisis, in which robots, known as Omnics, rose up in rebellion against humanity until stopped by a peacekeeping group known as Overwatch. With selection of this global theme, the developers wanted to create a cast of playable characters to portray diverse representations of genders, ages, ethnicities, and nationalities. The heroes include human, transhuman, and non-human characters such as cyborgs, robots, and a talking gorilla. The need for a diverse cast was important to the developers, as some of Blizzard's previous games had been criticized before for missing this mark; Metzen explained that even his daughter had asked him why all the female characters from Warcraft seemed to be only wearing swimsuits. Metzen stated: "Specifically for Overwatch over the past year we've been really cognizant of that, trying not to oversexualize the female characters." Kaplan explained that the industry was "clearly in an age where gaming is for everybody", going on to say that "increasingly, people want to feel represented, from all walks of life, boys and girls, everybody. We feel indebted to do our best to honor that." In addition, Blizzard stated at the 2016 Blizzcon that some of the characters are LGBT, though did not specify which ones at that time. Blizzard has stated that "As with any aspect of our characters' backgrounds, their sexuality is just one part of what makes our heroes who they are." Since then, Tracer has been shown to be in a romantic relationship with another woman through one of the tie-in comics published online by Blizzard. In a subset lore story, Soldier: 76 was also identified as gay, having had a romantic relationship with a man prior to joining Overwatch. A research paper analyzed this announcement and found that players avoided Soldier: 76 afterwards. However, the pick rate returned to previous levels after around three months.
The team envisioned the characters akin to superheroes in this narrative, each with their own abilities, background and personality that could stand on their own, but could also fit into the larger story; this notion translated into the characters being agents for the game, which Metzen said still captures the "heroism and vibe" that superhero stories carry. The team did not want to have any characters that served solely as villains in the game, but did develop some of the characters, like Soldier: 76, to have an uncertain purpose within the narrative.
Several characters were envisioned for the game during its pre-planning stages, but did not make the cut, or were later incorporated into other heroes. Examples of such characters included a jetpack-wearing cat, a hockey player who used rocket-powered skates, and a Russian woman who would ride a bear and, for her ultimate ability, would have the bear rear up and wield his own set of AK-47 rifles. Initially, Reinhardt was an Omnic, but later was settled to be a human character, with the Omnic nature later revisited when the development team crafted Orisa.