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The Overwatch franchise, a series of first-person shooter games developed by Blizzard Entertainment, consists of 54 playable characters across both games as of October 2026. The o…
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Investigate this subjectThe Overwatch franchise, a series of first-person shooter games developed by Blizzard Entertainment, consists of 54 playable characters across both games as of October 2026. 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.
The Overwatch franchise, a series of first-person shooter games developed by Blizzard Entertainment, consists of 54 playable characters across both games as of October 2026. 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.
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.
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's 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
Source: Characters of the Overwatch franchise (CC BY-SA)
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