During today’s Overwatch Spotlight event, Blizzard kicked off the hero shooter’s next narrative arc. Called “The Reign of Talon,” it will serve as an anchor for the next year of story content both in and out of the game itself. The stage setter for this was a new animated cinematic which showed new HBIC Vendetta taking her “rightful” place at the top of the Talon organization. To do that, she had to go through the villainous group’s acting leader, and in doing so, may have done something Overwatch has never done before: killed off a hero.
Doomfist is dead. Well, maybe? Vendetta sure did send him tumbling down into an abyss after hacking off the cybernetic arm he uses to propel himself through the air. I don’t know how he could have survived that. When, during a group interview on Blizzard’s Irvine campus, I asked Overwatch narrative lead Miranda Moyer if the long-time mastermind of all the chaos of the hero shooter’s extended media had thrown his last punch, I didn’t get a definitive answer, but it sounds like his fate will play into the upcoming Talon arc.
“I think Doomfist is a very interesting character,” Moyer said. “I think, as we all know, he talks a lot about evolution through conflict. So I think, to that end, we can’t really say what happened to him. Obviously, Vendetta showed up and it’s not great, but I actually don’t play Doomfist a lot, so I don’t know if there’s a tech you could do. But yeah, I think there’s obviously a lot to unfold in the story to look forward to, so I would stay tuned.”
With Bllizzard’s new focus on story content in and out of the game, something like Doomfist’s apparent demise could have new gameplay implications, akin to how League of Legends temporarily disabled the character Gangplank after he was killed off in the lore. While it doesn’t sound like Blizzard is going that far with Doomfist, his defeat at the hands of Vendetta will manifest in other ways.
“I will say that we do have a lot of ramifications for all this story that we’re doing in the game. So it’s definitely going to be something that’s not just like, you have to go outside the game or any outside media to experience this. It’s all going to be reflected largely in the game in different ways. So I won’t say specifically what that looks like, but there will be visible consequences that you can feel as a player as much as someone who’s keeping up with the content by reading or watching it.”
Overwatch’s next season will be the first in a restructuring intended to integrate storytelling into the game through both lore drops in the new story section of the main menu and changes to maps and in-match dialogue. We’ll see how this shake-up in Talon leadership and the possible death of one of the game’s longest-running villains manifests in the game when Season 1 launches on February 10.