Here’s an example of what I am talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRj-GotnNaQ&t=2026s
For Toronto, I think it would be cool to have Ana stalk you and be your guardian.
Let’s say you’re in the Toronto subway, and a puller tractors one of your teammates with the heroes panicking. Just before the Puller’s hair poses for a lethal finisher, a sleep dart hits her, saving their life.
Of course Ana(NPC btw) wouldn’t stick around either, you’d probably never see her.
Another cool scripted moment could be when you’re critical health and Ana heals you from a long distance for a few shots. A more epic moment could be when only 1 person is left standing against the final boss/wave, and just as you accept despair, Ana shoots you with nanoboost to keep hope alive.
Ana also has a valid story reason to be in Toronto (as does Pharah). We know Sam lives in Ottawa (is he a first nation’s politician? It’s in one of Chu’s tweets), and Ana still loves her family and it’s her duty to protect loved ones. Ana heads to Toronto to keep null sector’s front from reaching Ottawa. Pharah would be at Toronto for the same reason, and that really should be where Pharah decides to join Overwatch. Ideally, she would be an option as a playable member of the strike team(s) for Toronto.
I just think it would be a nice nod to their character, while showing Ana’s a hero and guardian to the player.
But, I bet your imaginations brought you to different ideas. I’d love to hear them.
FWIW, I didn’t say from, but lives (I know he’s from the west coast). He’s a public servant, so Ottawa was just my guess as that’s where most federal employees work. Thanks for correcting my false memory my though (thought Chu tweeted Ottawa was where he worked). The capital of BC is indeed more likely. Oh well, Canada is in trouble and she would still be there to help stop null sector from spreading.
I think it’s unlikely that these cutscenes would interact with players directly - the example we see is Widowmaker grappling into the sky without player input. It’d be super hard to make that work from a gameplay and cutscene design standpoint, I’d think.
That being said, I’d love to see a mission where you’re walking through some city and maybe it’s being attacked & Symmetra constructs hard-light platforms and walls and stuff as you go through to make a path forward. Probably like put her into existence somehow even if nobody can play as her or just make her unplayable for the level itself so she can interact a big chunk of the time.
Oh the scenes I described has Ana as an NPC. I Just described conditions for her to appear as is probably the case for Widow (player has to trigger Widow’s event with movement input regardless).
Now that would be so cool for world building. You’d get a sense of her power as an architect. That’s a smart way to immerse players with Sym’s character.
I think it’d be cool if a mission brought some OW heroes into an apartment complex or back-alley where a bunch of people leave Lucio’s music blaring in the background, making time feel like it’s speeding up or slowing down at different sections of the map.
Also, it would be SO COOL to have a mission progress in a bright & bustling city centre, only for a repeat of the Sombra fan cinematic.
That would be a wonderful cinematic experience to behold, it would bring tangible power to Sombra that PvP cannot express. They have so much potential for imagination and vibrancy with the story mode.
They have said that the story arc we are getting for OW2 will be ‘Overwatch focused’ and that side characters like Ana, Sym, junkrat, talon cast and hog, etc. might not be playable heroes… which makes sense. However, they have so much potential to show the power and character of these heroes as npcs with choregraphed events.
If they don’t do cool things like that with the side characters, then they would have completely dropped the ball in my opinion. Why go through all the effort of creating a choregraph system if only use it for the more main characters.
The non-overwatch heroes don’t have to be playable or even directly active in the story, but they should still have a presence and not just be ignored.
A bit of a shame.
Would have been nice to have more events like Retribution, and backround missions to flesh out Vishkar, Junkertown, Volskaya, Talon, Mobile Exo-Force, Deadlock Gang, and the Shimada Clan. I think the world of OW is big enough that you don’t need to focus on just one faction.
Hopefully they provide satisfying moments for players of these kinds of heroes (which make up over half the cast).
We know Talon is, Widow for sure, Sombra, doomfist, and Reaper are good candidates also. Sigma is really a side character, so I can’t say,
They all better have choregraphed sequences, or something in the first complete story arc that fleshes out these characters. We may not be able to play as hog or junkrat in the story mode if it takes you to Junkertown (which is very stupid might I add, but w/e), but they should still be story pieces, whether Hog appears for a few moments to shred a big robot that is about to kill your squad, or maybe you awkwardly step in a random Junkrat trap.
Something that at leasts gives them presence. Even if we don’t go to Australia, we know that Junkrat and Hog still travel the world, so they can still have a subtle presence that tells a mini story about them regardless.
Maybe we are in India, and Talon is about to drop a huge bomb from the sky to destroy the temple/city or w/e. As you see the bomb drop, a huge horizontal Wall created from Symmetra could appear and intercept the bomb with no flashness held back. The heroes might not even know it was Sym, and she might not even appear in that story, but the player would know that Symmetra’s presence was there and it would be epic.
Sorry for the rant. I just have a feeling that they will probably do none of this. Because they already think that having the side characters being playable would feel ‘forced’ and too convenient for the story. So they would probably just stop imagining what their presence could be and ignore them.
