Yesterday it was leaked and then confirmed that Blizzard’s action role-playing series, Diablo would indeed land on Nintendo’s little console in the form of Diablo III: Eternal Collection.
This slapped the faces of anyone who vehemently believed that it wasn’t possible to port such a game to the machine and Diablo opens up the door for other Blizzard titles to join the party. In a recent interview with Gamespot, senior producer, Pete Stilwell stokes hope that Overwatch could be in the running.
He does say that Diablo III is currently their “only focus on Switch.” which makes sense but does say that Overwatch could technically run on Nintendo’s system. Overwatch is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter and is currently Blizzard’s giant golden baby. From the 9.7 million players during its open beta alone, to the 40 million current players, Overwatch has generated a cool $565 million from PC sales alone.
Overwatch wouldn’t be the first PC/PS4/Xbox One title to come to the Switch. Even in the first-person shooter genre we’ve had Doom 2016 and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus with Doom Eternal recently being announced.
While those titles did suffer from technical hiccups, there’s a chance Overwatch’s stylized look will be better handled by the Switch’s chipset and indeed Hi-Rez’s similar team-based shooter, Paladins: Champions of the Realm runs really well on the system. At the moment it stands alone in the team-based first-person shooter genre but Digital Extreme’s coop third-person shooter, Warframe, has also been announced for Switch. Until we get some hands-on time though, we don’t know how it will perform.
The idea of playing Overwatch around the pool with some friends certainly carries appeal and if Blizzard’s Diablo runs well and is embraced by Switch players we can, at the very least, be sure that Blizzard will bring more titles to the platform.
