The name game

BlizzCon has come and gone.

Having sufficiently humbled themselves after the Blitzchung fiasco, Blizzard was able to get through their semi-annual convention to announce their slot of upcoming games without causing another international incident.

A new entry in the Diablo franchise was announced, as was the expected next expansion for "World of Warcraft," but the biggest news of the convention was probably the reveal of "Overwatch 2," a story-based sequel to Blizzard's multi-player focused FPS.

The story of "Overwatch" may be the most in depth and elaborate video game story never told. For four years now Blizzard has been slow dripping pieces of "Overwatch's" story, having players cobble together a narrative out of animated shorts, one-shot comic books, and the occasional voice-line.

All the while, Blizzard has largely avoided injecting a narrative into the game itself. Outside of a few seasonal events, "Overwatch" remains a dedicated multi-player game where it doesn't matter what Reaper's true motives are so long as he gets on the payload.

Blizzard has long said that "Overwatch" is, at its core, a purely multi-player experience where story is nothing more than superficial flavor.

But they never said anything about a sequel. For most games, sequels are generally considered a good thing. They're made for people who have gotten everything they can out of a game and are eager for more content.

However, some games aren't designed this way. In games designed for extended replayability, sequels often mean having to start your progress over from scratch.

Sometimes this can be a little frustrating. For instance, each new entry in the "Pokemon" franchise requires you to start your collection from scratch in order to catch 'em all. While transferring your beloved monsters from one game to the next is usually possible, it's rarely worth the effort outside of specific cases.

For a game like "Overwatch" this becomes even more of an issue. Its micro-transaction model encourages players to spend real world money to unlock various skins, voice lines, and other cosmetics.

It's one thing to have to leave behind your team of Pokemon when moving from one game to the next. It's another thing entirely to ask players to move on from potentially hundreds of dollars invested in loot boxes over the years.

The good news is that Blizzard has figured out how to largely bypass this issue. For "Overwatch" players that purchase "Overwatch 2," their skins, ranks, statistics, achievements, and everything else they've worked to unlock will carry over.

In fact, as far as the PvP side game is concerned, "Overwatch" and "Overwatch 2" will effectively be the same game. Players from both games will play each other with the same characters on the same maps. For all intents and purposes, the core "Overwatch" experience will be unchanged. Only the new PvE content will be exclusive to "Overwatch 2."

Which begs the question, "Is it truly accurate to call it a sequel?"

Traditionally, introducing new premium content into an existing game is generally labeled as "DLC" or an "expansion."

Blizzard's own "World of Warcraft" has followed this model for fifteen years now. In fact, just before announcing "Overwatch 2," Blizzard revealed "World of Warcraft: Shadowlands," the eighth expansion to the game. With this taken into account, perhaps "Overwatch 2.0" may be a more appropriate title.

However, there will be one major difference. If a completely new player wants to play the content in "World of Warcraft: Shadowlands" they will need to also purchase the base game.

For "Overwatch 2" however, the base game of "Overwatch" is already included.

The decision to label "Overwatch 2" a sequel has caused a stir in the gaming community among those that really want everything to fit neatly in their own little boxes.

Ultimately though, it's a pedantic argument about semantics.

Is "Overwatch 2" a sequel in the way games typically define sequels? No.

Does calling "Overwatch 2" a sequel instead of an expansion encourage new players to jump in by making it clear that they don't also need to buy the base game? Yes, which is probably why they went that direction.

From my point of view, so long as Blizzard honors my collection of Bastion skins, they can call "Overwatch 2" whatever they want.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and really does want to know what Reaper's true motives are