In an interview with Kotaku.au, Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan and Geoff Goodman revealed that team-based shooter Overwatch will run entirely on the studio’s own servers, meaning that LAN play is out of the question.
On the plus side, alongside those dedicated servers the game will offer support for custom game modes outside the matchmaking pool, if you fancy some non-competitive play.
“Overwatch will run completely on Blizzard servers. With that said, and when we do matchmaking it will be in a Blizzard pool, we are looking at regions and IPs and doing the best to minimise any sort of ping issues,” said Kaplan.
“We’ll allow you to set up some of those things that traditional dedicated servers allow you to do. Basically give you a safe place to go play a match to play with your friends and not go into the big matchmaking pool, we’ll have a setup that will allow for that as well.”
The pair also confirmed that there will be a Spectator mode included whenever the game is actually ready to go. It’s up on the Battle.net launcher already, but we’re still awaiting an official date.
