It’s early in the week so you know what that means – hints at Blizzard’s future plans thanks to new job postings. A batch of internships for 2018 went up last night, and among them was an advertisement for an artist internship in the Incubation department. Familiarity with Overwatch is listed as a “recommended talent” – essentially a plus to being hired – as part of a job creating in-game assets for an unannounced title.
For what’s happening right now, the Overwatch Halloween 2017 event begins tonight.
You can read the full, slightly twee job description over on the careers site, via this NeoGAF thread. For those unaware, the Incubation department is the part of the company that heads up possible future projects, although there’s no guarantee they actually come to life. It got a burst of attention with the return of founder Allen Adham a couple of years back and has presumably been developing cool stuff ever since. None of it is yet to come to light, with no new game announcements from Blizzard since Overwatch, or any expected at BlizzCon this year. Too busy with the next WoW expansion.
Beyond that, we don’t know a lot. Bringing interns onto an Incubation project sounds like a risky prospect to me, secrecy-wise. That may mean it’s announced before the applicants are due to start in May/June – plenty of PAX and GDC style shows between now and then, nevermind the Overwatch League starting and other esports events. Assumption is it’s a mobile title due to simply the movements of the industry and Blizzard’s already powerful suite on PC, but it could be anything. The mention of Overwatch could even be a bluff, but let’s not go too far down that tin-foil road.
Instead: genre speculation. People joke about a dating sim all the time, but it would sell millions of copies, let’s be honest. Blizzard don’t currently have anything in a turn-based tactical space akin to XCOM, despite their strategy chops. The chance of another card game or MOBA seems low, though it could be an attempt at the latter on mobile. Give us your best suggestions below, and here’s what else we know they’re working on: a new FPS, a mobile MMO RTS, a new Diablo (that role was filled recently, so at least it’s moving forward) and likely more.