Blizzard says Overwatch was considered for Switch since launch, talk about the difficulty of the port, platform parity, and hopes for cross-progression

Switch fans have been asking for Overwatch to come to the platform for years now, and it's finally happening on Oct. 15th, 2019. Turns out seeing Overwatch on Switch was a desire Blizzard themselves had as well, and according to a Verge interview with Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan, the company started considering a port of the game right when Switch launched.

“Literally the day the Switch came out, we were thinking about it. I remember immediately talking to people around the office saying, ‘What would it take for us to be here?’”

Blizzard has already brought Diablo III over to Switch, but that port seemed to be rather straightforward. According to Kaplan, Overwatch was a bit more complicated.

“It was much easier to get Diablo on the device than it was to get Overwatch, and, like everything we do here, we wanted to make sure to do it right. It was just a long process of figuring out how to handle the development in a way that we felt like we would be very proud of the end product.”

With Overwatch finally coming to Switch, do players have to worry about the Switch version not being up-to-date with other versions? That won't be the case, says Kaplan.

“Our goal is to keep all platforms in parity. So as far as we can, we’re going to have all the same feature sets. Any kind of new heroes or events or anything like that should be out at the same time.. None of our platforms are considered lesser to us.”

The last question on the minds of Overwatch fans is whether the game will provide cross-progression. Once again, Blizzard says they want it to happen, but don't have solid details yet.

“I think it’s going to be super exciting to have that. A lot of people are asking for it, and it’s something that, as a player, I totally want to be able to do that. It’s something that we’re currently investigating, but we don’t have any solid info right now.”