OVERWATCH For The Nintendo Switch Will Reportedly Not Support Cross-Platform Progression At Launch

It was recently announced that Overwatch will finally be coming to the Nintendo Switch on October 15th. The popular multiplayer shooter has been available on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC platforms for about three years now.

Naturally, following the announcement, those who have been playing Overwatch since its initial launch in 2016 immediately wondered whether they will be able to carry over their progress to the Switch.

Unfortunately, based on a recent interview between Overwatch's lead game producer and Eurogamer, it seems that players won't be able to port over their level nor cosmetic items — at least for the time being. Blizzard are apparently mulling over whether cross-system play would be a good fit for Overwatch but it seems that they're not technically able to support cross-platform progression.

Cross play and cross progression are something we've learned a lot about in the last couple of years, particularly looking at our other game Hearthstone, which has multiplatform support. We don't have anything specific to talk about today, other than say there are business and technical challenges to getting all that to work correctly. Our focus really has been just trying to get Overwatch on the Nintendo Switch so we can have all new ways to play and welcome the Nintendo community into the Overwatch community.

The site followed up the developer's response by asking whether the option was considered by Blizzard as well as whether there's a chance that it could be added at some point in the future. Unfortunately, his response was just as uncertain.

"Yeah, I mean this is something we've talked about, the industry's been evolving on this in the last couple of years and we've been actively monitoring and paying attention to what's been going on, we're just not in a place yet from a technical or a business side that we can make any sort of commitment on that front."

So, it seems that Overwatch won't support cross-platform progression when it launches on the Nintendo Switch. However, that isn't to say that Blizzard won't be able to get around to adding it later down the line — perhaps if fans make it abundantly clear that they want the option to be implemented.