• Overwatch gets a $20 price cut
    110 replies, posted
Its an okay game, highly overrated It uses gameplay elements that were exposed for being hot garbage long before the game entered development. Stun and CC abilities only create frustration in first person gameplay, this was something that was already understood in video game research circles. Blizz even took this a step further and piled on more annoying mechanics, the entire design of the game feels like its suppose to frustrate it. Its because of that I can play the game for about 14 hours a year before I burn out on it entirely.
To be fair I can see the appeal of a game that you can play casualy and not be stomped on by some supernerd that practiced/studied the intricacies of the game engine for countless hours (I am saying this as a supernerd that studied/practiced the intricacies of the source engine for countless hours). I think the main problem with Overwatch right now is the slow development time, not that the game itself is not fun. There is a lot of strategy when it comes to positioning and anticipating the enemy, even moreso than TF2. But in the end Overwatch should just have been a PvE game. The two events we have had so far have been nothing but sheer cinematic fun.
Uh, dude, he said salt.
I've originally bought the game to play with an ex and friends, and though the couple of years I've had it I have to say I don't enjoy the game anymore. The polish wore off, the game started to show its very blatant flaws, and the developer's effort to support this game's longevity dwindled with time. Sure it's still a decent game, but it could've been a lot better had the developers cared to fix the core problems than skirt around them and pretend the game is doing okay. I can't stand the kind of gameplay it harbors because of how hard it stone walls you with ultimates, stuns, and CC, to the point it's too much of a chore to even finish the match anymore. I can only play for 1-2 matches until I feel burnt out from playing it, or until I get the 3 loot boxes from arcade and never touch it until next week. I much prefer playing TF2, even after a several month hiatus, I managed to get right back into things to just have fun playing the damn game by itself.
I honestly don't like the Overwatch TF2 comparisons because they virtually fail in what both the games aim to achieve. Overwatch is an FPS Hero Shooter MOBA; it has all the mechanics and strategies of a MOBA; with positioning and timing your cool downs with the FPS combat of any 2010+ shooter. TF2 is a Class FPS Arena Shooter; its mechanics of what you'd see in Arena shooters back before 2010s and has the porous classes of something you'd see in games like Battlefield. They're not at all similar beyond Overwatch, quite honestly, happily engorging itself on the comparisons even though the more obvious comparisons are toward Paladins which has been indevelopment for just as long. Overwatch should be compared to Paladins and MOBAs, not Team Fortress 2.
Im probably one of the 4 people on the planet who still thinks about Battleborn, but every now and then when theres some talk about OW i kinda hoped that game would at least do well as something like Paladins instead of fall flat on its face and die the moment it launched The combat had a lot more depth with bits of customization, the characters were much more interesting both visually and personality wise, had an actual campaign mode and rewards for progression were more than just loot boxes stuffed with junk As much polish OW had I couldnt be bothered to spend more time in it when I was rarely having fun because of the dumb mechanics shoved in and the level up loot boxes was just a incentive from actiblizz to dump more money instead of being an actual reward to keep me playing I mean Paladins and TF2 is still up and running and each of them are great in their own right and everything i just said was subjective, but it still kinda sucks that batteborn was immidiately dismissed to be a shitty version of OW
To be honest Paladins now is just OW but better and free. Too bad a lot of people (myself included) tried it when it first went public, said 'this is a bit shit and copypastey' and never tried it again.
I bought this game for £2.99 on release day when a site put the price up wrong - honestly i'd feel salty if i paid full price. TF2 was much more fun.
Overwatch can be pretty fun I think, but it really bothers me how the character distribution in the Tank, Healer and DPS categories is so lopsided, as well as how the gameplay favours team comps. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/224858/63c739a6-16c3-4842-9795-1d93810a4c55/bild.png Most players in the game evidently want to play DPS heroes the most. There's a shitload of DPS heroes in the game to support that (I know it's because they merged two categories, but still). However, at this point, the game asks for a team composition that looks more like: 2 DPS, 2 Tanks, 2 Healers. The meta of the game tends to support something similar. It really doesn't fit with the role preference distribution of the playerbase (in my experience). The few tank/support heroes that exist aren't necessarily interchangeable either. So really, while there may be seven tanks to choose from, you may actually just get pigeonholed into playing Reinhardt or something over and over. The heroes in the game aren't exactly deep, so that gets boring quickly. So that's fun for people who have to play as tank/healer for their team, even when they don't want to.
I bought Overwatch at full price to play with friends, played the tutorial and something about the way it controlled just put me off completely, absolutely nothing like the shooters I grew up with and in a bad way. I regret buying it to this day, though I still see what people have to say since I'm always interested in competitive design and Overwatch feels built to fail because it's trying to be too appealing to its own detriment. Characters and maps seem simple to learn and are made with cool factor first, balance later, feels like a lot of toxicity comes then from 1) characters being so simple that you think you're playing right, so surely you shouldn't be failing and 2) The CC abuse everyone's already mentioned as a result of cool first/balance later. If they allowed for playstyle diversity and tech skill that needed to be learned, you can bet online would get hella cleaned up real fast. Also, custom gamemodes like TF2 would have been cool.
I really can't bring myself to play it anymore. Had tons of fun earlier, especially in mystery heroes. Found myself enjoying it less and less over the past 6 months, with frustration being the only constant. Still love the character design, but that's about the only positive thing I see in the game at this point.
As soon as I got Siege, the niche of "not-great layered but not-overly-complex multiplayer shooter I can play with mates and get mad at in place of something I care about" was completely supplanted and I have not touched Overwatch since.
I seem to recall thinking along the same lines as what's been said in this thread a few months after the game came out when people were still hailing this thing as the TF2-Killer. Funnily enough I'm playing it more now than I have at any time in the past few years. Though strictly in the Arcade where there's a bit more leniency towards fucking around. Every so often when playing you get that lovely, fleeting moment of a round that is exceptionally fun and devolves into a hard-fought battle over the objective where winning or losing is a matter of inches. And then the other 90% of the time you may as well beat your head against Reinhardt's shield because your team got wiped after the opening skirmish and now the other team is riding that initial success all the way to GG-EZ Town via Struggle Boulevard. It just becomes a goddamn slog, and I swear some nights I'll win one match for every eight or so I lose. People laugh about the rules Blizzard put in place to reduce toxicity, but they did go a long way in shutting people up from bragging about their victory which was a fucking constant. As for the sexuality of the characters, you may as well make the guy who delivers my mail gay because It'll matter to me about just as much. Maybe I'd give a damn if there was actual interesting stories to read about with these characters aside from the scraps Blizzard has provided. But really this wouldn't matter at all if you FUCKERS JUST GOT ON THE FUCKING POINT! AND DO WE REALLY NEED A HANZO AND A GENJI RIGHT NOW?
To fix overwatch, I would get rid of stuns, get rid of hard counters, and increase the players per team so there's less pressure on each individual to obey the meta. To me, Hanzo is one of the more fun heroes to play. He's also one of the ones I play the least; simple because when I'm playing as him I don't feel very useful, and that pressure to do well makes me not play him even in arcade and quickplay and instead I just go play Ana, roadhog, or Soldier 16 for the 100th time. I think sombra is an example of a hero done right. High skill cieling, fun to play, although her hacking ability is frustrating if you're someone like Reinhardt, where you're just left defenseless for a good couple of seconds. Mei, on the other hand, is the single best representation of everything wrong with Overwatch. Has a stupidly long stun, an extremely frustrating movement speed reducing gun, a 4-second stall button and a wall that is often used to harm teammates.
What are you, the comparison police? Obviously OW is similar enough to TF2 that everybody finds it useful to compare and contrast them, or they wouldn't be doing it.
I think the biggest issue I have with Overwatch is more with its core design pillar. It is designed to emphasize team composition, to the point where there's nothing really deep or satisfying about it from a solo perspective. There's nothing really player skill based outside of the basic "can you aim and shoot", and if there is, they usually end up toning it down due to complaints. I don't think the game is bad or garbage, it's just not my thing at all. I mostly come from a time where shooters were more focused on movement and player skill rather than team composition. As such, I just find Overwatch slow, boring, and lacking. If you enjoy it, more power to you and I'm glad. It's just not for me. I had fun with it for about the first year, but I think that was just due to it being new and me playing it with friends. After the newness wore off, I was able to see it for what the game actually is, and I just simply decided it wasn't for me.
The part that kills it hardest for me is that it takes all six players coordinating to win the game, and only one player dicking around or being stupid to completely throw the game regardless of how hard the rest of the team is trying or well they're performing.
They ought to use all that loot box money to make a TV series that would not only be cool on its own but bring the game back into the spotlight.
I feel bad for the friends that bought the legendary edition of OW. The main reason I played OW is the fact I loved playing with friends, and it was the only game I could play with them. I loved TF2 and Mobas, but Overwatch had too much flaws. I had more fun on the Death Match game mode than playing the game on a CP/Koth map. Worse offender was when on CTF event, you had to wait 3 second on the flag without taking damage to get it. Some Event was good. Some were Bad.
Overwatch is nothing like TF2 except at launch it had the whole class breakdown which was thrown out. Its not useful, they don't have anything close in goal design nor in gameplay design. Again, the only reason why the comparison comes up is because Overwatch happily took the publicity and comparisons with a game that is fairly beloved in the community.
Man I would love a Quake inspired arena shooter, but with an appealing style like Overwatch. Cause if there’s anything that Overwatch does right, is it looks real good!
Quake Champions is absolutely gorgeous in my opinion.
TF2 had the same problem. f2p seemed to initially make it worse but then it got better.
Y'know, I was just thinking about this a couple days ago. In how TF2 still feels like a modern classic and Overwatch turned out to be a flavor-of-the-month thing that burned out quickly. Oh sure, there are still plenty of people playing Overwatch, and its concurrent playercount is probably still an order of magnitude higher than TF2 reaches nowadays, but even with Valve effectively abandoning it and having left the spotlight, TF2 never faded. It's still there in the public consciousness, happily chugging a long as a mainstay of video game culture. Overwatch has to constantly make an effort to keep itself in the spotlight because if it isn't, it'll disappear entirely. TF2 was a trendsetter. It wasn't the first to do what it did - class-based shooters had been done before, we'd had cartoony shooters like Timesplitters, a lot of its gameplay was just cribbed from Quake - but it was the first game to combine them in such a way that the product as a whole was nothing we'd ever seen before. It was basically the blueprint of the modern hero shooter in how it spawned so many imitators, Overwatch itself included. Honestly, if it weren't for Blizzard behind it (having taken up the "gamer darling" mantle once Valve's reputation started to fall) and - let's just rip the band-aid off here - all the waifu-pandering in its character design, it probably wouldn't have been nearly as popular as it was, and would've been more comparable to something like Monday Night Combat.
While I agree there is waifu pandering in overwatch I tried playing Paladins a couple weeks ago and holy shit that game is titty city. Blizzard stole the mantle of Waifu king by appealing to all tastes instead of just slapping great bug honkers on every female.
I dunno what it was but I played a lot of the overwatch beta and loved it, bought the game at launch and played it for ages and it was odd, maybe it scratched the phantom itch left behind by tf2. I didn't gradually build to the conclusion that I disliked overwatch, it's just suddenly me and my friends stopped playing one day and never went back and we could never find the motivation to go back. Looking back I can see why I didn't like it and I wonder why I ever played it in the first place, hell some of the reasons I dislike it are why I stopped playing dota2. For starters you have the meta, not the metagame aspect where every its a constant game beyond the game of finding new tricks and counters and strategies that become effective without a need for direct balancing No no no... Overwatch has "The Meta" sometimes refereed to as "The Current Meta" which is a perfectly static list of X hero good Y hero bad, Z hero good against X hero. You must pick X hero first, Z hero if X hero is on the enemy team and never ever play Y hero ever. The meta only changes in patches and any deviation from the meta is an active detriment to your team. Compare and contrast to tf2 where during a game you can wind up swapping classes four or five times and switching up weapons to dynamically counter what the enemy team is sending at you and it's not always "to counter spy, pick pyro" you could pick pyro or you could just keep a sharp eye out. Demomen can be stopped by pyro's engineers and not going near corners. Snipers can be countered by other snipers or spies or getting in their face as anyone with the capacity to avoid their lines of sight and get in their face and pretty much every class and their mother has a fucking way to make an engineer almost useless and for everything else there is the úbercharge. Then we have how one player can affect the game in a bad way. If one player on your team in overwatch isn't pulling his weight then it drags the whole team down no matter how good the other guys are. In tf2 one really good player can help a mediocre team to victory. What this means in overwatch is that your friends need to be as good as you else playing with them directly spoils your chance at victory. It's 6v6 round based nature only lends to this where a disconnecting player is nearly a death sentence. If one guy quits you stand a good chance if it being game the fuck over. In tf2, especially in the good old days of the FPUS and FPUK tf2 servers, it was all drop in drop out, no one player was the ball and chain that kept your team back and yet your own individual skill made a difference. Then there was how it had this cheery light-hearted tone but also tried to take itself seriously, you cannot take yourself seriously when one of your core classes is jetpack gorilla and you add a mecha hamster later., it's characterisation flip flopped between straight faced and determined to the likes of Junkrat and don't get me fucking started on Tracer who might as well qualify for the internation standard kilogram of "Here's exactly how NOT to do a British character." (Somewhat unrelated note but one time when I mentioned tracer was a shit character I actually got in an argument with someone who said that by virtue of tracer being gay and me not liking them I am therefore homophobic, this left a bad taste in my mouth that festered into a rather unreasonable hatred of declaring characters gay for the sake of nothing at all and it took a long talk with some good friends for me to see the folly of this line of thinking.) Then there was the map design which ranged from adequate to chokepoint fuckster-duck where you piddle behind shields giving each other the evils till one side puts a toe out of line and you snowball down the rest of the way. Some 2cp maps had this bad habit of the first point being nearly indefensible and resulting in you getting to sit for 10 min in the box that every second point seemed to be. Case in point the russian mech factory map where it's a really long walk from defender spawn to the first point and the second point is a well fortified box with the spawn right outside. The first point as a single chokepoint only by-passable by a few heroes and only a fewer set of those heroes still can use the bypass that isn't directly next to the chokepoint thus making the bypass useless. But once the attackers are past that chokepoint it takes so long for the defenders to get back that unless you had someone who can sit there and block the capture for the duration the attackers are going to take that shit no problem. Because for attack/defence maps like that there is an overall timer for match time, the quicker the attackers take point 1 the longer you have to hold point 2. After that first point, enjoy 8 minutes in the fukken box. And then I come to the point that I really really disliked about overwatch, Ultimates. Ultimate were a concept lifted from moba's and added to a shooter with much less of the intricacies and complexity of a moba. The fact that your ultimate gauge fills up and never goes down ever means that you are going to get to use one at some point, there is nothing the enemy can do to prevent deployment of an ultimate and many of them are fire and forget so there is no risk to using one. This isn't as big an issue in a moba where correct deployment matters and you can find ways to blunt the effects or outright immunize yourself to them. But lets take for example Hazno's ultimate, them bigass dragon things that do damage. It goes through walls, can be deployed anywhere, has infinite range and once the effect manifests cannot be blocked or stopped in any way. Just fire it in the general direction you don't want enemies to be for the next 30 seconds and huzzah. Then there was the (thankfully changed) old way Mercy's resurrect worked. Press Q to instantly return all your allies to life and effectively undo everything the enemy team did. This happens the second you hit Q and there is no real way to prevent you from using it unless you die before you get the chance but all that lead to was Mercy farms the ultimate and hides till the enemy team uses one or two of their ults before swooping in and going "lol no". Not to mention that killing the mercy while it's charging doesn't do dick for you, that gauge never goes down and they will always get that ult it is inexorable and unless you dedicated yourself to hunting a mercy down and making sure they were dead before you went in a killed the enemy team then they were going to resurrect some of their allies. Compare to the closest thing tf2 has to an ultimate, the medic's Ubercharge, if the medic dies he loses any progress on his gauge, there are a myriad of ways to counter an in progress charge and it only benefits one teammate at a time. You can kill the medic before its used, you can kill his ally before it's used, you can just airblast them around so they can't do anything, they might not even be using the one that turns them invincible so you could just kill them anyway. They might not even get a chance to do anything worthwhile with the charge if you just pull back and let it burn out. The ubercharge isn't a "press for effect" it's a "press for potential" Ok imma wrap this up because I realise i've nearly written six terrible paragraphs of this autism and all over a silly video game.
I'm not saying competitive should be changed. I'm saying we should have an alternative to just 6v6. Like an arcade mode or something.
Sorry, but your post heavily exaggerates TF2's impact compared to Overwatch. What makes you think Overwatch won't stay in public consciousness, especially considering the impact it had on other media besides videogames? How would Overwatch disappear entirely without "constantly making an effort"? I think you underestimate how many people play this game. While Overwatch is loosely based on TF2, saying that Overwatch isn't a trendsetter is bold, considering the number of games that tried to compete with Overwatch. It's actually TF2 that would have died if they didn't make it f2p and added the market.
I'd guess that it's because blizzard spends a lot of time promoting overwatch as an esport. Most tf2 related video content is either some funny occurrence or gmod/sfm videos, whereas overwatch has a lot more twitch streamer content going for it. Personally this is kinda something I dislike, tf2 content tends to be a joke you can relate with as you've either been in that situation or its something that's about the world tf2 is in. Overwatch seems to be more about "hey look at these guys who are really good at overwatch or this famous person playing overwatch!" Tf2 in that regard felt more personal, I could empathise with what was going on whereas overwatch related content is more spectator style. It's hard to explain how I feel about it but it's more tf2 style stuff connects with you whereas overwatch stuff is just showing off.
Overwatch is more marketing than game. It's not popular because it's a consistently fun experience, it's popular because it's aggressively marketed and so it takes on this "You have to play it because it's the game everyone else is playing." status.
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