Local developer Jeff Kaplam fails to understand his audience. Stunned by results - Sensationalist Headlines

I wouldn't say Kaplan failed to understand his audience, as the majority of players can actually accept that some heroes were designed to be situational. Some players choose to ignore that fact and selfishly turn a competitive team game to something it is not.

The characters in Overwatch are simultaneously too braindead to have any form of genuine depth or complexity and too hard to pick up on the first go to be able to simply get them and be good within a couple of minutes, which means that Blizzard's dumb approach to overly specific, overly situational characters just cannot work. It was a blatant misfire on their part and unless they overhaul nearly every single hero in the game and offer maps that are more varied than the same choke-point centric structure with minor tweaks the game is doomed to die out for lack of any genuine depth for long-term players to get invested in.

Perhaps class-based games trying to achieve this should require or show class selection during respawn, so that sticking to the same class is a conscious choice.

One way to solve it could be to have each character work on an individual respawn timer, so that you either have to stick to the same character and suffer longer and longer respawns as you keep dying, or hotswap to something else so you can have a shorter timeout while your other characters essentially go on cooldown.

This is why overwatch is bleeding players and many people I know who used to play are just done with the game. People wanna play Hanzo and and they wanna play Genji and being forced to play a snoozefest Tank like Reinhardt or Support instead because that's what the situation calls for or because they're just not very good at that character yet may be the most effective for the team but it's not fun for the person playing, and if it's not fun, what's the point? That's why having hard counters sucks ass. Doesn't matter how skilled of a Genji you are, you aren't gonna do shit against that Zarya or that Winston. And that's frustrating for someone that doesn't really find it fun to play as Soldier 76 just because that's what the situation calls for.

My biggest problem with Overwatch is that it really doesn´t work as a casual game. It is designed for the six players on your team to stick around for the entire game. You got a bad start and more than one person leaving? Enjoy the snowball ult effect, which you maybe, maybe can halt around the last point, so look forward to defending that for 5+minutes (7+ minutes on two point maps like Hanamura).

I really do hope they finally figure out how to get Overwatch right. I love everything about it. The characters, the world, the story (if they would bother to expand on it already but there is a good framework) but I just can't get past the gameplay. I would hate for the game to crash and burn because Blizzard doesn't know what they are doing with it.

Yknow, the funny thing is that I actually had no interest in any sort of RTS games or, hell, top-down games in general, before I played LoL. The thing that hooked me was the theme of the game, the idea of "summoning" a legendary champion from this pantheon of heroes to fight for you, I thought the way they presented that was the shit. Not like I would've kept playing it if I didn't find the gameplay as engaging as I did. And it's not like you can't have a game be good while switching characters. But a game is really at its best when the lore fits the gameplay like a glove

I doubt that Overwatch is bleeding players because of that reason, 'maining' is generally fine and accepted, as long the 'maining' player can recognize whether they're being useful or not. Nevertheless, treating the game as if it is something else is ignorant. People shouldn't be playing the game if they can only have fun by what is antagonizing their team, that is not what a competitive team game is about. Unless it's quick play, that's perfectly fine. Regarding hard counters, skill does matter and there is depth to be found in teamwork. Heroes are simple but the game is not one-dimensional, there is so much a Genji can do for his team and vice versa. Genji and like most of his teammates, have an influence on Zarya's and Winston's bubbles. Neither Zarya or Winston can shut down Genji without expense. Genji himself bring deflect against Graviton Surge, and Winston tend to tunnel vision him. Dragonblade straight up ignores Winston's shield. If someone is going to play only 5% of the game, they better work hard for it to work. I honestly think managing to do so is admirable and separates the good 'mains' from the bad.

some of us got this game on launch dude. i loved playing nothing but pharah before matchmaking straight up ruined quickplay. add on three years of reworks and meta shifts and now you have an entirely different game than it used to be

Ouch, you are in for a bad time, because if you try to explain the game that makes a REAL convoluted lores. The League of Legend lore was so much of a mess they rebooted it in 2014 entirely, The "League of Legend" is no longer a thing and the "summoner" (player) does not exist anymore and is no longer acknowledged (yet spell like flash and cleanse are still summoner's spell and the map is still called the summoner's rift). The game doesn't have to make sense, and follow the lore.

The difficulty in dealing with Flash is that it came out super early, so the game essentially developed around it. Like when people leave something by a tree, and then it grows to encompass that thing? With every passing month, it became harder to remove it, and by its first 3 years, LoL was already transforming from "Heroes of Newerth's inbred cousin" to "Heroes of Newerth is the inbred cousin". The more players they had, the bigger the risk if Flash's removal ended up changing LoL into something radically different from the game these players had fallen in love with. Funny to think it has a range of 400 and a cooldown of 300sec, when it was once 150sec with a range of a thousand. I wonder if it would've been best to embrace it and make Flash into a default spell, with the 2 slots open for other stuff Yes I played from 2011 until around that time. The larger political considerations of the League's existence never made much sense to begin with. They didn't need to, the scope of the game didn't include them, like how TF2 didn't touch the reasons why RED fights BLU, yet the game's thematic still had a strong, cohesive "feel" to it. Once the comics came around, they did (and a good job of it, too), and that's where LoL made a mess, in extra material, because that's the part that does put the lore into focus, nonsensical bits included. The simpler lore it had, and the novel idea of summoners, fit the game well, and there's plenty that they should've just ignored

What the game was "intended" to be doesn't matter since the entire point of the thread is that the game is something entirely different than what they envisioned because people don't find what they envisioned fun.

it does. the premise of the game is still to change heroes accordingly to the situation. the difference you mention is that heroes are now catered to work in every game mode, instead of being only ideal at defence. the people you mention is one side of the player-base, the other side of the player-base is fine with as it was. 'maining' is becoming more enabled and that is an annoyance for one side of the player-base, because team composition is still the core aspect of the game, as it was back then.

While I'm likely to just repeat what a lot of people have said already I'll give my own two cents on the matter having played a LOT of TF2 and struggling to get into, and ultimately dropping Overwatch. While i do enjoy playing whatever I find the most fun, in which case in TF2 was mostly medic and spy, it never felt too terrible if i found an enormous 3 engineer nest in the capture room and decided "well i'll go demoman" after i was turned into a pile of gibs. It feels like absolute shit in Overwatch because of that Ultimate meter that you lose if you feel pressured into changing over a shit situation. The other issue is that some characters just feel like shit to play against. Mei is about as unfun as you can design a character in an FPS by deciding she can take away all your control and then to rub salt in the wound while you're completely immovable, she gets an i-win shot at your face. There's a reason sandman was nerfed, because it wasn't fun for anyone on the receiving end. Overwatch also tries to make characters "more unique" by giving them certain gimmicks that change the way they interact with things, which was never an enormous problem in TF2 because the MAJORITY of characters have an alternative if you go at it that way, even accounting for the base game without the weapons. Scout can double jump. But soldier can also rocket jump. Demoman can jump with his sticky grenades. They all move more or less the same aside from a few differences, usually in the form of using their weapons instead of an ability kit. Overwatch is all over the place. D. Va can fly in her mech, Pharah can jetpack, Mercy can dash to teammates, Hanzo can climb walls, Lucio can wallgrind. I can imagine some people REALLY like how some of these characters play and NOT want to be forced to play without the things they really like. Then there's they present each of these characters in the way that they do and was mentioned in this thread. If I'm playing big burly knight man, odds are I won't want to switch to grappling hook sniper woman to counter their jetpacking Tribes player. It's a pretty big disconnect from the way the characters are presented from TF2's generic, stereotypical mercenaries (which don't get me wrong, I love, but the point is that they ARE stereotypes, and even then have more personality than OW's characters but that's another point altogether.)

Part of what I think completes TF2's atmosphere is that the characters actually feel alive because they have very animated facial movements when they speak. OW doesn't even have that.

You can swim in Team Fortress 2 water is a thing You can't swim in Overwatch and water isn't a thing Guess who win.

All of the Mercs are teeming with personality and differing shades of complexity and quirks to their characters. The voice acting and script delivery in TF2 is spot-on, you can really resonate with some of the more insanity/sadistic deliveries mercs will deliver during combat. In contrast to Overwatch's dull, sterile scripts for characters with lines and personalities out-of-place for 80% of the characters in game where you kill hundreds and thousands of characters. Compare this: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/w/images/d/de/Soldier_taunts07.wav Which sounds no less badass now then it did twelve years ago, because it fits the context of a game full of psychopathic mercenaries who take sadistic glee with murdering eachother. Compared to someone like Mei icicle head-shotting some poor sap in a gruesome fashion, and all you hear is a coy "sorry.." as she kills a dude in cold blood. Its a huge juxtaposition; which could've been made to work if the characters in Overwatch weren't so dreadfully written and uninteresting

My only real problem with why I don't switch characters on the fly is because of the ultimate charge in Overwatch. I die, and my ultimate is fairly high up there, I don't want to switch right away. I want to make use of that ultimate. If I switch characters, I lose that ultimate charge, and have to start from the beginning. They could potentially let you transfer your ult charge from one character to the next (by "ult points", not by "percentage" aka you can't just immediately get a black hole with Zarya) but even then I think that would cause some balance issues, they'd have to think that through carefully if they were to do something like that. If that becomes a balance issue on its own where someone decides to switch to one character real quick to pop their ultimate then go back to the other character (I can see this being very common with probably Widowmaker's ultimate, Bastion's ultimate, or D'va's ultimate) than maybe it can subtract ultimate points for switching - not eliminate ultimate points entirely.

I dunno how this "TF2 characters are complex" meme got started. Before the comics, they were all just stock stereotypes, albiet incredibly well executed stereotypes.

Complex being the wrong word I was looking for, yeah. Perhaps someone else would do a better job at explaining. I just find myself a lot more amused and engrossed in the TF2 cast for varying reasons. I didn't really feel that sort of connection to the Overwatch cast, nor did I take too much of a liking to some of the script and voiceline decisions with some of the characters.

Y'know, they almost -- almost -- had an interesting undertone with Mei. In the seasonal Mei-focused event she got quite a few voicelines that were intentionally chipper as always, but about stuff that definitely shouldn't be said in that manner; Like a giggly "I put a rock in this one!" after preparing a snowball to shoot at high velocity out of her gun into someone else's face. Paired with other new lines like "Come on ooouuuut..." and "I'm going to find you!" which were technically fitting for a friendly game with pals but still kinda off, it all fed into the old observation that whether intentional or not Mei operates like a classic persistence predator slasher villain and tends to give off those vibes. Of course, it was never really touched on again, because that kind of complexity in her persona would be a risk. Like how Mercy was originally hinted to have accidentally made Reaper what he is, but then those lines were removed and Moira was added in to have done every last bit of bad sciency stuff, because we can't have the perfect almost literal angel making mistakes.

They weren't though. Before the comics were a thing we knew that the engineer has 12 PhDs and that the heavy weapons guy had a degree in Russian literature. Heavy is obsessed with his gun to the point that he knows every minute detail about it and gets upset that someone else touched it. Demo is a depressed drunkard who is upset people don't give him respect. A lot of the details of the characters came from the Meet the Team videos and from voice lines in the games. The comics just expanded it and gave the characters names.

Those "details" are one step above "Sonic's favorite food is chili dogs" in terms of adding complexity. Even the Heavy having a degree in Russian Literature is little more than one of those subverted cliches that are just as common as the thing they subert.

You'd think with a character with a backstory of "everyone I love was tragically frozen to death" played completely seriously, her playstyle should he something different than "bubbly persona while freezing everyone to death." A good character would have their character reflected in their playstyle, like Junkrat or Zenyatta, but Mei is like the polar (heh) opposite.

It's still more than being stock stereotypes, which is what you said they were. I wasn't disagreeing that they weren't developed characters.

Okay then, stock stereotypes with some aftermarket decals.

... that still manage to be more engrossing and engaging as characters than nearly anyone in overwatch's over-designed cast.

I like to imagine that the cryo-accident gave Mei brain damage that turned her into a demented psychopath with a soft demeanor ala Harley Quinn. Like on the outside she's all "Let's gather some valuable data on this mission!" but on the inside she's like "FUCK DATA WE'RE HERE TO KILL! KILL!!! KILL!!!" (but seriously, how much data can you hope to gather from pushing a payload or standing on a point?)

...Which I never disputed if you read my posts.