Okay, so I officially have 35 hours in this, I guess I better review it, though I wonder how many people will care 4 OT's in.
This is such an anomaly for me. I am usually a singleplayer guy. My favorite MP up until now was Halo 3's, and I don't think I put in more than 20 hours into it. I just don't do MP. I didn't understand the appeal of doing the same 'mission' over and over, which is evenly paced because you have to have an equal shot with your opponent. It just didn't appeal to me compared to singleplayer experiences, which have hours of content, controlled difficulty pacing to make sure things stay interesting, constant new content.
So I was very skeptical when picking up Overwatch. I'll be honest, it's the characters themselves that sold me on it. I was really worried, because the characters of Team Fortress 2 sold me on getting the game when it still cost something to get....and I ended up playing maybe 2 or 3 hours before realizing I was bored out of my mind. Granted, this was when it had been around for a while, so the players who stayed knew their shit, and I was a much worse player back then. But still, it just didn't click for me. But the fan art thread showed such a passionate fanbase for it, and there was a lot of good character design and personality in it that spoke to me and even in RL I heard people talking about it....I just had to try it out. I was going to get a used copy, but GS was out of them, so I was really hesitant in picking it up....but I did.
As I said, I'm a singleplayer guy, so that I've put in 35 hours into overwatch with no intentions of stopping any time soon really say something about the game. This is just not an experience I had before with ANY other game, and I don't know if I can properly describe how that makes me feel. There's a novelty about just the experience of being into a game type you've never liked before. Think about the kind of game you generally hate or have absolutely no interest in...then try to think of a game of that type that you love despite it being something you usually are indifferent to. That it's the only one of it's kind makes it special in a particular way.
I think part of the reason it's so unique is the Rock-Paper-Scissors design of the combat. I've never had the best reflexes, so when it came down to it, if I was facing a completely equal opponent in, say, Halo, but they were better in reflexes, they'd basically win. When I got good at that game, it was mainly learning the map enough to compensate for my slow fingers, but you can only know a map so well before you hit a plateau. With this, reflexes are a big part of it, for sure...but knowing the map is even more tantamount, coordinating with your team, and knowing who to go after and when. That kind of strategic thinking is far more in line with my strengths. Which is not to say I'm supergood at this game or anything, because trust me, I'm not. But I rarely feel as helpless as I used to if I played Halo against a better person. Now, to feel helpless, the entire team needs to have things locked down, and not only do I feel that's more earned, but it's something I think I could over come with good teammates. That means I always look at a match idealistically instead of "Oh man, I hope these guys aren't super good". But you want to know whats super good about this? While I learn to play to a character's abilities, I'm passively learning better reflexes as well. I tried to play Genji before when I started because he was a Cyborg Ninja and holy shit is that cool....only to find out I'm useless with him. D.Va gelled with me much better as a close range fighter with a ton of health and high mobility. But now that I've put so many hours into the game, going back to explore characters, it's much easier to control Genji and I had a much easier time getting to know him from just playing the game in a manner that suited me more at first.
But I also think that....I don't even know what you'd call it. The story? The characters? The lore? That's still a big appeal to me despite the game not having a singleplayer mode...and more bizarrely, me not wanting one. I don't know how anyone would make a campaign with all these characters in such a way as to not fuck up all the various interpretations of their personality. These are all simple characters, but they invite people to imagine their daily lives (which is why I think memes like Dad 76 and D.Va being a mountain dew chugging, dorito munching gremlin have taken off.) Like, people are intrigued to know about the big events like why Overwatch originally fell through, but they care a lot more about just imagining how these characters hang out with each other. So while I'm interesting in knowing about their history, the typical gaming conflicts (in this case, of an evil robot invasion) won't hold up as much. To give a recent example, I like this
strip from the fan art thread. Now, all the game (well, not the game, but Blizzard's website, but still) tells us is that Reaper was jealous of Soldier 76 getting the glory, he worked on the black ops division of Overwatch, and the game implies Mercy is the one that is responsible for the current condition of reaper who is perpetually dying, and Mercy, Soldier, and reaper all came out scarred from the experience of Overwatch's fall. That's not a lot of information, but through ideas like this comic, I just think of Mercy and Soldier 76 and Reaper all having been friends, while Reaper was still a very troubled individual, he also cared for them. So I like to think they had interactions much like this one where Mercy and Soldier would have to drag him into doing social stuff like that. And this is a powerful narrative technique, when you get people to write the narrative of the story for you. I remember one author talking about how he was praised by a fan for a battle scene in his novel that he didn't actually write because the scene faded to black before the action started, but the reader in question made up the scene in his head that ended up being one of his favorites. This is basically what Blizzard has done. There is a definitive narrative to all these characters, but they have invited players to make it their own. And that's amazing. But it also means Blizzard can't say anything. If they come in and say "this is what happened", and it doesn't fit with what people's created narratives are, no one is going to be happy. And it's not going to measure up to what people imagined either, because imagination is basically better 99% of the time. And, again, this is all assuming they create the narrative around the stuff I'm actually interested in, the character relationships. But more than likely, it'd be around the Omnic Crisis and....well, I just don't care about that. I only care insofar as exploring Zenyatta's personality more, but the giant robot war itself? I would have very little interest in exploring that part of the characters history unless it was done REALLY well.
But I'm guessing most of you are more interested in the gameplay aspect of this. The fandom seems kind of split, where hte fan art thread talks about their personality and history and stuff (while their not looking at the characters in skimpy outfits), while here the talk is almost exclusively about the gameplay. Well, like I said, I like the concept of it and I'm still kind of amazed that it's grabbed my attention the way it has. But no online MP game is perfect and there are things about it that annoy me. Keep in mind, I'm an average player at best (my win rate, with 260 games, is about 53%) so if anything what I say is bullshit, feel free to call me out on it, but here are the balance issues as I perceive them:
*Hero stacking: fuck this so hard, especially when it's a bunch of Torbs or Bastions and you can only, at best, take out one of them before the other 3 blow you away.
*Some character balancing: I've heard people say that D.Va's ult is both utterly useless and circumstantially useful. I've won more than a few games with it, but when it comes down to it, if you know D.Va ult is coming (which you most likely will because of the huge timer), you're going to survive easily it easily. I would like to see this altered in some way. I know that D.Va is getting a buff soon, but I don't know what that entails. If it's just damage increase, I don't think she needs it, but I'd like to see her either shorten her ult or make it so that players just die within certain vicinity. If a Reinhardt is there, he can shield his team, but he fucking dies. If a Mei shields a team, they survive, but still get damaged from the force. And don't have players survive by hiding behind a fucking signpost for christ sake. As it is, the counters to D.Va are too numerous and complete. I would also like to be able to shoot down Mei's robot thing. It's not an overpowered ult, but I'd like a good chance of being able to counter it. I'd also like to see a nerf of Torb's molten core. It's just such an annoying ult to deal with because nothing fundamentally changes about it, he just goes super saiyan and the 800 armor on the turret firing rockets basically makes it nigh impossible to bring him down. I've tried everything, D.Va shooting it point blank, using Pharah Rockets, Genji reflect, sniping from a distance (I've only ever had this work at the beginning of the map. If it's toward the end, there isn't an angle you can get with any character that doesn't have them immediately firing on you, and a sniper that's in range is generally going to lose out to multiple turrets). Unless there is team concentrated fire, all you can do is wait out the Molten core, and it's part of the reason why stacking Torb is so impossible to deal with without high coordination among your team, even when you start getting some hits in, he just ults and everything you just did is instantly undone. It's very annoying and not fun.
* Maps: I actually like Hanamura, but you guys showed earlier in the thread how D.Va stacking can fuck this mode up hard, maybe harder than other maps because the spawn point for it is so close to the objective. I don't know if it's necessarily unbalanced but Route 66 is annoying to play as the defender because the spawn is so far away when the team hits the second checkpoint. Maybe I'm just crazy and it's no slower a travel distance as other maps, but it somehow feels longer to me and I spend more time just running to the enemy engagement unless they're almost at the end. King's Row somehow avoids this problem, maybe because the travel between the starting point and the garage spawn area is somehow not well suited for combat, so they usually get it to the next checkpoint pretty fast. Volskaya Industries same problem if I spawn as the attacker, it just takes me forever to get there and it's annoying. I know this is less a balance issue, but I'm just noting the stuff that I don't like.
This isn't all of it, but I don't want to just make this a list of me criticizing each character individually, since that'd be boring. But, of course, none of this breaks the game for me, they're just problems I'd like to see fixed somehow.
So yeah, that's my experience with it. I really love this game. I'm going to probably make a thread on it concerning diversity, because that's also a big draw for the characters for me and I want to see how many people are likeminded to me in that regard. This is more than a great game for me, it's a special game. It's my entry point to a whole genre I've been up until now entirely disinterested in. It's a game that appeals to my playstyle and it does narratively interesting things with it's world building. It's really fun and I'm glad to be playing it.
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