Pretty sure it's just people upset that a game they liked didn't win a pointless award but they need to make some sort of 'sensible' argument so they don't just look like whiners.
The Internet in a nutshell
Pretty sure it's just people upset that a game they liked didn't win a pointless award but they need to make some sort of 'sensible' argument so they don't just look like whiners.
OvercrackWell deserved, a truly awesome and addictive game.
Overwatch has a story.
Hopefully, Blizzard will go easier on us with the next character.That fucking Sombra ARG though.
I would have given it to Uncharted 4, heart swelling with pride and no doubt in my mind.The only other games on that list that were deserving were Inside or Doom...
If you say you would have given it to Uncharted 4 shame on you.
The only other games on that list that were deserving were Inside or Doom...
If you say you would have given it to Uncharted 4 shame on you.
I got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand Overwatch shows the high level of Blizzard's technical polish. It looks great, it runs great and so on. Even more amazing when you consider it was salvaged from a failed MMO attempt and not built as an action game from the ground up. On the other hand everything else about it: the community, the game balance, the class design...is awful.
It's hard to say how much of an impact the quality of the community should have for an award. It differs for each person's anecdotal experience after all. Lots of journalist types for instance play these games against each other in closed bubbles when they do their reviews. I imagine playing the game against Geoff Keighly and Snoop Dog at a presser changes the flavor compared to having to deal with the average clodhopping bnet player. But, for my own personal experience, it is the most terrible gaming community I've ever been a part of. People often consider it a truism that every online community has its shitters and you can't really make a distinction. I have to disagree with that in this case. The Overwatch community is the most intense and viscous group of aggressive morons I've ever seen. I have well over a thousand hours in Dota 2 so it's not like I've been sheltered from "intense" communities. Hell, two days ago I was in Battlefield 1 and a conversation took place in the all chat between these randos about how Hitler needed to be resurrected with science because "Trump wasn't enough" and the "white genocide was moving too quickly" and only Adolf could stop it. Even that insane stupidity pales in comparison to the junk in Overwatch. The conversations in Overwatch are purely dominated by whining and backseat driving. On the surface, it might not seem like much compared to praying for Hitler's return. But in my experience and over a period of time, it is just exhausting. Don't pick this character, don't play that way, don't do this, don't do that. Did I pay 40 bucks for a videogame or a mother-in-law? At least the weird Hitler convo between the Battlefield dude bros has some entertainment value for being off the wall and strange. The Overwatch stuff is just nonstop the same bitching and moaning shit over and over. "I have X golds LOL this team!" "What an E-Z game bois!" *commences t-bagging* "Our DPS did nothing" "Where is the healer?" The names change, but it feels like I'm with and against the same people over and over. I've met some extremely toxic people over the years in gaming, but at least they had their own identity. I'll never forget Alan in Dota. The worst sniper I had ever seen. He told me in his quavering jug voice that I sounded like I had a bag of dicks in my mouth. A whole bag! Is this what Ganymede whispered to Zeus while he was whisked away to Mount Olympus? Or what about POOP the Tusk? A slow talking southern fried offlaner who's battlecry of "Well fam I guess I'll initiate"was the prelude of his inevitable feed as he snowballed down mid. I close my eyes and I can still hear his juicy sighs and the soft click of yet another can of beer being opened in the background. Conversely, I can't remember a single Overwatch asshole. It's because they are the SAME. EXACT. ASSHOLE. There's no entertainment value here, no ironic smiles. It's just the same blurry slurry of shit.
The game balance is pretty bad as well. There have been earlier posts trying to claim how "dynamic" the meta is posting those asinine meta reports from that CaptainPlanet/FalconKick goober. It's missing the forest for the trees. That a few characters swap places every once in a while is not a vibrant meta when the reasons that they do so are based on balance problems in the core game design. Two examples out of many that illustrate this problem: the presence of Lucio at the top of the meta since release and the musical chairs relationship between soldier 76 and mccree. Lucio has been top tier since the game came out. Not only that but he's also been whittled down consistently since release with nerfs, so with every patch he feels shittier and shittier to play despite still being monstrously important. This is a HUGE game design problem. Overwatch is ostensibly built around hero swapping and drafting but if you have even one top tier character that fits into every lineup that kills a big chunk of variety when you consider there are only 6 characters a team. Soldier received a seemingly small on paper buff of 3 damage points which pushed him to the top and now he's clobbered McCree back down into the pit. In the past McCree had clobbered soldier with the longer range pistol change. And in the past BEFORE THAT soldier clobbered McCree after McCree had his fan roll combo nerfed. Some people might look at this and say "What's the problem? Everyone is getting a turn! WOO meta variety!" And to answer that: this is not a good thing. The reason being, as already mentioned by other posters in this thread but that I'll elaborate on, is that the game is too dumbed down. Specifically, there is not enough unique properties per character and certain elements are too additive with another and those unique properties that DO exist either have too much interference with other elements or not enough. I'll use my two examples here to illustrate what I mean. Soldier and McCree are both hitscan dps characters, meaning they deal their damage by clicking on people instantly. Soldier runs arounds around quickly, has a an aoe healing dispenser for utlity, and uses a stream of bullets style of attack that emphasizes tracking. McCree has a combat roll that reloads his gun, a stun for utility, and an attack style that emphasizes single snap shots. On paper they look different enough, right? But in practice it doesn't matter. They share the same job: doing damage and killing people (this segues in to the class design problem later). The question then becomes which is the one that is most efficient at doing that. In Overwatch everything, damage and healing, stacks with another (the additive problem). This creates a dps race where in order to chew through all the healing that's everywhere you have to have burst damage (uniqueness problem). This in turn, means that the best dps is the one with the greatest capacity for burst (interference problem). In the past, Soldier's whittling dps style couldn't compete with McCree's burst. Now after the buff, soldier is eating McCree's lunch because his tiny 3 damage buff turned his whittling gun into a chunking gun. And this is all without touching the other can of worms here, where both these characters being hitscan and capable of burst have pushed away dps characters that are projectile based like Pharah who's been a flying garbage can since release. Lucio hits all three problem areas but expresses them in a different way. While Soldier and McCree step on each others toes, Lucio steps on everyone's foot His aura adds to everything except other Lucio auras (now not even an issue since hero stacking is gone from everything except super silly arcade modes) which illustrates the additive problem. His speed boost despite being halved on release messes with the pace of the game of too much and hampers certain character jobs too much (namely the defense category) and has nothing to compete with it. This is both a uniqueness problem (in this case too unique) AND an interference problem. On top of that, he is in my opinion, complete torture to play. This goes into my third point of class design.
The class design based around the "holy trifecta" of dps, tank, healer to put it simply, sucks ass. I'm not a fan of this style in any genre, but for an action fps it's absolutely awful. The problem here is if you have roles then it creates a demand for role protection. And these three kinds of roles are really shitty roles to have to protect. For one it's a first person shooter. The average person who gets the game wants to shooter persons first, right? Having "dps" be a protected role creates a problem because something that should be the bare minimum of what a first person shooter character does becomes something unique that other characters can't step on without creating a balance issue. That's without mentioning that "character that does damage" is not an interesting way to design things. What this means is that you can't have too much utility with too much damage and you have to pick one or the other. This creates a very limited feeling and feeds into the other two problems as it creates balance issues when there is a high amount of bleed over and a high amount of toxicity because of how interconnected everyone is forced to be. This is why for me Lucio is pure pain. The character is all in on utility which means he doesn't do anything else but tickle people with his bubble gun. He technically does a lot of utility, but it just FEELS like you aren't doing anything but praying you get carried. The tank role is another problem. In rpgs and mmos "tank" characters work by using gamey things like aggro control to force enemies to attack them instead of the squishy mage in the back. But this doesn't work against real people in an action game. A tank wants people to attack them to prioritize their ability to take damage. To encourage someone to attack them first they have to be doing something that makes you want to attack them first. This is often doing damage. Which means they interfere with the role that is designed to do damage. Not a coincidence that there is a rise in the multi tank lineups lately where either the character itself through power creep is everywhere, like D.VA for the latest example, or the character is facilitated by some other ability to breach their role (also an interference problem) like the nanaboosted rheinharts from the past patch, OR the character was simply out of control from the beginning like Zarya.
In summary, I cannot in my opinion say that Overwatch deserves ANY accolades. It is certainly a very cute game but it has too many critical flaws. At the end of the day it's a Dunning-Kruger simulator with too simplified game mechanics and based around a flawed class paradigm that belongs in the early MMOs.
I got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand Overwatch shows the high level of Blizzard's technical polish. It looks great, it runs great and so on. Even more amazing when you consider it was salvaged from a failed MMO attempt and not built as an action game from the ground up. On the other hand everything else about it: the community, the game balance, the class design...is awful.
It's hard to say how much of an impact the quality of the community should have for an award. It differs for each person's anecdotal experience after all. Lots of journalist types for instance play these games against each other in closed bubbles when they do their reviews. I imagine playing the game against Geoff Keighly and Snoop Dog at a presser changes the flavor compared to having to deal with the average clodhopping bnet player. But, for my own personal experience, it is the most terrible gaming community I've ever been a part of. People often consider it a truism that every online community has its shitters and you can't really make a distinction. I have to disagree with that in this case. The Overwatch community is the most intense and viscous group of aggressive morons I've ever seen. I have well over a thousand hours in Dota 2 so it's not like I've been sheltered from "intense" communities. Hell, two days ago I was in Battlefield 1 and a conversation took place in the all chat between these randos about how Hitler needed to be resurrected with science because "Trump wasn't enough" and the "white genocide was moving too quickly" and only Adolf could stop it. Even that insane stupidity pales in comparison to the junk in Overwatch. The conversations in Overwatch are purely dominated by whining and backseat driving. On the surface, it might not seem like much compared to praying for Hitler's return. But in my experience and over a period of time, it is just exhausting. Don't pick this character, don't play that way, don't do this, don't do that. Did I pay 40 bucks for a videogame or a mother-in-law? At least the weird Hitler convo between the Battlefield dude bros has some entertainment value for being off the wall and strange. The Overwatch stuff is just nonstop the same bitching and moaning shit over and over. "I have X golds LOL this team!" "What an E-Z game bois!" *commences t-bagging* "Our DPS did nothing" "Where is the healer?" The names change, but it feels like I'm with and against the same people over and over. I've met some extremely toxic people over the years in gaming, but at least they had their own identity. I'll never forget Alan in Dota. The worst sniper I had ever seen. He told me in his quavering jug voice that I sounded like I had a bag of dicks in my mouth. A whole bag! Is this what Ganymede whispered to Zeus while he was whisked away to Mount Olympus? Or what about POOP the Tusk? A slow talking southern fried offlaner who's battlecry of "Well fam I guess I'll initiate"was the prelude of his inevitable feed as he snowballed down mid. I close my eyes and I can still hear his juicy sighs and the soft click of yet another can of beer being opened in the background. Conversely, I can't remember a single Overwatch asshole. It's because they are the SAME. EXACT. ASSHOLE. There's no entertainment value here, no ironic smiles. It's just the same blurry slurry of shit.
The game balance is pretty bad as well. There have been earlier posts trying to claim how "dynamic" the meta is posting those asinine meta reports from that CaptainPlanet/FalconKick goober. It's missing the forest for the trees. That a few characters swap places every once in a while is not a vibrant meta when the reasons that they do so are based on balance problems in the core game design. Two examples out of many that illustrate this problem: the presence of Lucio at the top of the meta since release and the musical chairs relationship between soldier 76 and mccree. Lucio has been top tier since the game came out. Not only that but he's also been whittled down consistently since release with nerfs, so with every patch he feels shittier and shittier to play despite still being monstrously important. This is a HUGE game design problem. Overwatch is ostensibly built around hero swapping and drafting but if you have even one top tier character that fits into every lineup that kills a big chunk of variety when you consider there are only 6 characters a team. Soldier received a seemingly small on paper buff of 3 damage points which pushed him to the top and now he's clobbered McCree back down into the pit. In the past McCree had clobbered soldier with the longer range pistol change. And in the past BEFORE THAT soldier clobbered McCree after McCree had his fan roll combo nerfed. Some people might look at this and say "What's the problem? Everyone is getting a turn! WOO meta variety!" And to answer that: this is not a good thing. The reason being, as already mentioned by other posters in this thread but that I'll elaborate on, is that the game is too dumbed down. Specifically, there is not enough unique properties per character and certain elements are too additive with another and those unique properties that DO exist either have too much interference with other elements or not enough. I'll use my two examples here to illustrate what I mean. Soldier and McCree are both hitscan dps characters, meaning they deal their damage by clicking on people instantly. Soldier runs arounds around quickly, has a an aoe healing dispenser for utlity, and uses a stream of bullets style of attack that emphasizes tracking. McCree has a combat roll that reloads his gun, a stun for utility, and an attack style that emphasizes single snap shots. On paper they look different enough, right? But in practice it doesn't matter. They share the same job: doing damage and killing people (this segues in to the class design problem later). The question then becomes which is the one that is most efficient at doing that. In Overwatch everything, damage and healing, stacks with another (the additive problem). This creates a dps race where in order to chew through all the healing that's everywhere you have to have burst damage (uniqueness problem). This in turn, means that the best dps is the one with the greatest capacity for burst (interference problem). In the past, Soldier's whittling dps style couldn't compete with McCree's burst. Now after the buff, soldier is eating McCree's lunch because his tiny 3 damage buff turned his whittling gun into a chunking gun. And this is all without touching the other can of worms here, where both these characters being hitscan and capable of burst have pushed away dps characters that are projectile based like Pharah who's been a flying garbage can since release. Lucio hits all three problem areas but expresses them in a different way. While Soldier and McCree step on each others toes, Lucio steps on everyone's foot His aura adds to everything except other Lucio auras (now not even an issue since hero stacking is gone from everything except super silly arcade modes) which illustrates the additive problem. His speed boost despite being halved on release messes with the pace of the game of too much and hampers certain character jobs too much (namely the defense category) and has nothing to compete with it. This is both a uniqueness problem (in this case too unique) AND an interference problem. On top of that, he is in my opinion, complete torture to play. This goes into my third point of class design.
The class design based around the "holy trifecta" of dps, tank, healer to put it simply, sucks ass. I'm not a fan of this style in any genre, but for an action fps it's absolutely awful. The problem here is if you have roles then it creates a demand for role protection. And these three kinds of roles are really shitty roles to have to protect. For one it's a first person shooter. The average person who gets the game wants to shooter persons first, right? Having "dps" be a protected role creates a problem because something that should be the bare minimum of what a first person shooter character does becomes something unique that other characters can't step on without creating a balance issue. That's without mentioning that "character that does damage" is not an interesting way to design things. What this means is that you can't have too much utility with too much damage and you have to pick one or the other. This creates a very limited feeling and feeds into the other two problems as it creates balance issues when there is a high amount of bleed over and a high amount of toxicity because of how interconnected everyone is forced to be. This is why for me Lucio is pure pain. The character is all in on utility which means he doesn't do anything else but tickle people with his bubble gun. He technically does a lot of utility, but it just FEELS like you aren't doing anything but praying you get carried. The tank role is another problem. In rpgs and mmos "tank" characters work by using gamey things like aggro control to force enemies to attack them instead of the squishy mage in the back. But this doesn't work against real people in an action game. A tank wants people to attack them to prioritize their ability to take damage. To encourage someone to attack them first they have to be doing something that makes you want to attack them first. This is often doing damage. Which means they interfere with the role that is designed to do damage. Not a coincidence that there is a rise in the multi tank lineups lately where either the character itself through power creep is everywhere, like D.VA for the latest example, or the character is facilitated by some other ability to breach their role (also an interference problem) like the nanaboosted rheinharts from the past patch, OR the character was simply out of control from the beginning like Zarya.
In summary, I cannot in my opinion say that Overwatch deserves ANY accolades. It is certainly a very cute game but it has too many critical flaws. At the end of the day it's a Dunning-Kruger simulator with too simplified game mechanics and based around a flawed class paradigm that belongs in the early MMOs.
You don't like the fact that Blizzard some how made a great game from a scrapped MMO? Weird.I got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand Overwatch shows the high level of Blizzard's technical polish. It looks great, it runs great and so on. Even more amazing when you consider it was salvaged from a failed MMO attempt and not built as an action game from the ground up. On the other hand everything else about it: the community, the game balance, the class design...is awful.
It's hard to say how much of an impact the quality of the community should have for an award. It differs for each person's anecdotal experience after all. Lots of journalist types for instance play these games against each other in closed bubbles when they do their reviews. I imagine playing the game against Geoff Keighly and Snoop Dog at a presser changes the flavor compared to having to deal with the average clodhopping bnet player. But, for my own personal experience, it is the most terrible gaming community I've ever been a part of. People often consider it a truism that every online community has its shitters and you can't really make a distinction. I have to disagree with that in this case. The Overwatch community is the most intense and viscous group of aggressive morons I've ever seen. I have well over a thousand hours in Dota 2 so it's not like I've been sheltered from "intense" communities. Hell, two days ago I was in Battlefield 1 and a conversation took place in the all chat between these randos about how Hitler needed to be resurrected with science because "Trump wasn't enough" and the "white genocide was moving too quickly" and only Adolf could stop it. Even that insane stupidity pales in comparison to the junk in Overwatch. The conversations in Overwatch are purely dominated by whining and backseat driving. On the surface, it might not seem like much compared to praying for Hitler's return. But in my experience and over a period of time, it is just exhausting. Don't pick this character, don't play that way, don't do this, don't do that. Did I pay 40 bucks for a videogame or a mother-in-law? At least the weird Hitler convo between the Battlefield dude bros has some entertainment value for being off the wall and strange. The Overwatch stuff is just nonstop the same bitching and moaning shit over and over. "I have X golds LOL this team!" "What an E-Z game bois!" *commences t-bagging* "Our DPS did nothing" "Where is the healer?" The names change, but it feels like I'm with and against the same people over and over. I've met some extremely toxic people over the years in gaming, but at least they had their own identity. I'll never forget Alan in Dota. The worst sniper I had ever seen. He told me in his quavering jug voice that I sounded like I had a bag of dicks in my mouth. A whole bag! Is this what Ganymede whispered to Zeus while he was whisked away to Mount Olympus? Or what about POOP the Tusk? A slow talking southern fried offlaner who's battlecry of "Well fam I guess I'll initiate"was the prelude of his inevitable feed as he snowballed down mid. I close my eyes and I can still hear his juicy sighs and the soft click of yet another can of beer being opened in the background. Conversely, I can't remember a single Overwatch asshole. It's because they are the SAME. EXACT. ASSHOLE. There's no entertainment value here, no ironic smiles. It's just the same blurry slurry of shit.
The game balance is pretty bad as well. There have been earlier posts trying to claim how "dynamic" the meta is posting those asinine meta reports from that CaptainPlanet/FalconKick goober. It's missing the forest for the trees. That a few characters swap places every once in a while is not a vibrant meta when the reasons that they do so are based on balance problems in the core game design. Two examples out of many that illustrate this problem: the presence of Lucio at the top of the meta since release and the musical chairs relationship between soldier 76 and mccree. Lucio has been top tier since the game came out. Not only that but he's also been whittled down consistently since release with nerfs, so with every patch he feels shittier and shittier to play despite still being monstrously important. This is a HUGE game design problem. Overwatch is ostensibly built around hero swapping and drafting but if you have even one top tier character that fits into every lineup that kills a big chunk of variety when you consider there are only 6 characters a team. Soldier received a seemingly small on paper buff of 3 damage points which pushed him to the top and now he's clobbered McCree back down into the pit. In the past McCree had clobbered soldier with the longer range pistol change. And in the past BEFORE THAT soldier clobbered McCree after McCree had his fan roll combo nerfed. Some people might look at this and say "What's the problem? Everyone is getting a turn! WOO meta variety!" And to answer that: this is not a good thing. The reason being, as already mentioned by other posters in this thread but that I'll elaborate on, is that the game is too dumbed down. Specifically, there is not enough unique properties per character and certain elements are too additive with another and those unique properties that DO exist either have too much interference with other elements or not enough. I'll use my two examples here to illustrate what I mean. Soldier and McCree are both hitscan dps characters, meaning they deal their damage by clicking on people instantly. Soldier runs arounds around quickly, has a an aoe healing dispenser for utlity, and uses a stream of bullets style of attack that emphasizes tracking. McCree has a combat roll that reloads his gun, a stun for utility, and an attack style that emphasizes single snap shots. On paper they look different enough, right? But in practice it doesn't matter. They share the same job: doing damage and killing people (this segues in to the class design problem later). The question then becomes which is the one that is most efficient at doing that. In Overwatch everything, damage and healing, stacks with another (the additive problem). This creates a dps race where in order to chew through all the healing that's everywhere you have to have burst damage (uniqueness problem). This in turn, means that the best dps is the one with the greatest capacity for burst (interference problem). In the past, Soldier's whittling dps style couldn't compete with McCree's burst. Now after the buff, soldier is eating McCree's lunch because his tiny 3 damage buff turned his whittling gun into a chunking gun. And this is all without touching the other can of worms here, where both these characters being hitscan and capable of burst have pushed away dps characters that are projectile based like Pharah who's been a flying garbage can since release. Lucio hits all three problem areas but expresses them in a different way. While Soldier and McCree step on each others toes, Lucio steps on everyone's foot His aura adds to everything except other Lucio auras (now not even an issue since hero stacking is gone from everything except super silly arcade modes) which illustrates the additive problem. His speed boost despite being halved on release messes with the pace of the game of too much and hampers certain character jobs too much (namely the defense category) and has nothing to compete with it. This is both a uniqueness problem (in this case too unique) AND an interference problem. On top of that, he is in my opinion, complete torture to play. This goes into my third point of class design.
The class design based around the "holy trifecta" of dps, tank, healer to put it simply, sucks ass. I'm not a fan of this style in any genre, but for an action fps it's absolutely awful. The problem here is if you have roles then it creates a demand for role protection. And these three kinds of roles are really shitty roles to have to protect. For one it's a first person shooter. The average person who gets the game wants to shooter persons first, right? Having "dps" be a protected role creates a problem because something that should be the bare minimum of what a first person shooter character does becomes something unique that other characters can't step on without creating a balance issue. That's without mentioning that "character that does damage" is not an interesting way to design things. What this means is that you can't have too much utility with too much damage and you have to pick one or the other. This creates a very limited feeling and feeds into the other two problems as it creates balance issues when there is a high amount of bleed over and a high amount of toxicity because of how interconnected everyone is forced to be. This is why for me Lucio is pure pain. The character is all in on utility which means he doesn't do anything else but tickle people with his bubble gun. He technically does a lot of utility, but it just FEELS like you aren't doing anything but praying you get carried. The tank role is another problem. In rpgs and mmos "tank" characters work by using gamey things like aggro control to force enemies to attack them instead of the squishy mage in the back. But this doesn't work against real people in an action game. A tank wants people to attack them to prioritize their ability to take damage. To encourage someone to attack them first they have to be doing something that makes you want to attack them first. This is often doing damage. Which means they interfere with the role that is designed to do damage. Not a coincidence that there is a rise in the multi tank lineups lately where either the character itself through power creep is everywhere, like D.VA for the latest example, or the character is facilitated by some other ability to breach their role (also an interference problem) like the nanaboosted rheinharts from the past patch, OR the character was simply out of control from the beginning like Zarya.
In summary, I cannot in my opinion say that Overwatch deserves ANY accolades. It is certainly a very cute game but it has too many critical flaws. At the end of the day it's a Dunning-Kruger simulator with too simplified game mechanics and based around a flawed class paradigm that belongs in the early MMOs.
I got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand Overwatch shows the high level of Blizzard's technical polish. It looks great, it runs great and so on. Even more amazing when you consider it was salvaged from a failed MMO attempt and not built as an action game from the ground up. On the other hand everything else about it: the community, the game balance, the class design...is awful.
It's hard to say how much of an impact the quality of the community should have for an award. It differs for each person's anecdotal experience after all. Lots of journalist types for instance play these games against each other in closed bubbles when they do their reviews. I imagine playing the game against Geoff Keighly and Snoop Dog at a presser changes the flavor compared to having to deal with the average clodhopping bnet player. But, for my own personal experience, it is the most terrible gaming community I've ever been a part of. People often consider it a truism that every online community has its shitters and you can't really make a distinction. I have to disagree with that in this case. The Overwatch community is the most intense and viscous group of aggressive morons I've ever seen. I have well over a thousand hours in Dota 2 so it's not like I've been sheltered from "intense" communities. Hell, two days ago I was in Battlefield 1 and a conversation took place in the all chat between these randos about how Hitler needed to be resurrected with science because "Trump wasn't enough" and the "white genocide was moving too quickly" and only Adolf could stop it. Even that insane stupidity pales in comparison to the junk in Overwatch. The conversations in Overwatch are purely dominated by whining and backseat driving. On the surface, it might not seem like much compared to praying for Hitler's return. But in my experience and over a period of time, it is just exhausting. Don't pick this character, don't play that way, don't do this, don't do that. Did I pay 40 bucks for a videogame or a mother-in-law? At least the weird Hitler convo between the Battlefield dude bros has some entertainment value for being off the wall and strange. The Overwatch stuff is just nonstop the same bitching and moaning shit over and over. "I have X golds LOL this team!" "What an E-Z game bois!" *commences t-bagging* "Our DPS did nothing" "Where is the healer?" The names change, but it feels like I'm with and against the same people over and over. I've met some extremely toxic people over the years in gaming, but at least they had their own identity. I'll never forget Alan in Dota. The worst sniper I had ever seen. He told me in his quavering jug voice that I sounded like I had a bag of dicks in my mouth. A whole bag! Is this what Ganymede whispered to Zeus while he was whisked away to Mount Olympus? Or what about POOP the Tusk? A slow talking southern fried offlaner who's battlecry of "Well fam I guess I'll initiate"was the prelude of his inevitable feed as he snowballed down mid. I close my eyes and I can still hear his juicy sighs and the soft click of yet another can of beer being opened in the background. Conversely, I can't remember a single Overwatch asshole. It's because they are the SAME. EXACT. ASSHOLE. There's no entertainment value here, no ironic smiles. It's just the same blurry slurry of shit.
The game balance is pretty bad as well. There have been earlier posts trying to claim how "dynamic" the meta is posting those asinine meta reports from that CaptainPlanet/FalconKick goober. It's missing the forest for the trees. That a few characters swap places every once in a while is not a vibrant meta when the reasons that they do so are based on balance problems in the core game design. Two examples out of many that illustrate this problem: the presence of Lucio at the top of the meta since release and the musical chairs relationship between soldier 76 and mccree. Lucio has been top tier since the game came out. Not only that but he's also been whittled down consistently since release with nerfs, so with every patch he feels shittier and shittier to play despite still being monstrously important. This is a HUGE game design problem. Overwatch is ostensibly built around hero swapping and drafting but if you have even one top tier character that fits into every lineup that kills a big chunk of variety when you consider there are only 6 characters a team. Soldier received a seemingly small on paper buff of 3 damage points which pushed him to the top and now he's clobbered McCree back down into the pit. In the past McCree had clobbered soldier with the longer range pistol change. And in the past BEFORE THAT soldier clobbered McCree after McCree had his fan roll combo nerfed. Some people might look at this and say "What's the problem? Everyone is getting a turn! WOO meta variety!" And to answer that: this is not a good thing. The reason being, as already mentioned by other posters in this thread but that I'll elaborate on, is that the game is too dumbed down. Specifically, there is not enough unique properties per character and certain elements are too additive with another and those unique properties that DO exist either have too much interference with other elements or not enough. I'll use my two examples here to illustrate what I mean. Soldier and McCree are both hitscan dps characters, meaning they deal their damage by clicking on people instantly. Soldier runs arounds around quickly, has a an aoe healing dispenser for utlity, and uses a stream of bullets style of attack that emphasizes tracking. McCree has a combat roll that reloads his gun, a stun for utility, and an attack style that emphasizes single snap shots. On paper they look different enough, right? But in practice it doesn't matter. They share the same job: doing damage and killing people (this segues in to the class design problem later). The question then becomes which is the one that is most efficient at doing that. In Overwatch everything, damage and healing, stacks with another (the additive problem). This creates a dps race where in order to chew through all the healing that's everywhere you have to have burst damage (uniqueness problem). This in turn, means that the best dps is the one with the greatest capacity for burst (interference problem). In the past, Soldier's whittling dps style couldn't compete with McCree's burst. Now after the buff, soldier is eating McCree's lunch because his tiny 3 damage buff turned his whittling gun into a chunking gun. And this is all without touching the other can of worms here, where both these characters being hitscan and capable of burst have pushed away dps characters that are projectile based like Pharah who's been a flying garbage can since release. Lucio hits all three problem areas but expresses them in a different way. While Soldier and McCree step on each others toes, Lucio steps on everyone's foot His aura adds to everything except other Lucio auras (now not even an issue since hero stacking is gone from everything except super silly arcade modes) which illustrates the additive problem. His speed boost despite being halved on release messes with the pace of the game of too much and hampers certain character jobs too much (namely the defense category) and has nothing to compete with it. This is both a uniqueness problem (in this case too unique) AND an interference problem. On top of that, he is in my opinion, complete torture to play. This goes into my third point of class design.
The class design based around the "holy trifecta" of dps, tank, healer to put it simply, sucks ass. I'm not a fan of this style in any genre, but for an action fps it's absolutely awful. The problem here is if you have roles then it creates a demand for role protection. And these three kinds of roles are really shitty roles to have to protect. For one it's a first person shooter. The average person who gets the game wants to shooter persons first, right? Having "dps" be a protected role creates a problem because something that should be the bare minimum of what a first person shooter character does becomes something unique that other characters can't step on without creating a balance issue. That's without mentioning that "character that does damage" is not an interesting way to design things. What this means is that you can't have too much utility with too much damage and you have to pick one or the other. This creates a very limited feeling and feeds into the other two problems as it creates balance issues when there is a high amount of bleed over and a high amount of toxicity because of how interconnected everyone is forced to be. This is why for me Lucio is pure pain. The character is all in on utility which means he doesn't do anything else but tickle people with his bubble gun. He technically does a lot of utility, but it just FEELS like you aren't doing anything but praying you get carried. The tank role is another problem. In rpgs and mmos "tank" characters work by using gamey things like aggro control to force enemies to attack them instead of the squishy mage in the back. But this doesn't work against real people in an action game. A tank wants people to attack them to prioritize their ability to take damage. To encourage someone to attack them first they have to be doing something that makes you want to attack them first. This is often doing damage. Which means they interfere with the role that is designed to do damage. Not a coincidence that there is a rise in the multi tank lineups lately where either the character itself through power creep is everywhere, like D.VA for the latest example, or the character is facilitated by some other ability to breach their role (also an interference problem) like the nanaboosted rheinharts from the past patch, OR the character was simply out of control from the beginning like Zarya.
In summary, I cannot in my opinion say that Overwatch deserves ANY accolades. It is certainly a very cute game but it has too many critical flaws. At the end of the day it's a Dunning-Kruger simulator with too simplified game mechanics and based around a flawed class paradigm that belongs in the early MMOs.
I got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand Overwatch shows the high level of Blizzard's technical polish. It looks great, it runs great and so on. Even more amazing when you consider it was salvaged from a failed MMO attempt and not built as an action game from the ground up. On the other hand everything else about it: the community, the game balance, the class design...is awful.
It's hard to say how much of an impact the quality of the community should have for an award. It differs for each person's anecdotal experience after all. Lots of journalist types for instance play these games against each other in closed bubbles when they do their reviews. I imagine playing the game against Geoff Keighly and Snoop Dog at a presser changes the flavor compared to having to deal with the average clodhopping bnet player. But, for my own personal experience, it is the most terrible gaming community I've ever been a part of. People often consider it a truism that every online community has its shitters and you can't really make a distinction. I have to disagree with that in this case. The Overwatch community is the most intense and viscous group of aggressive morons I've ever seen. I have well over a thousand hours in Dota 2 so it's not like I've been sheltered from "intense" communities. Hell, two days ago I was in Battlefield 1 and a conversation took place in the all chat between these randos about how Hitler needed to be resurrected with science because "Trump wasn't enough" and the "white genocide was moving too quickly" and only Adolf could stop it. Even that insane stupidity pales in comparison to the junk in Overwatch. The conversations in Overwatch are purely dominated by whining and backseat driving. On the surface, it might not seem like much compared to praying for Hitler's return. But in my experience and over a period of time, it is just exhausting. Don't pick this character, don't play that way, don't do this, don't do that. Did I pay 40 bucks for a videogame or a mother-in-law? At least the weird Hitler convo between the Battlefield dude bros has some entertainment value for being off the wall and strange. The Overwatch stuff is just nonstop the same bitching and moaning shit over and over. "I have X golds LOL this team!" "What an E-Z game bois!" *commences t-bagging* "Our DPS did nothing" "Where is the healer?" The names change, but it feels like I'm with and against the same people over and over. I've met some extremely toxic people over the years in gaming, but at least they had their own identity. I'll never forget Alan in Dota. The worst sniper I had ever seen. He told me in his quavering jug voice that I sounded like I had a bag of dicks in my mouth. A whole bag! Is this what Ganymede whispered to Zeus while he was whisked away to Mount Olympus? Or what about POOP the Tusk? A slow talking southern fried offlaner who's battlecry of "Well fam I guess I'll initiate"was the prelude of his inevitable feed as he snowballed down mid. I close my eyes and I can still hear his juicy sighs and the soft click of yet another can of beer being opened in the background. Conversely, I can't remember a single Overwatch asshole. It's because they are the SAME. EXACT. ASSHOLE. There's no entertainment value here, no ironic smiles. It's just the same blurry slurry of shit.
The game balance is pretty bad as well. There have been earlier posts trying to claim how "dynamic" the meta is posting those asinine meta reports from that CaptainPlanet/FalconKick goober. It's missing the forest for the trees. That a few characters swap places every once in a while is not a vibrant meta when the reasons that they do so are based on balance problems in the core game design. Two examples out of many that illustrate this problem: the presence of Lucio at the top of the meta since release and the musical chairs relationship between soldier 76 and mccree. Lucio has been top tier since the game came out. Not only that but he's also been whittled down consistently since release with nerfs, so with every patch he feels shittier and shittier to play despite still being monstrously important. This is a HUGE game design problem. Overwatch is ostensibly built around hero swapping and drafting but if you have even one top tier character that fits into every lineup that kills a big chunk of variety when you consider there are only 6 characters a team. Soldier received a seemingly small on paper buff of 3 damage points which pushed him to the top and now he's clobbered McCree back down into the pit. In the past McCree had clobbered soldier with the longer range pistol change. And in the past BEFORE THAT soldier clobbered McCree after McCree had his fan roll combo nerfed. Some people might look at this and say "What's the problem? Everyone is getting a turn! WOO meta variety!" And to answer that: this is not a good thing. The reason being, as already mentioned by other posters in this thread but that I'll elaborate on, is that the game is too dumbed down. Specifically, there is not enough unique properties per character and certain elements are too additive with another and those unique properties that DO exist either have too much interference with other elements or not enough. I'll use my two examples here to illustrate what I mean. Soldier and McCree are both hitscan dps characters, meaning they deal their damage by clicking on people instantly. Soldier runs arounds around quickly, has a an aoe healing dispenser for utlity, and uses a stream of bullets style of attack that emphasizes tracking. McCree has a combat roll that reloads his gun, a stun for utility, and an attack style that emphasizes single snap shots. On paper they look different enough, right? But in practice it doesn't matter. They share the same job: doing damage and killing people (this segues in to the class design problem later). The question then becomes which is the one that is most efficient at doing that. In Overwatch everything, damage and healing, stacks with another (the additive problem). This creates a dps race where in order to chew through all the healing that's everywhere you have to have burst damage (uniqueness problem). This in turn, means that the best dps is the one with the greatest capacity for burst (interference problem). In the past, Soldier's whittling dps style couldn't compete with McCree's burst. Now after the buff, soldier is eating McCree's lunch because his tiny 3 damage buff turned his whittling gun into a chunking gun. And this is all without touching the other can of worms here, where both these characters being hitscan and capable of burst have pushed away dps characters that are projectile based like Pharah who's been a flying garbage can since release. Lucio hits all three problem areas but expresses them in a different way. While Soldier and McCree step on each others toes, Lucio steps on everyone's foot His aura adds to everything except other Lucio auras (now not even an issue since hero stacking is gone from everything except super silly arcade modes) which illustrates the additive problem. His speed boost despite being halved on release messes with the pace of the game of too much and hampers certain character jobs too much (namely the defense category) and has nothing to compete with it. This is both a uniqueness problem (in this case too unique) AND an interference problem. On top of that, he is in my opinion, complete torture to play. This goes into my third point of class design.
The class design based around the "holy trifecta" of dps, tank, healer to put it simply, sucks ass. I'm not a fan of this style in any genre, but for an action fps it's absolutely awful. The problem here is if you have roles then it creates a demand for role protection. And these three kinds of roles are really shitty roles to have to protect. For one it's a first person shooter. The average person who gets the game wants to shooter persons first, right? Having "dps" be a protected role creates a problem because something that should be the bare minimum of what a first person shooter character does becomes something unique that other characters can't step on without creating a balance issue. That's without mentioning that "character that does damage" is not an interesting way to design things. What this means is that you can't have too much utility with too much damage and you have to pick one or the other. This creates a very limited feeling and feeds into the other two problems as it creates balance issues when there is a high amount of bleed over and a high amount of toxicity because of how interconnected everyone is forced to be. This is why for me Lucio is pure pain. The character is all in on utility which means he doesn't do anything else but tickle people with his bubble gun. He technically does a lot of utility, but it just FEELS like you aren't doing anything but praying you get carried. The tank role is another problem. In rpgs and mmos "tank" characters work by using gamey things like aggro control to force enemies to attack them instead of the squishy mage in the back. But this doesn't work against real people in an action game. A tank wants people to attack them to prioritize their ability to take damage. To encourage someone to attack them first they have to be doing something that makes you want to attack them first. This is often doing damage. Which means they interfere with the role that is designed to do damage. Not a coincidence that there is a rise in the multi tank lineups lately where either the character itself through power creep is everywhere, like D.VA for the latest example, or the character is facilitated by some other ability to breach their role (also an interference problem) like the nanaboosted rheinharts from the past patch, OR the character was simply out of control from the beginning like Zarya.
In summary, I cannot in my opinion say that Overwatch deserves ANY accolades. It is certainly a very cute game but it has too many critical flaws. At the end of the day it's a Dunning-Kruger simulator with too simplified game mechanics and based around a flawed class paradigm that belongs in the early MMOs.
Look man overwatch took only 20% of the effort to make compared to uncharted 4 okay, it's simply not a contestLord this thread is my lifeblood. Yes yes yes, let the salt flow through you. From "only cosplayers play Overwatch because my friends list says so" guy to this new deeply wounded glacier of text. I'm bathing in it.
Look man overwatch took only 20% of the effort to make compared to uncharted 4 okay, it's simply not a contest
I read the summery and saw the part about Overwatch not deserving ANY accolades and really question if I should put the time into reading that essay.
Duke Nukem also deserved a GOTY after such a long development which needed a lot of effort.
Uncharted 4 deserves it over InsideThe only other games on that list that were deserving were Inside or Doom...
If you say you would have given it to Uncharted 4 shame on you.
Lmao is really all that can be said.It's pretty disgusting how anti-Sony the games industry and gaming journalism still is. Even after single-handedly ensuring the continued viability of AAA console gaming this gen with the PS4 sales phenomenon, they still spit in their face. The snub of UC4 reminds me of the election where a group of liberal elites ignored the will of the masses and prematurely crowned an unworthy victor.
Titanfall 2 fits in the bargain bin.
BEST NARRATIVE:
Firewatch (Campo Santo)
Inside (Playdead)
Mafia III (Hangar 13/2K)
Oxenfree (Night School Studio)
Winner: Uncharted 4: A Thiefs End (Naughty Dog/SIE)
Hi
Please be a real person, please be a real person...
Sooo... You didn't play it? AwesomeTitanfall 2 fits in the bargain bin.
She's getting reworked!