Category: overwatch

The new meta in Overwatch is tanks in the backline. It’s a nightmare playing support now, so much so that it’s the meme-of-the-moment, because it’s near impossible to stay alive unless your team understands the threat. Which in quickplay is rare, for obvious reasons (everyone’s a solo hero).

The most common thing now is finding an Orisa hunting the healers, which is so peculiar. Orisa has gone from a shield building defender (ideal to partner with Bastion) to a rampaging spear-throwing damage dealer, despite still being categorised as a tank. New tank Junkerqueen is also a brutal support slayer, rounding out a trio of Australian archetypes that make me cringe with their gruesome finishers and naked bloodlust.

About the only tank who’s still a tank is dear old Reinhardt, thank goodness. Getting a game with him is a small relief as you can stick close and keep him alive – unless he’s also playing offensively in which case he’s charged away defenceless to the other side of the map.

The one-tank change seems to have also freed up other DPS to go support hunting. Sombra in particular is a one-shot Mercy killer now, even more so than Tracer ever was. Symmetra and Junkrat are equally lethal – being killed by Junkrat spam is still one of the most frustrating ways to die. Even Moira and new healer Kiriko, both support, seem to spend a lot of time now murdering their compatriots rather than healing their team.

I still feel like I can swing a match with Mercy, but only if I’m not being hunted by tanks. There’s always been barely any way to get away from a Winston, but now the other tanks are involved it feels like a losing battle. Maybe some kind of defensive buffs are required, but I suspect it will be the opposite – making Mercy et al into attacking machines too so there is no backline to dive into.

Overwatch 2 has launched neatly into the post-Shadowlands pre-Dragonflight dwaal, filling the gap perfectly. But it’s really only a sequel in name – the gameplay is very similar, the heroes too – so the only really new things are a fine-but-not-amazing new game mode and the (admittedly rather consequential) removal of a tank from each team.

Despite being so familiar it’s still a riot to play once you settle in. And because it’s a refresh there are short queues for every role, even DPS, meaning it’s easy to squeeze plenty of games in. There’s enough of the joy still there to make it worth playing, although the new monetisation system and shooter over quirky focus means the game is walking a fine line.

Removing a tank has made the entire game far more offensively focused. Unfortunately that also means there seems to be even less teamwork (in Quickplay) than there was a week ago in OW1. This is exacerbated by the changes made to many tank skills and abilities to make them less tanky and more frontline wreckers – each match now feels like the dive compilations of yore are the only way to play. Orisa has gone from being a defensive shield bringer to being a hard-to-kill offensive juggernaut. OW2 puts a lot more pressure on the solo-tank, and because of the increased emphasis on offence most tanks aren’t bothering to tank: instead, they just get into the fight and wreak havoc – just like a DPS.

The game feels faster as a consequence, more chaotic, and getting a non-team team makes it almost impossible to win with any confidence. I cannot imagine what it would be like coming in as a new player – I find it more difficult now to predict what anyone is going to do and I’ve played since launch. No consolidating behind the tanks, far fewer safe zones, and a lot less structure. There seems to be more of an emphasis on solo heroics rather than team play, despite the fact that when you do play as a team the wins are far more achievable. I guess playing Competitive would solve some of that, but I don’t like the pressure that mode brings.

Blizzard also removed the scorecard commendations at the end of a match, which is a shame. Those felt like a fun way to reward good team players, and it was nice to be on the receiving end occasionally. Now it’s a personal rather than shared recognition. And I really miss the ability to give kudos to the enemy team – sometimes you want to congratulate the enemy for superior play. Perhaps the system was being gamed, or it felt too punishing?

I really don’t like the new unlock/xp Battlepass system, which keeps reminding you that you haven’t paid for a season pass. Levelling up and being ‘rewarded’ with a notification that you can’t use the reward without the pass is demoralising. Despite loot boxes being cursed, getting one each time you levelled up in OW1 was generally a fun thing. Blizzard have a right to earn ongoing fees for service, but it’s being pushed too hard. Let it be there, but don’t rub our faces in it.

I’ve played almost exclusively Mercy so far (my DPS and Tank skills having atrophied almost completely), and she plays just the same – reliable, not spectacular, but able to keep a team going in a bad situation. And quietly fun. Unlike showboat Moira whose ultimate still seems crazily overpowered, but maybe that’s just healer-jealousy!

It feels much more like a (significant) patch than a new game. The big unknown is how the promised PvE modes will play. Hopefully they won’t be dropped (it’s been very quiet on that front), and given the intensity of the PvP player base it’s hard to imagine PvE drawing in new players in large numbers. Then again it could turn out to be dipped in the same magic sauce OW1 was when it launched. Here’s hoping.

OW2 is still a fun game, still has some stellar moments of hero interaction (combo-ults or last second saves), but I still miss the OG version where stacked teams of Symmetra or all-tank madness meant each game was totally different, and would adapt majorly during the fight to counter the enemy team. Those days have gone (despite the arcade mode variant) and it really feels like balance is the be-all-and-end-all. Instead of heroes with incredibly diverse skills and crazy specials, it’s now a more traditional shooter where everyone is balanced to a competitive ideal.

And just like OW1, it’s still impossible (for me at least) to get a Play of the Game as Mercy. Reinforcing an under-threat point with a well-timed ultimate whilst downing two of the opposition team isn’t enough – a Bastion that plonked down and mowed down two people got Play instead. Sigh.

Today Overwatch introduced the Role Queue, a feature that forces players to queue as one of the three character archtypes: Tank, Support, and DPS. There are two slots of each role available, which means every game will end up with two Tanks, two Supports, and two DPS.

For MMO players that will be a very familiar concept – it’s the holy trinity but in an FPS, something I don’t think many people would have expected to see.

Even the queuing system looks familiar, with rewards for queuing as a particular role based on their current popularity. As usual, Tanks and Healers are scooping up the loot, and DPS have the long queue. Which suits me fine as DPS is not my forte in Overwatch.

Being able to queue as a Support or Tank makes me much more likely to try out Competitive play more, as you can be fairly confident you’ll be able to play one of the characters you know well. I can play two Tanks relatively well (D.va and Orisa) and one moderately (Reinhardt), and Mercy is my favourite Support character (aka Healer).

One odd artefact of this is that the non-healing Supports have been moved to the DPS class. In fact they should probably rename Support to Healing, as that’s all that’s left there now. For example Symmetra (another favourite) and Mei used to be Support, but now have to compete in the far more populated DPS category. And both being low DPS output compared to the more pure damage dealers means there will probably be a fair bit of finger-pointing if they’re chosen. Though apparently Mei-meta is the new hotness – I’m waiting for the Sym-meta for my moment of glory!

It’s a bit of a controversial change in some ways. As Skyline says in that video, one of the pleasures of Overwatch is the fluidity of the teams, and the ability to adjust on the fly. Coming up again a heavy tank team? Double your DPS and see if you can overwhelm them. Switch to a specific character temporarily to counter someone on the other team. Just want to have some fun – play a 6 Healer composition and be unkillable. That will all be much more difficult – if not impossible – with the new system, and while fluid comps will still be on offer in Arcade mode, that’s less appealing than the main game.

And another great feature of Overwatch has always been the strength of character, and how different they all are. With Role Locking there will have to be more consistency across characters to ensure balance. We can already see that some of that happening in the patch notes today with Bridgette being nerfed into more of a Healer than an all round powerhouse:

Developer Comment: The goal of these changes is to make Brigitte more of a primary healer for your team, at the cost of weakening her survivability. Since Brigitte will now be only one of two support heroes for your team, it is important that she can provide enough healing to be valuable in that role.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out, and whether it boosts or dampens enthusiasm for the game. One wild theory might be that this is being done in order to allow Blizzard to launch Overwatch 2 – dare we hope for Overwatch PVE – at Blizzcon. Overwatch Classic (heh) can be the eSports version, with closely balanced characters and locked roles, and Overwatch 2 can be the one where the creativity can run wild. Unlikely, but then so was Blizzard doing Warcraft Classic.

#Blaugust14

Blizzard’s Overwatch League is about to begin it’s first ever pre-season, before the real competition kicks off in early 2018, and there is already controversy with teams missing the preliminaries and players suspended for cheating. Just like the real sports that Blizzard wants the OWL to be!

And just like traditional sports, there are city based teams with trainers and managers and owners. At first I was wondering how a game that sells for ~$50 could afford to support all this, but when you see the amount of OW merch available it all starts to make sense. Today they announced a new in game currency would be available to purchase OWL skins for your favourite teams. There’s plenty of cash in them thar hills.

It’s quite incredible the amount of money that is being poured into this endeavour, and shows just how important esports are becoming. The 12 members of each team are provided with “USD $50,000 minimum base salary, healthcare and retirement savings plans, and housing provided during the season”, there’s a Commissioner, and super high quality profiles of top players.

What they don’t have, however, is women.

There are 96 official players (8 teams of 12 players), and they are all men. Given the seriously good push for diversity and representation in the game itself, this is incredibly disappointing. This is a brand new sport, invented from scratch, with no rules and no historical precedent, and yet the inequalities of rusted on sporting tradition seem to have been applied.

There can be no argument about physical differentiation in esports, so not mandating some kind of gender balance or ratio seems like a huge missed opportunity. Imagine the positive change that could be made by Blizzard enforcing a 50/50 or 60/40 ratio of men to women. The competition for those spots would be intense and reveal a whole new tier of skilled players. But without the seeing the chance to play at the highest level, professional female players will surely struggle to be motivated.

The arguments would be made that viewers only want to watch the top 100 players, and if they all happen to be men then so be it. But that is of course a self perpetuating problem, and Blizzard could have made a huge and positive difference to how women view, play, and are encouraged to become professional sportspeople, in a way that is uniquely available to esports. Not to mention the incredibly positive press you would imagine this would generate for Blizzard – and they are one of the few companies powerful enough to shut down the inevitable haters.

It will still be fun to watch, but in the back of my mind will be the feeling that it could have been so much better.

EDIT 6 Dec: As if on cue (the marketing people are doing their work) there is a long profile of OWL in Wired. It addresses the gender issue, and predictably the answer from Blizzard is ‘it’s complicated’. Disappointing to read that “When asked what the Overwatch League was doing to attract more female players, nobody at Blizzard could point to any specific outreach or recruiting efforts.”. Perhaps most damning is this quote from Nate Nanzer (Blizzard’s global director of research and consumer insights):

“There was never a question that I was going to sit and play games with my son,” he said. “But then the other day my daughter asked me, ‘Can I play Overwatch too?’ and I was like, oh shit, I gotta be better about this. I gotta treat it equal.”

If the ‘director if insights’ has only just had this…insight…then it’s no wonder the league is a testosterone festival.

Thanks to a handy infographic published by Blizzard, we know that the two week PvE Uprising brawl in Overwatch racked up 145 million games during its stay. That’s a big number. Let’s break down the numbers.

First of all we learn that the bad guys won more often than the goodies. That came as a surprise I think, but the reason is revealed a bit further down. Meanwhile:

That’s an even bigger number. I almost feel sorry for the robots. But not for the confounded Bastion tanks in the last room – reason one for the Omnic’s racking up 11 million more victories. Next:

And there’s reason two. Legendary mode had a staggeringly low win-rate of 0.6%. This is the most interesting graphic of the whole thing, revealing that Blizzard aren’t afraid to completely stomp even their best players. The 50% drop off from Normal to Hard is also worth noting – it was a much more difficult ramp up than say the Normal/Heroic switch in Warcraft. After one success in Hard mode my random group of strangers stuck together to try Expert and we were completely annihilated, so I now understand why players screamed with triumph when they beat Legendary. Like winning ye olde Stranglethorn Fishing comp, but harder. And finally:

If my shaky maths is right, that’s over two billion minutes played. 2,415,405,127 to be precise¹. 40 million hours. 1.5 million days. My brain is hurting.

Fair to say Uprising was a success then. Time to go look at some nature. After just one more game.

In a not-quite-surprising but also quite-suprising move, the Overwatch team has introduced a PVE mode called ‘Uprising’ for the latest limited time patch. It’s not-surprising because they’ve done it before (with ‘Junkenstein’s Revenge’), but what is surprising is how they’ve suddenly made an Overwatch PVE game – dare we say an Overwatch MMO¹ – seem possible.

Uprising is basically an MMO dungeon, rendered in the high-pace high-colour Overwatch universe. If you’ve ever played an MMO you’ll instantly be at home: there’s mini-bosses, routes, timers, tactics, and hard-modes. It even introduces and demands the (accursed?) trinity – tank/healer/DPS – to the game. It’s a nice change of pace to the more chaotic PVP play and has been extremely well received.

Funnily enough it also introduces some of the same problems MMO dungeons have. The first time I played it was several days after launch, and by then it seemed like most players already knew exactly what routes to take, what shortcuts, where the trash would spawn, and when to burn cooldowns. So coming in cold was instantly difficult as the expectation was go-go-go, the bane of MMO dungeon running if you prefer a more measured approach.

Being Blizzard they were obviously expecting this, and have countered it a little by making four difficulty modes similar to the Normal/Heroic/Mythic steps in Warcraft et al, including a final ‘Legendary’ mode that has even hardcore players struggling. Even the first step up from Easy to Hard mode makes it clear that the go-go-go approach won’t work for long, and that a little caution and communication is required.

Which is all very smart stuff if you’re preparing/training/testing your player base to see how a PVE game might work. Jeff Kaplan has hinted at more games in recent interviews, including this quote buried in an article about Overwatch character diversity on Polygon:

We think of Overwatch as being beyond the 6v6 shooter. We think of it as a universe we hope to build many games in some day.

Of course he would say that, and it’s also fairly flimsy ‘evidence’², but there is obviously the possibility that Titan will raise phoenix-like from the incredible success of Overwatch. Which would make for an amazing story in itself given that title’s fraught history. In Reinhardt’s words, bring it on.