FA+
Shop
Overwatch is bad some more I guess: A retrospective
5 years ago
And when you wake up, everything is gonna be fine
I was just looking at my older journals and saw that I had a bunch about my negative first impressions on Overwatch. And like, there's some kinda funny takes there. Imagine being like "oh boy flankers is bad" and then she's Double Top Tier for like 85% of the game's lifespan.
The main problem I have with the game (aside from the uh... interesting decisions Blizzard has been making, I wanna focus on gameplay here) is that it's powercrept; but moreso, it powercrept in a very particular way.
The problem I have with Overwatch is that nobody dies.
It feels like literally every character in Overwatch, except Zenyatta, has some magic button they can press on cooldown to get themselves or an ally out of a bad situation. Everyone has an escape button or a sustain tool that they can panic-mash if they're ever caught out.
But then, in addition, there's one thing I've disliked about Overwatch since day 1: double healer team comps. I've compared the game to TF2 before and I'll do it again because competitive TF2 has a one-Medic limit. There is a reason for that. It turns out, when all the healers have slippery escape buttons and self-sustaining personal heals and can all pretty viably fight back in their own right, you can never actually get rid of the enemy supports.
Meanwhile, as mentioned, everybody else has their own defensive cooldowns too. I think pre-nerf Brigitte is an excellent example of the problem; she W+M1s your team, triggering her passive heal if she hits literally anyone, while soaking damage with her armor. You break through her armor health? She puts up her 600-health shield while her self heal tops her off, then resumes the W+M1. Does your team break through the shield? Well you still have to burn her down from full health *again*, still regenerating over time and complete with armor health, and oh wait one of her tanks uses a defensive ability to protect her while her health and shield recover. So you repeat the process again, and nope this time the other healer burns a cooldown to bail her out and she's back to full, again, and finally the next time you break the shield she just retreats behind her tank to recover... by which time the cooldowns that were being used to keep her alive are back up and she's ready to do the whole thing again.
Extreme example, obviously (they nerfed her into the ground for a reason), but most characters in the game end up fitting various degrees of this gameplay. You put some damage into somebody, they press the Don't Die button, retreat behind their tanks to get topped off, don't engage again until the Don't Die button has cooled down.
So the solution then, is to pick characters that can instakill people instead, don't even give them the chance to burn a bunch of cooldowns to live! Except then you just end up with the problem of: Widowmaker, Hanzo, Junkrat and sometimes Doomfist get to instakill people, and THEN they also get to still have an escape button for some reason.
Widowmaker in particular blows me away because who in their right mind looks at an instakill sniper character and says "yeah sure they should have a grappling hook for escaping with, it's not like close range combat is this archetype's entire weakness or anything." Trying to get rid of her is such a waste of resources that honestly it feels like you're better off trying to 6v5 the rest of her team on the objective and making the gamble that hopefully she's bad.
So, nobody dies unless they're picked off by instakill characters; but the instakill characters themselves also never die. Mercy was right all along.
And then there's the whole matter of "buffing the crap out of Reaper and Mei to try to counter Brigitte, failing until they eventually just nerf Brigitte anyway, but leave Reaper and Mei's buffs intact because no they definitely weren't made with purely countering the tank meta in mind." Oops, the thing they were trying to counter is gone and now they're top tier unkillable gank DPS with escape options too. Wonder how that happened.
It got to the point where on the rare occasions I still play the game (dragged into it by drunk friends mostly), I can't deal with actually playing DPS. It's too frustrating to try to play the designated damage dealer in a game where none of your damage ends up meaning anything. I end up needing to just play tanks and leave killing Genji in the half a second between his Literal Invulnerability and his Escape Button to people who can actually do that somehow.
And then there's still the map design, the twig-thin hitboxes on almost everybody who isn't a tank, the Counterpick Gameplay that actually punishes you for counterpicking because lol now the other team has ult and you don't, and let's not forget lootboxes while we're at it...
Just uh, hoo boy there's a lot. Anyway whatever, I mostly just wanted to rant about something to get a more up-to-date journal up here than "hey I was sort of near MFF 3 years ago."
The main problem I have with the game (aside from the uh... interesting decisions Blizzard has been making, I wanna focus on gameplay here) is that it's powercrept; but moreso, it powercrept in a very particular way.
The problem I have with Overwatch is that nobody dies.
It feels like literally every character in Overwatch, except Zenyatta, has some magic button they can press on cooldown to get themselves or an ally out of a bad situation. Everyone has an escape button or a sustain tool that they can panic-mash if they're ever caught out.
But then, in addition, there's one thing I've disliked about Overwatch since day 1: double healer team comps. I've compared the game to TF2 before and I'll do it again because competitive TF2 has a one-Medic limit. There is a reason for that. It turns out, when all the healers have slippery escape buttons and self-sustaining personal heals and can all pretty viably fight back in their own right, you can never actually get rid of the enemy supports.
Meanwhile, as mentioned, everybody else has their own defensive cooldowns too. I think pre-nerf Brigitte is an excellent example of the problem; she W+M1s your team, triggering her passive heal if she hits literally anyone, while soaking damage with her armor. You break through her armor health? She puts up her 600-health shield while her self heal tops her off, then resumes the W+M1. Does your team break through the shield? Well you still have to burn her down from full health *again*, still regenerating over time and complete with armor health, and oh wait one of her tanks uses a defensive ability to protect her while her health and shield recover. So you repeat the process again, and nope this time the other healer burns a cooldown to bail her out and she's back to full, again, and finally the next time you break the shield she just retreats behind her tank to recover... by which time the cooldowns that were being used to keep her alive are back up and she's ready to do the whole thing again.
Extreme example, obviously (they nerfed her into the ground for a reason), but most characters in the game end up fitting various degrees of this gameplay. You put some damage into somebody, they press the Don't Die button, retreat behind their tanks to get topped off, don't engage again until the Don't Die button has cooled down.
So the solution then, is to pick characters that can instakill people instead, don't even give them the chance to burn a bunch of cooldowns to live! Except then you just end up with the problem of: Widowmaker, Hanzo, Junkrat and sometimes Doomfist get to instakill people, and THEN they also get to still have an escape button for some reason.
Widowmaker in particular blows me away because who in their right mind looks at an instakill sniper character and says "yeah sure they should have a grappling hook for escaping with, it's not like close range combat is this archetype's entire weakness or anything." Trying to get rid of her is such a waste of resources that honestly it feels like you're better off trying to 6v5 the rest of her team on the objective and making the gamble that hopefully she's bad.
So, nobody dies unless they're picked off by instakill characters; but the instakill characters themselves also never die. Mercy was right all along.
And then there's the whole matter of "buffing the crap out of Reaper and Mei to try to counter Brigitte, failing until they eventually just nerf Brigitte anyway, but leave Reaper and Mei's buffs intact because no they definitely weren't made with purely countering the tank meta in mind." Oops, the thing they were trying to counter is gone and now they're top tier unkillable gank DPS with escape options too. Wonder how that happened.
It got to the point where on the rare occasions I still play the game (dragged into it by drunk friends mostly), I can't deal with actually playing DPS. It's too frustrating to try to play the designated damage dealer in a game where none of your damage ends up meaning anything. I end up needing to just play tanks and leave killing Genji in the half a second between his Literal Invulnerability and his Escape Button to people who can actually do that somehow.
And then there's still the map design, the twig-thin hitboxes on almost everybody who isn't a tank, the Counterpick Gameplay that actually punishes you for counterpicking because lol now the other team has ult and you don't, and let's not forget lootboxes while we're at it...
Just uh, hoo boy there's a lot. Anyway whatever, I mostly just wanted to rant about something to get a more up-to-date journal up here than "hey I was sort of near MFF 3 years ago."
