OVER WATCH

OVER WATCH
Most of Overwatch’s DNA comes
from other objective-based team
shooters, particularly Team Fortress 2 and
Enemy Territory (plus its descendants,
Brink and Dirty Bomb). This is where you
get the linear attack-defence maps, the
four archetypal character roles, the
pushable payloads and the capture points.
Conversely, Overwatch’s character
and ability design draws heavily from the
MOBA – and I’m not just talking about
slow-recharging ultimate abilities. The
prominence of cooldown-restricted
movement powers, stuns and knockbacks
all come from this part of Overwatch’s
heritage. As does the notion each
character you play isn’t just a class but a
hero – somebody with a name, a distinct
look, a personality and a backstory.
Much of what I love about Overwatch
comes from this successful synthesis.
Take Tracer, for example. Her burst-fire
submachine guns are pure FPS, as is her
sticky-bomb ultimate, but her short-range
teleport and time-rewind power have their
roots in the MOBA. In combination, this
creates an aggressive skirmisher who
fights unlike any other shooter class I’v
played. She excels behind enemy lines,
attacking from one direction, rewinding
back four seconds, and then attacking
from another, convincing the enemy
they’re facing multiple different versions
of the same person. As Tracer, you don’t
just need to know where the enemy is, or
where you’re going – you need to
remember where you’ve been, how and
when to rewind to catch a foe off-guard or
snatch a freshly spawned health kit.
It’s cerebral, challenging, and exciting,
and it sells this particular character.
Tracer’s chirpy cod-Cockney accent
grates at first, but then you realise how
perfect it is that she’s kind of annoying –
because she’s incredibly annoying to fight.
My favourite thing to do in the game is
dash behind enemy lines, place her sticky
bomb on an entrenched defender, rewind,
face them and do her ‘salute’ emote just in
time for detonation. If you can pull that off
and be included in the ‘play of the game’ at
the end of the match, it’s an amazing
feeling. It’s also kind of a dick move.
tricky union
Overwatch’s biggest issues, however,
come from this genre marriage. They’re
less to do with the game’s systems, which
are elegant and clever, and more to do
with the way these systems interact with
actual human beings. On one hand, you
have two types of game – objective-based
shooter and MOBA – that both create a lot
of interdependency between people. On
the other, these genres foster different
attitudes to that interdependency. In a
shooter, altering your loadout or class
mid-mission to suit the situation is normal
and accepted. In a MOBA, a character is
something you lock in and commit to
master over the course of hundreds of
matches. Overwatch’s problem is it’s very
much the former type of game, but it
looks like the latter.
Even in the limited player pool of the
closed beta, this can create some
agonising situations: trying to push into
the last few inches of enemy territory
while half your team is determined to play
snipers and set up turrets, or trying to
hold ground with two Tracers and a couple
of Genjis (they added a cyborg ninja with a
sword. He’s popular. Go figure). Unless
you’re in a party with enough friends to
have a majority influence on your team, it
sometimes feels like your enjoyment is at
the mercy of the matchmaking algorithm.
As the beta progresses, solving the
problem of player psychology will be
Blizzard’s biggest challenge – but it’s
something the team’s aware of. “Hero
switching is important to the game and we
want to make you feel OK about doing it,”
says lead designer Jeff Kaplan. “We want
to move away from things that just let you
lock in and do nothing but play one hero.”
My first fears for the game’s future
were compounded by the (widely held)
assumption that it would be free-to-play.
At BlizzCon, Blizzard announced that
Overwatch would be a full-price game, and
that its 21 current heroes would amount to
a fixed roster, at least for a while. This
should shunt public perception of the
game away from Dota territory and back
towards Team Fortress, and every time
Blizzard has discussed the business
model, it’s been linked to the importance
of encouraging character switching.
“Mei really speaks to me and I think
she’s adorable and I want to be her,”
Kaplan says, referring to the newly added
defence character Mei, a cheery Chinese
cryo-scientist who freezes foes and
creates ice walls to protect her allies. “We
didn’t want players stressing out about,
you know, ‘How do I get my hands on her?’
‘What’s the unique formula that I need to
do to unlock her?’ We really want to
encourage hero switching as well, and we
felt in models that didn’t have all of the
heroes available to our players it became
very difficult to reinforce this concept of
fluidity in the team compositions.”
The developer has demonstrated a
willingness to change the game radically in
pursuit of this goal. Right before BlizzCon,
it stripped out Overwatch’s progression
system – itself the second version of a
system that had been overhauled once
before. The first allowed you to level up
individual characters to customise their
abilities, and Kaplan describes it as “a
disastrous train wreck.” The most recent
allowed you to level up individual heroes
as in Heroes of the Storm. “It encouraged
the wrong player behaviour,” Kaplan says,
citing situations where players wouldn’t
switch character – even though it might
win them the game – because they’d
prefer to earn XP on their current hero.
“We removed that progression system,
which was pretty drastic for us,” Kaplan
says. “We have a new one – we hope it
sees the light of day in early 2016, but we
have a lot of work to do first.”
It’s encouraging Blizzard isn’t treating
player behaviour as distinct from game
design and it’s willing to make sweeping
changes to Overwatch to combat the fact
a multiplayer game’s biggest enemy is
often that there are multiple players.
There’s a real gem of a competitive
shooter, here. It’s better and more
intelligent than the new Battlefront in
every way that matters, and it’s still in beta
– real beta, not just a marketing exercise.
Dozens of hours in, I’m back in love
with it. With the full complement of 21
characters available, it feels intricately
balanced in a way it didn’t quite before.
Switching character mid-match to counter
an enemy composition is very satisfying,
and it feels like that sentiment is catching
on. You know you’re in for a good night
when your randomly assigned teammates
start tactically switching mid-match, or
warp your team’s starting composition
around one another’s choices.
at its best
Strategic teamplay here is just as
rewarding as being a lone gunman. After
playing as the archer Hanzo through a
fraught defensive round (they’re always
fraught), I like to switch to Brazilian DJ
Lucio for the attack. He’s fast, can wall-run
using laser rollerskates, and his ultimate
drops the bass in the form of a teamprotecting
shield. Even though his gun is
fiddly to use and his healing power is a
passive aura, it’s exciting to play him –
there’s a degree of speed and grace
required to keep him in the right position,
and profound satisfaction in blitzkrieging
the capture point with your team right
before dropping that ult in a way that lets
the enemy team know they’re simply not
welcome in their own territory any more.
That’s Overwatch at its best, and the
feeling that’ll ultimately (hopefully) justify
Blizzard’s decision to charge full price for a
multiplayer-only game. Perhaps I’ll fall out
with the game again before then – as each
new wave of players joins the beta, more
one-sided games are inevitable. I’m now
confident, however, that Blizzard knows
what this game’s potential weaknesses
are – and that this beta represents an
earnest attempt to address them before
you’re asked to put your money down.


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