Overwatch - My First FPS game

Overwatch still makes up parts of my life

I remember how the gaming community was in such awe when Overwatch first released. The theme of a hero shooter is not unheard of, as Team Fortress experimented the possibilities a few years before, but it was Overwatch which polished the idea into a game with infinite possibilities and a fun combat.

A phenomenal launch

Overwatch and Overwatch 2 is an online multiplayer team-based hero shooter released in May 2016 by Blizzard Entertainment (now ActivisionBlizzard). players are sorted into teams of 6 (5 now in Overwatch 2). Player can choose between 36 unique heroes with completely different kits and battle against each other for a goal to win the match.

Matches happen in instanced maps with various environmental designs. We have cityscapes like New Queens Street, Dorado and Busan, suburbs like Route 66 and Junkertown, and other interesting locations such as Blizzardworld which is Blizzard's theme park and Nepal which is a sanctuary. Apart from the 22 maps implemented in standard play, the game has 14 more maps for various arcade game modes.

Standard play is comprised of 3 game modes: control, push, and payload. Control is to take over a control point and defend it until the counter reaches 100%. Push is to take over a robot which will push the barricade toward the enemy. You either have to push it all the way to the enemy's spawn or to get more progress by the timer runs out. For payload, the attacking team will try to push it towards the objective and the defending team has to stop it.

The launch was phenomenal back in 2016. The gaming community was thrilled to see a new fun addition to the rather serious-themed competitive shooters in the market. Overwatch won multiple awards including Game of the Year in 2016. Blizzard was able to maintain Overwatch's popularity by introducing the Overwatch World Cup and Overwatch League, as well as releasing new heroes.

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Character Design

One thing that made me want to buy the game back then was the attractive hero designs. I remembered watching a streamer playing Hanzo and thought "that guy who can shoot dragons looks cool! I wanna play the game now!".

The 36 heroes are mostly unique in their appearances, back stories and skillsets. Genji is a ninja who pulls out a dragon blade and slashes people, Bastion is a robot who can transform into turret mode, Hammond is a ... ball who can roll around, Ana is a sniper healer who can literally be a dps if she wants to, so on and so forth.

With various designs comes various playstyles. Each hero plays and feels different, even when they are of the same role. Heroes in the support role differ from each other tremendously even when their main job are to heal and support their teammates. Mercy has consistent healing and has mobility skills that allows her to bounce around teammates; Ana on the other hand, doesn't have mobility skills but possess greater healing output via her healing bullets and has a grenade to both heal teammate and anti-heal the enemy; Zenyatta doesn't possess great healing capabilities but has a discord orb which can amplify enemy's damage received. Combined with his high primary and secondary fire damage, he could be a DPS who can heal if played well.

Even when two heroes does the same action, it is the little details that set them apart. One observation I made recently is how Sombra's translocator feels so different than throwing an Ana grenade. It's much slower and the falling curve is different, making it hard to apply my Ana knowledge on playing Sombra.

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Beginner-friendliness

One thing I really like about this game is it offers options for those who never played FPS games previously. Other games like Valorant, CS:GO and Battlefield need every player to have basic aiming skill. Valorant, being the closest to Overwatch with its hero-based selection and its utility- and skill-dependent gameplay, still needs every member of the team to kill using a gun. Overwatch however, adopted the Holy Trinity role of tank, DPS and support and making things easier for starters. I was a Mercy main for so long because she is one of the easier heroes to pick up without having to aim.

Overwatch provides quite a lot of viable options for people with less mechanical aim skill, such as Winston, Mercy, Moira, Baptise, Reinhart, Mei, Pharah. That doesn't mean they are easy to play though. Most of them have kits that require them to have good map and game awareness and decent control of their character and skill cooldowns.

Using my main Mercy as an example, while it's easy to hold down left click and heal, Mercy has to have good game sense and sensitive hearing to know where the enemy is going. She needs to master all her movement techniques to dodge enemy flankers and get out of the scene once her team loses, all while prioritizing her healing and damage boosting so to provide the most value to her team. A good Mercy player is those who rarely dies in team fights, is able to damage boost teammates to get kills, is able to keep her team alive, and even killing zoned out enemies in her ult.

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Gameplay & Level Design

As a competitive shooter, the standard play should be perfected to allow players strategize in different team compositions. Overwatch has achieved this criteria with the level design. I think the game modes are near perfect for competitive purposes. The rules are clear and fair, the addition of overtime allows more clutch contests, and the map designs allows different heroes to thrive. Some maps have tight space such as Oasis Library and Lijiang Tower. These favours heroes with good crowd control abilities such as Sombra and Mei. Some maps (Illios ruins, Numbani) have a lot of high grounds in which snipers such as Widow and Ashe works really well. Some maps feature additional terrain advantage such as Rialto which enables heroes like Lucio, Hammond and Pharah to "boop" enemies out of the map.

Despite some maps having noticeable terrain advantages which favours some hero picks, other heroes still work just fine. It all boils down to your team's composition and whether teammates are able to support each other to achieve objectives.

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Pain points & my experience

I've been playing this game ever since its first Christmas event. I went from wanting to play Hanzo to realiszing that I didn't know how to aim, then I switched to playing support because no one wanted to, and I've been stuck with it until now. I feel a need to heal and support my teammates and I really enjoy seeing my teammates alive and well.

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Toxicity & sexism

I've encountered toxicity quite often in both competitive and quick play. Sexism not so much, but I did experience one or two throughout the years. I've seen toxic one-tricks who shit talks the other team when winning fights, people who scold/mock their own team for being bad, people who hates on one hero and anyone who plays that hero, people who thinks girls should go back to the kitchen, and so many more. I didn't believe how "diverse" their claims were.

One reason that triggers the behavior is expectation difference. I've met people who think they should give it their all and win in quick play. They will instantly flame the others when they tried to have fun and mess around. There are also entitled people who think they know the game best. When the fight is against their favour, they become tilted and started flaming someone they deem trash. This often comes with their own biases towards a certain role or even gender. There's nothing wrong with wanting to try hard and win, but straight up trash talking your team is just too much.

On the other side, we have people who are just inherently bad. They scold, annoy, harass people for the sake of fun. They know no limits. They will even purposefully throw a game to see other's reactions. A good example is how some girls are harassed only because they speak on voice. The gender assumption goes as far as some people assuming the support players are girls when they think those supports aren't being "good enough", such as the "she doesn't heal me, ofc it's a girl" kind of statement.

This kind of generic sexism has affected the female community. Most girls I know who play any sort of competitive shooter, not just Overwatch, do not speak or reveal that they are girls for the sake of protecting themselves. They have had guys trying to attack them by sending threats, or horny men sending gross DMs. They only open mic when they are in a friend group whom they trust.

I think this is one thing that Blizzard couldn't completely solve given the competitive and social nature of this game. There is no strict internet cross-border jurisdiction that can punish those behavior. The anonymity of the gamertags as well as Blizzard's privacy terms further add to its difficulty. What they could do is only the bare minimum such as applying chat filters - "gg ez" is turned into a random sentence - but people are always innovative when coming to these things. From GG EZ to skill diff, BMs are getting more and more unpredictable.

This problem is a hard nut to crack. There's just no way to counter those human beings whom you so desperately want to mute but you can't since you need to work with them to win the game (especially in competitive). The only way to alleviate the situation is to offer quality groups that players can join to begin with. That minimizes the randomness of getting a toxic player and fosters mutual understanding of groupmates.

I would suggest Blizzard to implement FLG system again with more filters and options. Players can set the rank/role/other requirements they want their teammates to be. Anyone who doesn't fit the description would be blocked out. Player's profile will be viewable by their group regardless of it being public or private. This is to ensure there won't be rank boasting or difference in expectation. Players who create a group for competitive can further require people to write a brief description of their hero preferences and other info before joining.

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Hero balancing

This is another topic that could lead to huge arguments. There are always big reactions by parts of the community when some heroes get buffs/nerfs. The hero that I'm most familiar with, Mercy, got multiple reworks during these few years. She went from being able to do sneaky OP 5-man rezzes, to being able to fly super fast and instantly rez fallen teammates, to being able to super-jump hover in the air, to being a damage boost healbot hiding behind cover. Although I have my biases towards her, I do feel like some of her changes are necessary to make the game more aim-based.

Some people are always going to be upset regardless of the hero changes. Such is the Mercy community complaining about losing her 2 second cooldown guardian angel ability. I don't know much about how Blizzard does their balancing tweaks, but I do agree that any developer should be making changes based on some sort of statistical evidence (unless it's a design failure in reworks). What I see as "the whole community" complaining might not actually be the majority. I hope Blizzard maintain a big enough sample size to look into voices of different tiers of players - professional, GM, gold, bronze, casual, etc.

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Competitive rewards and achievements

There is currently little extra incentive to invest time on a hero and playing competitive other than player's inherent competitiveness (and addiction). Players had competitive points to purchase golden guns in Overwatch 1. It was quite an honor back then, but when so many seasons went by, even bronze players can afford at least one or two golden guns. That defeats the purpose of having golden guns as a "flex" for being invested in competitive play. There's also no corresponding recognition given to players who has accumulated hundreds of hours on a hero.

My suggestion would be to add hero-exclusive skins, effects, achievements, titles, and selection animation to every fifty or hundredth hours they play on that hero. Adding hero-specific challenges would also be a cool thing. Currently, we only have dailies, weeklies and event challenges that earns u battle pass exp. It would be nice to have a hero-specific tab where players get similar challenges as in the usual category, but more with individual hero's kit. Say there could be challenges for Mercy such as amplify some amount of damage, resurrect some amount of times, and so on.

The competitive currency system could use some updates such as having competitve-exclusive cosmetics, voicelines and player icons. They could even be rank exclusive and limited for that season. For each rank players go to, they unlock cumulative rewards, meaning if they are Masters, they can access every reward from Bronze to Master in that season. Competitive currency can be given not just by every game or the win rate. Extra could also be awarded through KDA ratio, whether the player was on fire, and whether they got a POTG.