Overwatch

[Venkman]

I heartily agree with schild's list. But I would add something about "age".

I've played Blizzard games since Warcraft 2. This is so long ago it wasn't even common in my circles yet to theorycraft about games. Back then I was peak Blizzard demographic and psychographic. But that was a marriage, two kids, and three houses ago. 20 years later I'm absolutely not their target market  Some pie chart breakdown of their user base would likely feature me in the <5% "other/organic user" category.

Which means I don't know if their games are generic empirically, or generic just to those who measure their time as video games in decades.

I think umani is a good analogy. But Taylor Swift is too for a different reason: skilled, polished, and ridiculously popular with my kids and those slightly older than them. She's one controversy away from being their generation's Madonna, but otherwise, yea, a programmatic phenomenon rather than an organic one.

Of course, how often do truly homespun indie-level successes become international ones without that programming

Anyway, I always go by my analogy to Apple anyway: never the first, rarely even the second, but generally the most polished for their core audience of believers, and sometimes successful enough to attract a whole bunch of people to something new to them.

[Malakili]

Maybe it can be called Blizzardness, but Blizzard games FEEL polished in a way that few other companies' games do. Even calling it polish is actually a wrong because it's fundamental to how the game plays. Blizzard tends to do away with jank. While many of us are seasoned veterans of dealing with jank to get to the fun, the fact that their games tend to feel right when you play them is enormously important and I think generally undervalued in the gaming industry. The fanciest, neatest, deepest game systems mean nothing when it feels like a slog to do anything.  I think a lot of us (myself included from time to time) wear our willingness to put up with crap for a "deep" or "complex" or "interesting" experience, but I don't think it's wrong to admit that a game that just flat out plays well counts for a lot.

From what I've been hearing this is the thing the new Doom game got right (at least in the single player), to give a non-Blizzard example. I think Blizzard does it better than anyone (including Valve). I can't really stress enough that this is the reason why I end up playing something like Diablo 3 for 1000s of hours even when there are other ARPGs out right now that that have game systems I like more in principle. Diablo 3 just *feels* better to play.  Overwatch isn't particularly innovative, it doesn't have the gunplay of Counter-Strike, the speed and movement of Quake 3, or the map design of TF2. But it does play very very well.

[tmp]

Graphics: 7.5 - always

I'd break this further into

Graphics: 6
T&A: 9

[Kail]

Graphics: 7.5 - always

I'd break this further into

Graphics: 6
T&A: 9

See, like, when I say people seem like they're really reaching for stuff to hate on, this is what I'm talking about.

[tmp]

I'm not so much hating on it as observing that's just how they seem to roll.

[schild]

Remove all humanoid or relevant t&a and it's still a 7.5. That's simply what they do. They are C students.

[lamaros]

This has got a lot of advertising here in Aus, and from that and what I'm seeing about the internet it feels like Blizzard thinks this could be a really big game and are pushing hard.

No desire to play it for me, though.

[Sophismata]

Real Hanzo gameplay:
https://gfycat.com/UnimportantShinyBaldeagle

I looked into some of the game mechanics a bit more. It has some pretty shitty mechanics for resolving latency and the servers run at 20 ticks (in comparison, CSGO is 64 / 128 depending on if it's a tourney or not). Overwatch uses favour-the-shooter and some lazy hit calcs help "close the skill gap".

It's probably not relevant for most of you, but it will explain why you can get killed through walls or after blinking / dodging with tracer, genji, etc.

[Falconeer]

People are starting to figure out how to defend. Sure, defense it's probably meant to be easier, but turrets are slowly starting to make the gameplay stale after only a week. Granted, there are a lot of counters and counter-counters, but a mix of Bastion, Tornbjorn and Symmetra are already pretty much mandatory in a defense and are making defense rounds boring. At least on attack, even if you die over and over, you feel you have to come out with solutions to problems. And winning on offense feels like an achievement while winning on defense feels like you've just done your dull duty.

In short, the three turrets suck. Nerf please.

[Merusk]

Play on low skill with me. You'll still have plenty of Reinharts, Reapers, and Mercy players on def with only one maybe two turrets.  😱

[Malakili]

Turrets in this game are very much like TF2 turrets in that a team that doesn't work together and isn't willing to switch to classes that are good against them can just throw themselves against a wall for 10 minutes until they lose. On the other hand, a coordinated team that is working together can plow through them almost trivially. 

Case in point, I was playing TF2 the week before Overwatch release. I decided to play some engineer and ended up racking up insane amounts of kills with some relatively basic turret placements because the other team refused to bring enough demomen or ubercharges to the table. I can imagine a new player in that game just thinking "engineers are bullshit" or something, but they are really dependent on the offense being kind of bad.

I play a lot of Pharah and turrets just aren't a huge problem, especially when you learn the common placement spots.

[Falconeer]

There are three kind of "turrets". Bastion's, Engineer's and Symmetra's. They behave differently, they are usually placed in different locations, and they are not usually taken out with the same method. I obviously don't think they are unbeatable, but I believe they are making a lot of maps stale and boring. Also, coordinated groups are a luxury usually not available in Quickplay.

[Malakili]

All of them die to rockets pretty quick. Symmetra's can be a little annoying in certain choke points, but usually they are good for about one kill on you because you didn't realize there was a nest there and then you can take it out the next time. I find Torbjorn's turret to be pretty mediocre. It's ok in a crowded fight when the opposing team doesn't really target it down and it can just sit there shooting for a while, but again, dies fast.

Bastion is a bit of a different story and can really wreck a QM game if your team doesn't deal with it. It's also very map dependent. Genji does absolutely crush Bastion and if you can get any kind of angle on him with Pharah, Hanzo or Widowmaker you can at least for his to get out of turret mode for a few seconds and then engage him.

Again, this feels very much like TF2 to me. Engineers were stupid good at launch because people sucked at the game. Sometimes they still crush a pub game, but they aren't nearly as good now that people generally "get it." They are fairly low skill ceiling things and are going to decline in usefulness as players improve. A turret never gets better at the game. Bastions will get better, but being immobile is a HUGE downside that isn't yet being exploited as well as it will be by opposing teams.

I've seen games were those three heroes crush (in fact, I've done it on each of them myself), but I don't think they present the same problem in principle that you do. This is going to be less and less of an issue over time.

[Paelos]

Except that comes off as bagging on the game because it's popular.  The game does have some similarities with TF2 but calling it "not at all innovative", in a genre which has been glutted with yearly sequels and rehashes for years now, comes off as reaching really hard to find something bad to say about the game.  If there's some amazing AAA dev who's consistently pushing out groundbreaking FPS then I'd love to hear about it, otherwise I suppose Blizzard will have to be content with being a complete trash company whose only consolation is that every other company in the world is somehow even worse.

It's not banking on the Blizzard name (if you can even do that anymore, it's not like copies of World of Warcraft: Legion are flying off the shelves), we all had the option to play the game before we bought it.  We all knew what the game was.  And honestly, this argument was old years ago when MMO devs were whining that nobody played their crappy cash grab bandwagon titles because we all just had some kind of Pavlovian response to the Blizzard logo, and not because their games were boring crap, no sirree.

Far from it. My impressions of Hearthstone was that the game was fun, even as the card-nerds were shitting on it for being too RNG. But they aren't wrong. Hearthstone isn't innovative, and it IS too RNG where the skill of the player will run into issues given random elements at a much higher rate than other card games. Most players just don't care because 1) it's fun, and 2) it's Blizzard.

It's not a whine, it's a recognition of what the BRAND of Blizzard can do. It brings people to the table. The game itself has to keep them at said table. But to deny that you can still bank on the Blizzard name is simply silly.

[Paelos]

Blizzard is very good at taking existing game ideas and polishing off the bad bits.

I've always thought of video game design as two things - adding good stuff and removing bad stuff. Blizzard is super good at removing bad stuff, like a game design rock tumbler. Anything that feels off or janky they fix. In douchey video game lingo, their games are low friction.

The problem I have with Blizzard games is that they often don't put in good stuff that's very interesting, and the genres they play in are genres that don't particularly appeal to me. I could go for a really polished 3D Action Adventure game, but a really polished team-based FPS just doesn't interest me.

That said, there's plenty of room for a company that takes existing game ideas and makes a best possible version of it without adding much.

That's a good point about Blizzard which is why I desperately want them to try their hand at a Total War type game instead of CA (who don't understand what is the "bad stuff" and instead removes the good stuff).

[Merusk]

The Total-War type games aren't action-oriented enough for Blizzard to bother with them. Blizzard works to make each of their games more action-oriented and less cerebral than their predecessors. (Yes, even WoW and Hearthstone). You don't have to do a ton of theorycrafting to do "ok" ad their games, because even button-mashing and sucking wind can get rewarded. I think you'd be stripping-out large parts of what make a TW or 4x game fit in their genre to try and do them Blizzard-style.

[Druzil]

I'm still pretty low level (12ish) but Bastion is definitely the biggest problem of the 3 in low level play.  I can see how he'd not be an issue on a coordinated team, someone can just switch to Mei/Winston/Genji/Reaper and take him out. 

While I'm still learning the maps though it's way easy for him to just deploy over the top of the team or in one of the million hidden corners and wipe everyone.  If anything, I'd say his mode switching time should be a little longer, but I don't play him so that's just a feeling from the receiving end of things.  Overall he's been less of an issue as I've been leveling up.

[Megrim]

Real Hanzo gameplay:
https://gfycat.com/UnimportantShinyBaldeagle

I looked into some of the game mechanics a bit more. It has some pretty shitty mechanics for resolving latency and the servers run at 20 ticks (in comparison, CSGO is 64 / 128 depending on if it's a tourney or not). Overwatch uses favour-the-shooter and some lazy hit calcs help "close the skill gap".

It's probably not relevant for most of you, but it will explain why you can get killed through walls or after blinking / dodging with tracer, genji, etc.

Yep, I'd say the biggest issues so far are the questionable hit detection and weak map design. Everything else about it is fine.

[Trippy]

Overwatch's server tick rate is only 20 Hz (20 updates per second) so yeah that causes problems.

[Merusk]

As someone who sucks at FPS, I don't notice or care.  So, Blizzardification +1.

At this point the most obnoxious thing is the people who treat it like an FPS deathmatch and don't stay on the point or think "I can 'main' a character and carry the game with my awesome K/D skills."

Because they largely can't.

[Megrim]

People are starting to figure out how to defend. Sure, defense it's probably meant to be easier, but turrets are slowly starting to make the gameplay stale after only a week. Granted, there are a lot of counters and counter-counters, but a mix of Bastion, Tornbjorn and Symmetra are already pretty much mandatory in a defense and are making defense rounds boring. At least on attack, even if you die over and over, you feel you have to come out with solutions to problems. And winning on offense feels like an achievement while winning on defense feels like you've just done your dull duty.

In short, the three turrets suck. Nerf please.

Also, Torbjorn's strength isn't really the turret but his completely bonkers rivet gun. It does so much damage it's not funny.

[Sophismata]

As someone who sucks at FPS, I don't notice or care.  So, Blizzardification +1.

Its effects are fairly noticeable to me, and in combination with some of the other issues explains why the shooting and movement feels slightly off.

[Thrawn]

So not only did Blizzard already permanently ban nearly 1,600 players in China for cheating in some form, they actually listed out every user name that was banned on the forums as well. 

[Fabricated]

They're pretty brutal apparently- they whack you for doing any sort of DLL injection or file modification. People attempting to develop hacks have gotten whacked multiple times which can get pretty salty at $40 per.

[Surlyboi]

Good. Every company needs to do that once they've got solid proof of cheating.

[Teleku]

Yeah, say what you will about Blizzard, but they love to hear the lamentations of the cheaters.  Always loved that about them, whatever their other flaws.

[Ginaz]

What The Actual Fuck!

NSFW NSFW NSFW

https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch_Porn/

[Teleku]

Huh, didn't realize they allowed that sort of stuff at reddit.  Guess they want that sweet sweet 4chan money.

[kaid]

Turrets in this game are very much like TF2 turrets in that a team that doesn't work together and isn't willing to switch to classes that are good against them can just throw themselves against a wall for 10 minutes until they lose. On the other hand, a coordinated team that is working together can plow through them almost trivially. 

Case in point, I was playing TF2 the week before Overwatch release. I decided to play some engineer and ended up racking up insane amounts of kills with some relatively basic turret placements because the other team refused to bring enough demomen or ubercharges to the table. I can imagine a new player in that game just thinking "engineers are bullshit" or something, but they are really dependent on the offense being kind of bad.

I play a lot of Pharah and turrets just aren't a huge problem, especially when you learn the common placement spots.

Turrets are strongest early in games like this. People are not well practiced in all the champs to realize there are some seriously hard counters to turrets. Pharah pretty much just owns turrets at massive range unless they are putting their turrets in some more concealed area which also means they are being way less dangerous. For the ones that are in nooks genji molests them charge in deflecting and finish it with a couple quick hits and lol away. long range explosives from a number of characters also do serious numbers on turrets.

Symetras turrets die if you sneeze at them one or two aoe's clears the entire nest and they take a pretty long time to get a full six reset back up again.

Early on those when people don't know the maps and don't know the heroes sentry guns are strong. Most of that goes away pretty rapidly though.

[Merusk]

Huh, didn't realize they allowed that sort of stuff at reddit.  Guess they want that sweet sweet 4chan money.

Oh my sweet summer child. How is it you've never heard of /r/gonewild. (NSFW, don't go looking.)

[schild]

Huh, didn't realize they allowed that sort of stuff at reddit.  Guess they want that sweet sweet 4chan money.

TONS OF SUBS LIKE THIS

What The Actual Fuck!

NSFW NSFW NSFW

https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch_Porn/

You new to the internet there, hombre?

Edit: Really Merusk? Gone Wild? That's the visible tip of the reddit porn iceberg. Also, I think it's unofficial name is /r/4outof10

[Teleku]

I do not actively read reddit unless linked to.  I'd ASSUMED, since they are well known and somewhat mainstream, they didn't actively host hardcore pornography (not just topless bikini babe subreddits), since that can lead to legal issues and whatever.  Especially niche internet fetish boards that 4chan loved so much.

Obviously I was terribly wrong and ignorant.

[rk47]

i must bookmark it so i wont accidentally type it by accident.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Yeah, Widowmaker giving Tracer the 12" D is so common nowadays, it's downright puritanical.

[Malakili]

I think I'll just read what people on f13 are saying about Ove....