Most of my free gaming time this week has been dedicated to playing Overwatch. I have had a huge itch for a while to play an online class-based shooter that isn’t TF2, Battlefield, CoD, etc. Overwatch fulfills that need nicely. As such, it has effectively been the only non-mobile title that I have played over the past week. To be economical, I ended up pre-ordering the standard edition of Overwatch for the sake of playing in the early access beta. I would be lying if I had said that I wasn’t tempted to upgrade to the Origins Edition, but I do not think that a couple of skins and cosmetic doodads are worth an extra $20. If I were still playing WoW I would probably use the Winston pet as justification.

I am interested in seeing how class balance progresses as players eventually learn to play more of the characters. I have sneaky feeling that certain characters aren’t nearly as overpowered as the community makes them out to be by virtue of the general player knowledge still being fairly low, being an open beta and all. People, at least in most of the games that I have played in over the past week, seldom switch characters on the fly, if at all. For example: Switching to hard counter tank + turret camping or to transition into mid/late game defense. Overwatch is obviously designed around being able to play around character strengths and weaknesses mid-match.

As a sidenote: How exactly are the Play of the Game clips calculated? I had assumed that it was based off of obtaining the most points within a short period of time during the match, but I have seen a couple of clips lately where the featured player was literally doing almost nothing (and in one case, according to a Reddit post, literally doing nothing). Bug? This complaint of course, has absolutely nothing to do with me being semi-bitter about the fact that none of my epic team kill clips were chosen over yet another clip of Bastion killing 2 to 3 players 😛