More Overwatch Musings

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 😛

Overwatch Musings

I received an invite to Overwatch’s stress beta test weekend. A weekend worth of playtime wasn’t quite enough time to thoroughly test out all 21 characters currently available, but what I can say is that Overwatch is an extremely fun and amazingly polished game. I love the character designs and the feel of the game. Much to my pleasure, no real technical or server issues arose during the weekend, which wasn’t what I was expecting, especially for a beta.

Balance wise, it is difficult to determine how balanced or unbalanced any particular character is because Overwatch is more about team synergy than individual character balance. A few characters feel pretty overpowered but then again, not so much when being countered by certain other characters on the opposing team. It feels kind of like a MOBA in that respect.

Other nitpicks: It’s odd not having a straight up scoreboard to let you know how you are doing in relation to other players currently in the game. It’s also odd not having a kill feed. I would also love to see at least one more game mode other than point control and payload before the game is released. Overall, it’s a fun casual shooter.