overwatch

so this game is out now and it's pretty fun.

Blizzard's clearly positioned it to be a successor to TF2, complete with cartoony characters and a much brighter color palette than most shooters. the game modes are mostly the same too. not sure i'm sold on it as an esports game, but it definitely hits the mark as a 'lite' shooter that doesn't make you feel bad for being bad (i am very bad at shooters hellp)

What's different about this than the other hundred similar fps games already out there?

mostly just that it has MOBA-style characters so you have a lot of wildly divergent playstyles available. i don't play a ton of shooters so i don't really have a good reference point for this other than TF2 which it is very similar to.

this looks great and i will wait until it is no longer full price before i purchase it

Played the beta the other week. Has the polish you'd expect and will likely scratch the itch if you like this genre, but mostly just re-affirmed for me that I don't really like Blizzard and their bland-o, safely middle-of-the-road design philosophy. Their stuff inevitably feels empty and unsatisfying to me.

They somehow managed to arrive at a lore that seems less coherent than LoL, which I find fascinating. I blathered about this quite a bit on the racism/sexism in games thread

had to look up what MOBA is but at least now i know i don't like MOBAs

besides the obvious TF2 influence what this reminds me of aesthetically is timesplitters, a playstation clone/refinement of goldeneye i always loved. world is a little antiseptic and weightless but it's also extremely legible.

i don't like mobas but a big reason i think is the interface? hated DOTA from its days as a war3 custom map because i basically hated all war3 custom maps. fastpaced 90s-style twitch shooters with no "loadouts" or "progression" on the other hand i love, and the abilities here are actually even more intuitive and neatly interlocked than you'd expect them to be given blizzard's obsessively-polish-other-people's-ideas m.o.. definitely a lot more joy and intricacy and tactical ingenuity here than in the average modern shooter, and more room for people who aren't good at shooters than in pretty much any shooter.

if you don't know and can't be arsed googling...

MOBA = Multiplayer Online Battle Arena

yeah this game obv isn't a moba, it just borrows the basic setup of having a laundry list of characters each with a different primary weapon + secondary abilities with cooldowns.

I'm the guy who bought Battleborn instead of this. lol

I played the Overwatch beta and it's definitely fun. I want to wait until they hopefully release a few more modes though.

a lot of classic shooter modes like capture the flag don't really work here because of the high mobility of some of the characters but it'd be nice to have another 'symmetric' mode, currently 9 of the 12 maps are asymmetric attack vs defend. i think they're avoiding the two-way capture point maps from TF2 since they produce longer games but it might be nice to have one just as an option.

street fighter's prob a closer comparison to this than MOBAs actually. and yeah it's basically incompatible with ctf without introducing complications (this ability doesn't work when you're carrying the flag; that ability does) of the kind the design has been really careful to avoid, but unless i'm missing something a mode like ut2k4's onslaught would be perfect -- except that it would involve bigger teams, bigger maps, longer match times. and despite every review's one obligatory flaw being the lack of content i'm glad the game's so focused and invitingly simple, even down to the total blandness of the objectives.

I'm the guy who bought Battleborn instead of this. lol
― reggae mike love (polyphonic), Tuesday, May 31, 2016 1:45 PM

haha i watched some battleborne gameplay and the chosen character had 4 or six arms so instead of the usual first-person hand holding a gun at the bottom it was a constant clusterfuck of purple(? alien i presume lol) hands gesturing wildly around the screen as you run and attack. how could anyone look at that for more than 30 sec

http://i.imgur.com/vhpYIcM.jpg

hands gesturing wildly around the screen as you run and attack.

I successfully used this character last night!

this is fun, but I still miss the early WoW setup of isolated population servers that forced you into a community. Here its just a nameless mass of players who you play with or against and never see again.

yeah all the reviews say friends are a big help; probably a lot easier to discover the mechanics alongside someone too. is anyone else playing/gonna play on pc? eventually prob.

i think they're avoiding the two-way capture point maps from TF2 since they produce longer games but it might be nice to have one just as an option.

a mode like ut2k4's onslaught would be perfect

should have mentioned that this is more or less the same thing iirc so otm.

keep reading complaints about those darn Shooter Kids who pick the snipey/headshotty characters and can't be nudged by their teammates into picking the roller-blading dj of area-of-effect healing, and i do occasionally end up on teams with like three dudes with revolvers. but then i realized that one of my two early faves, "farah", is herself a sop to quake fans: she leaps over people's heads firing rockets at them. (my other fave is the roller-blading dj of area-of-effect healing, who is way fun and recommended to non-shooter-fans because any aiming he might manage to do is just a bonus.)

yeah those are actually the 2 heroes i've played mostly so far as well

usually do the dj guy, mercy, or torbjorn the turret maker. only do damage chars if the team really needs it. have liked being the annoying healer since WoW days.

key to dj guy for me is spamming your gun like crazy. i still don't understand/can't tell if i am wall riding when i try to with him.

getting sniped is probably the worst thing in the game. the audio cues need to be toned down and more specific to your relative position.

the teleporter char is barely used at all but seems game changing in some maps.

wait there's a healer that basically fell out of Jet Set Radio? interest in this game increasing...

that there are some non-snipe-y headshot-y characters is really appealing to me --- i loved precision shooting when playing FPS on my computer, but have been consistently frustrated with using a gamepad for that stuff, mouse/keyboard uber alles

yeah only like half the heroes actually require you to be good at shooting, the rest have projectiles or lock-on/AoE weapons

ice lady and mech lady are the most fun imo

i played a tonne of this and it p much sucks - im too old and garbage and not racist to be good @ cs:go but theres waaaay to little skill to overwatch to make it enjoyable to play and the characters are not remotely balanced. i think if i had a) friends and b) the desire to play a game i didnt care abt winning this wld be preferable to ranked matches of league or w/e as just a fun thing to fuck around w/ but rn it just got boring v quickly.

yeah just about all the non-review pieces on this that I'm seeing seem to be about "how to counter X" because of balance issues. I guess the invitational beta period presumably attracted a self-selecting crowd of team shooter enthusiasts who put in the time and had skillz, and now any old filthy casual can pick it up it's becoming apparent most gamers are just screaming Bastion fodder. I would suck at this, btw.

bastion tends to rack up a lot of totally unskilled points but he's hardly uncounterable; you just come at him from behind, or above, or the side, or while he's looking at something else, or with a sticky grenade. haven't played enough to honestly say how good the overall balance is, and i can't tell any of the robot faces apart on the selection screen, and i may not be playing with people competent enough to break anything, but right now every stalemate i get into has a pretty simple way out tactically, and a pretty simple way to block that way out, and so on.

assuming player numbers don't somehow tank blizzard will presumably put years yet of obsessive balance work into this, tho i haven't really followed a blizzard game since ha starcraft 1 and thus don't know how their reputation is on that front these days.

the only appeal of this game 2 me would be to get a working knowledge of the mechanics/balance so that i could watch via cast youtubes all the ultra elite professional gamers implementing high level cheese at tournaments

seems like the main balance complaint right now among srs gamer people is that the cowboy is too good. people complaining about the sniper lady too but i watched a bit of footage of pro games and she was nowhere to be seen while both teams had multiple cowboys

yeah the ideal competitive team is just dbl mcrae (mcraw? mcsomething) since his flash into fan the hammer is basically uncounterable and v easy to execute. also the supports are super unbalanced w/only lucio being really playable at higher skill levels (although i think theres some argument for mercy)

im mostly disappointed because i was hoping for something fun to do that wasnt mtgo or street fighter v but this has been kinda blah after like ~75 hours

what made you keep going after the 73rd blah hour?

insomnia and peer pressure

this game also does have the Healer Problem which is a common theme in team games esp with blizzard where they insist on making a primary healer class and then once it exists it's too important to omit from your team yet way fewer than 1 in 6 people actually enjoy playing it. it stretches the balance in other ways too like once every team has a healer then all the powerful abilities/combos need to be instakills or they don't do anything.

if you do dig playing as a healer tho you'll never suffer for a raiding group ever again

insomnia and peer pressure
― ( ^_^) (Lamp), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 4:58 PM

lol this is p much why i played destiny for all those hrs aside from the slot machine rng loot

if you do dig playing as a healer tho you'll never suffer for a raiding group ever again

similarly, mercy is a black hole of post-game props clicks (lucio tends to go less appreciated tho people will notice if in addition to healing them you are wiping people out with your, yes, weirdly powerful spam gun)

somatically you'd think it's all the same pointing + clicking just pointing at different objects but it is just so much satisfying to make those objects disappear than to keep them in persistence

there's no challenge in clicking someone who wants to be clicked is the main difference

bleak

the skill in playing a pure healer is mostly in positioning and successful positioning gives much less positive feedback in games than successful shooting

update: game is still fun a week later. Junkrat has ended up being my favorite and best hero, he's good in almost every situation and there's something really satisfying about the sounds his weapon makes

definitely have the skinner box addiction going with this. how it pushes you immediately into the next game like netflix is brutal.

I was using an xbox controller for like 15 levels on pc which is apparently a noob move so now I am relearning on keyboard. >_<

suspect lucio and reinhardt get damage nerfs soon.

the advertising for this is officially inescapable

seems like it's a massive success so far

I have a buddy who wants me to buy this but I don't know. It's been nine years since I played an online FPS, CoD 4. I sucked then and I doubt twitch skills get better with age. I still occasionally fuck with FPS's if there's a good campaign mode, which I heard Doom has.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Anp4yn2FO0

Rod:

http://adequateman.deadspin.com/overwatch-is-salvation-for-washed-up-gamers-like-me-1779947989

Seems like this was designed with your demographic in mind

The stuff about the generous hitboxes also supports this theory

yeah there's only like 6 or 7 of the 21 characters that really require traditional fps skills to function, and a few of the tanks and supports don't even need to aim at all

I was using an xbox controller for like 15 levels on pc which is apparently a noob move so now I am relearning on keyboard. >_<

suspect lucio and reinhardt get damage nerfs soon.

― bnw, Monday, June 6, 2016 7:02 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh hey my b.net id is scribbler#11262 in case we're ever online at the same time -- maybe as many as six ilxors will have this eventually.

warning tho as the matchmaker has lifted me beyond the n00b tier it has turned out that i suck. into reinhart, genji, and first love pharah at the moment; want to figure out d.va and tracer; die too much; prob don't switch responsively enough.

i'm definitely still in the n00b tier, my teams are still getting slaughtered by bastion repeatedly while i try and fail to snipe him from around corners

i'm still having lots of fun too

http://i.imgur.com/h3BdajK.jpg

is that... fish sauce

http://i.imgur.com/GtZEMnP.png

http://i.imgur.com/HvGFI0Q.png

https://www.destructoid.com/two-overwatch-pros-quit-in-shame-as-korean-teen-proves-she-s-the-realness-370182.phtml

it's mostly hanzo and widowmaker that are the useless chars people pick too often ime, 2 bastions covering each other can be a terror to a disorganized team

She's so good, seemingly from out of nowhere

This is a game that is not yet out a month.

Kind of shitty move on Blizzard's part: removing the "avoid this player" feature because the highest ranking Widowmaker couldn't find anyone to play against.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-06-21-overwatch-will-remove-the-avoid-this-player-option

yeah they should just remove the "widowmaker" feature instead imo

http://i.imgur.com/4I0gCPr.png

mei is the secret truth to all life

ice walls ya'll. it's so simple, how did i miss it before

mei is my 2nd most played after roadhog i think. good fun

Free this weekend on ps4 & xbox

i never play this and suck at it but still think it is a p brilliant and generous game, recommend to basically any taste except anti-fast. played my first game in a long time the other night almost in dread and was shocked at how much fun i had (as winston/lucio) even tho we lost. so that is the opinion of someone who never plays this and sux at it.

yeah i haven't had time to play this lately (i think theres a new hero and a new map since i last played) but it hasn't lost its luster

So fun

i tried a few rounds of this. it's just very... like it feels like a very good version of a game i've already played a million times

Not sure there's anything wrong with that imo

no, not at all! and i'm glad to have the opportunity to play it this weekend but i'm pretty sure i don't need to buy it.

wait...it's free this weekend? is it one of those games where you pay to level up your character or unlock new ones or something?

it's free this weekend

wow, that's great. i'm usually not into FPS so much because getting your ass kicked by 13-year-olds gets boring after a while, but I'll give it a shot

yeah i'll get it if it's free

They keep you in games with similarly ranked players

it feels like a very good version of a game i've already played a million times

blizzard's motto iirc

KM all progression/unlocking is cosmetic

sorry to be dense: free for pc? free for ps4?

Only ps4 and Xbox

I bought this a few weeks after it was released because I had some friends playing it. We had a good amount of fun playing and chatting together but it loses its luster quickly.

also played it this weekend for free and had a really fun time - but feel no need to buy it.
i think its partly to do with how few game modes there are, but also once you unlock all the decals etc - whats the carrot to keep me going every day if there are no new skills/guns to unlock for anyone?

as in; gameplay for each hero will always be the same - and wont vary - reason i (god help me) still play a ton of destiny is there's always the chance fun new armors/weapons will make things feel new

yeah it's very much on the MOBA/fighting game model where the heros are self-contained and static and they add variety by making new ones, not by giving new toys to the existing roster like TF2 did

also the RTS model. (the sports model.) the carrot's supposed to be you get better, while still working w the same tools as all the people better than you.

the extreme paucity of modes/maps at launch almost reads as a statement about getting fundamentals strong -- a promise to focus on the basic interactions between heroes and get them as neat and dynamic as those between terran/zerg/protoss (starcraft after all only has one serious "mode"). as blizzard have never once in their history had an original idea their reputation's always been built on polish+balance. whether this is there or getting there or what is honestly a question i'm never gonna be qualified to answer but the ambition is to make a game people don't say (god help me) about, right? a player relationship that's (a lil) less narcotic.

played this for an hour or so in a pc bang at about 3am the other night, i guess that's my life now

new hero https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/heroes/sombra/

i haven't really played this in a few months though, the general populace seemed to be improving at it faster than i could keep up

i am still playing x_x

she looks fun although a mei ult followed by a sombra ult = time to shut off the computer. chain cc is pretty miserable to play against.

this may be the one offensive player i will use b/c she seems less aim based.

Thinking about picking this up now. Who's playing on PC vs. PS4?

PC here. played a bit this week after a long break, it's still pretty fun

there's a new deathmatch-ish game mode apparently, haven't tried it yet

Did end up getting it on PC. Played a ton this weekend.

Hardly an original thought, but it's a version of Team Fortress 3 that Valve never got around to. Hard for me not to compare it to TF2, which had this beautiful game and visual design to start with and devolved into a garish mess... Overwatch from the beginning seems designed for infinite expansion and a general lack of style/universe cohesion. Kept the sunny atmosphere of TF2 and dropped the blood and guts legacy from Quake. There have been tons of class-based team shooters, but none since TF2 have done such a great job on the appealing universe, character and visual designs.

Gameplay-wise it's like they took chunks of the various TF2 classes and split them even further, like instead of an Engineer who can build turrets, sentries and teleporters, you have individual classes that can do one of each (Anticipating an upcoming class that will do resupplies). TF2 was originally a streamlining of the original Team Fortress before it went all crazy with the secondary abilities and weapons and skins and hats and so on; Overwatch makes each character even simpler, most can't even sprint and half only have a single weapon w/alt fire. Definitely feels easier to learn a character in comparison.

Anyway, it's fun and I'll definitely be burning enough time into it to make me considering grinding out that stupid Heroes of the Storm quest to get a Genji skin, and I've never even played that game.

Still a while before I hit L25 to play ranked games but friend me if you want to: nhex #1 9 3 8

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/292245/How_Overwatchs_bleak_beginnings_turned_into_positivity_and_inclusiveness.php

I used to work at a law firm that sued activision a bunch and I always thought project titan was destiny, but nope.

when i went to LA the friend of a friend who i was staying with was obsessed with this, along with all his roommates and friends. we played a bunch of it and he tried to explain why it was so complex and strategic but i didn't really get it, kinda seemed like an unremarkable multi-player shooter

http://kotaku.com/here-is-a-good-video-game-kid-1793355232

hahaha

https://gfycat.com/CooperativeEmptyJellyfish

Got sucked into the Heroes of the Storm quest for the OW extras this time around; the game's actually pretty fun, despite how much I suck at MOBAs/RTS

not a game guy at all but i like playing overwatch ... maybe cuz im bad at aiming although my tracking has improved since playing soldier... im a fan of the lateral thinking required

if you're bad at aiming junkrat is a fun one