Alright, so Overwatch is releasing tonight and there’s excitement in the air. Blizzard has been rolling out its marketing machine in celebration and we’ve been treated to several comics and video shorts in order to flesh out the game a bit more before the mayhem of players flood the servers.

Overwatch belongs to Blizzard and all the wonderful people who make it. Check it out at www.playoverwatch.com

Sounds a bit familiar right?

Here’s some background. I’m a Team Fortress 2 player. I didn’t jump on board when the game was released but I was certainly playing it when you had to purchase the Orange Box in order to get it. Lovely game that I’ve sunk way to many hours to post here. Was it perfect? Of course not. But over nine years it was interesting to see the evolution of design and for Valve to hone in on the content they wanted to release. There were many bumps and, personally, I don’t hate the cosmetic and shift to free to play like a lot of other stodgy old guards.

I’m more annoyed by the drop/craft mechanic for items and I still hate item set bonuses though it looks like Valve has pretty much patched those out now. There’s still some balance issues but at this point, I feel they’re inherent in the game’s design. It’s one reason why I’m way too ready for a Team Fortress 3 if Valve ever decides to get around to making it.

But I don’t want to discuss game mechanics and I especially don’t want to compare game mechanics with Overwatch. I don’t have enough time in the second game to have really great arguments yet and if you want to see my initial impressions from the open beta, I wrote a rambling blog post the other week.

No, instead I want to discuss something that is far easier to compare between the two games and that’s its marketing.

Team Fortress 2 belongs to Valve. It’s old as dirt and can be got on Steam.

Mostly, I want to rant against Blizzard’s bizarre direction for their supplementary material.

First, let me just get this out of the way. The videos are pretty. They look like a Pixar animated short and capture that cartoon aesthetic perfectly. The animations are top notch and it is brimming with detail and liveliness. But this Pixar element also seems to be it’s biggest problem.

Namely, I don’t know who on earth Blizzard is marketing to with these videos. I’m not sure they do. When I say the shorts look like Pixar mini-movies, this extends well beyond its appearance. For instance, there’s a surprising number of children in these things with two of them – the latest Hero video being a prime example – that the shorts focus on. The action within them is comically juvenile as well. Here we see people shot with rockets, sniper rifles, automatic pistols and sawed off shotguns with nary a scratch. More often, individuals are just punched or kicked – superhero fashion – with there being nary any damage done to them as though everyone in the Overwatch world is made of rubber.

Contrast this with Team Fortress 2’s videos. Meet the Pyro is a fantastic comparison, not least because it walks this very tight line between comedy and carnage. It simultaneously leans on its cartoon style to excuse the excessive amount of violence within it while also managing to turn that very element into one of horror. TF2 doesn’t ever present itself with any resemblance of realism. The dismembered heads of a soldier’s enemies are line up on a fence while he lectures them is a rather grotesque concept but because it’s visuals are so unrealistic it’s easy to disassociate from any real sort of inhumane behaviour. The Pyro walks away from a street filled with the charred and chopped up corpses of his enemies whistling a little tune and it works within the style and world that Valve have crafted.

Soldier 76 doesn’t. It’s hard not to see the parallel’s between Blizzard’s shorts and Valve’s Meet video series. And it’s equally hard to not see the finesse that one executes them and the bubbling issues of the other. We don’t know anything about Soldier 76 at the end of it. That’s because the emphasis is entirely on the little girl who is neither a character within the game or even what Blizzard is attempting to market. In Hero, the cartoon style is used to create a juvenile world attempting desperately to overcome it’s unrealism to mimic reality as close as possible. A robot is being beaten by a group of thugs, the framing clearly meant to communicate how great an injustice this random act of cruelty is. The aforementioned movements and animation are all trying to make it seem like these are real, sympathetic characters. Because so much effort is breathed into making these characters seem real it makes the moments like when Soldier 76 is beating a thug’s head in with a burning pinata even more jarring. Despite the thug seemingly being unharmed by the assault, it comes across far more distressing than the Pyro driving a fire axe into the face of the Heavy.

It’s weird. It makes the audience feel weird. There’s this directional conflict between playful violence and serious real world consequences. Soldier 76 beats the shit out of a group of thugs who all seem to be “Batman puts people to sleep” sort of unconscious mixed with moments where he’ll blow a gunman up with rocket fire or others who fall from rooftops seemingly dead.

Alive – perhaps Blizzard best short so far – struggles with this issue as well. That video is following Widowmaker – an assassin for hire contracted to kill a religious robot – who has seemingly no excuse for being so gentle with her foes. Whenever it shows Widowmaker combating the hired security, she’s politely knocking them out but at the height of the video’s climax she takes a shot at the protagonist’s heart which – when the character zips out of the way – turns out to have been a headshot against her mark. The video offers no explanation for this sort of extreme behaviour and, once again, grounding the video in real life like moments as a religious rally for a robot-human civil rights activist makes the juxtaposition between the two tones stand out even more.

Basically, the content of the videos appears as though Blizzard is targeting children. But the framing of the videos is entirely adult.

And I can’t tell if Blizzard is attempting to avoid some sort of controversy over their videos or if they simply can’t decide on a direction for them.

I mean, it can easily be argued that Team Fortress 2 desensitizes its players to extreme violence. Rockets will explode characters into blood giblets that bounce across the ground. In Meet the Sniper, we see the titular character headshot his mark and for the bullet to pass through and strike the bottle of a Demoman behind him wherein glass fragments shatter into his one good eye. The Demoman then stumbles around bleeding profusely and blindly firing off his grenades until he falls into some canisters and dies in an explosion.

It’s hyper violence but it’s meaningless because the characters themselves are so exaggerated. This isn’t just in their form – which features over sized hands, diminutive legs, broad torsos and they like to create vivid and distinct silhouettes between the characters – but also in their behaviour and personality. These characters couldn’t possibly exist within any world striving for an ounce of realism. They entirely consistent within the Team Fortress world but that world is so far removed that the violence is hardly analogous to anything anyone would ever experience in reality.

Overwatch, however, sanitizes its violence. Kills – if they even seemingly occur amongst the hail of bullets, machine gun fire, rockets and grenades – always happen off screen. If something were to actually be violent and in your face it has consistently happened to robots which, conveniently, don’t emote in any real fashion and certainly can not bleed, bruise or otherwise communicate any real pain. When violence is enacted on a human, they always appear to survive through some magical superheroic constitution. Necks or limbs aren’t broken from falls from tremendous heights. Characters are shot at but never actually hit. Explosions make targets simply vanish.

The worst a character can seemingly accrue is getting several cuts in their jacket and a light dusting of carbon. It is, once again, the way one would treat violence in a mindless children’s show.

However, this is a game which players are tasked with actually eliminating their rivals via the same bullets, rockets, swords and whatnot. I can understand not taking Team Fortress’ cartoon approach where, even if someone has a hole blown through them the most you might see is some undetailed bone shape and an over-exaggerated emote of pain. But despite TF2’s desensitization there’s no question or ambiguity that these individuals are dead.

It feels more honest than Overwatch’s “everyone pretend to fall asleep.” More importantly, TF2 demonstrates that you can have a lighthearted and fun tone without resorting to juvenile cheats that talk down to its audience. Honestly, if Overwatch keeps shooting for these emotional vignettes, they have to start including some actual stakes to the characters. Have your characters bleed. You don’t need the over-the-top cartoon gore like TF2 and, honestly, that wouldn’t work in the first place.

But having Yakuza run around with arms flailing like a Sunday morning cartoon comic panel then thirty seconds later attempt some grave conversation about sacrifice, honour and familial obligation just comes across as incredibly tone deaf. It speaks more to a creative team afraid to commit to a direction and instead flops between the two. If you want realism then make the consequences of your violence real. If you want cartoony consequences then make your stories cartoonish narratives like the Sniper trying to explain the difference between assassin and crazed gunman to his parents over a pay phone.

It just goes to show that even if you’ve got a good style it doesn’t immediately equate to having good substance. You need to pair the two and ensure your style, tone, atmosphere and character are in line.

Happy Overwatch launch!

So, apparently there’s this thing called Overwatch. You may have heard of it. Maybe you haven’t. Either way, there was a beta recently and I got in on it. So did a bunch of my friends. They all loved it. Now I’m left with a question of whether I should buy in on it or not.

Thus, I get to make a blog post as I talk my way through it!

Let’s start at the beginning. What is Overwatch?

Overwatch belongs to Blizzard Entertainment and all rights and such are theirs.

Well, it’s a team based, class based, competitive online first person shooter. That’s a lot of tags. Shortening it down, it’s essentially Team Fortress 3 made by Blizzard instead of Valve.

It’s hard to shake the comparisons between Overwatch and Team Fortress. Both games are colourful shooters. Both games require players to compete in teams to claim objectives on the map. Both games allow you to choose which character you’re going to play with each character possessing different weapons that make them suitable for different roles in your strategies. You have snipers who sit on the back lines eliminating key targets. You have front line soldiers that engage the enemy head on with their overwhelming firepower and health. You have medics that keep your team mates healthy and contesting objectives.

But even with the similarities go beyond the game play and into the design itself. Valve spent a lot of time creating unique characters with grand personalities and visual designs that made them easy to stand out amongst a crowd. These characters have unique dialogue for greeting each other or slaying certain opponents. They’re fun and well-developed which is certainly beyond the faceless soldiers of games like Halo or Battlefield.

Course, what really makes this a spiritual successor is that Blizzard essentially lifts Team Fortress elements wholesale into their version. Take Mercy, the Overwatch support. Though she’s rocking a strange sort of futuristic angel aesthetic, her weapon is a staff that projects a beam to her allies to heal them. The Medic from TF2 has the Medigun that projects a beam to his allies to heal them.

Where the two games diverge is that TF2 is a bit closer to a classic shooter. Each class has three weapon slots: a primary gun, a secondary and a melee weapon. In Overwatch, every character has a melee attack but they all do the same damage and most Overwatch characters don’t have a secondary weapon. Overwatch also pulls a bit from Dota-like/MOBA design in that every character has two abilities and an ultimate.

The ultimate, however, works essentially like the TF2 ubercharge on the medic. Each class charges their ultimate, typically by dealing damage (though supports like Mercy can charge on healing – much like the Medic) before the ultimate can be deployed. The other abilities work on a cooldown system with a number of them being mobility related.

That’s the gist of the game and, as you can see, there’s a reason I call it “Team Fortress 2 with more bullshit.” But let’s quantify that last bit of my impression.

Team Fortress 2 only has nine classes – three in the assault, defence and support category. Overwatch has 21 as of this article split over four categories of attack, defence, tank and support. How Overwatch reached its large number, however, was by basically splitting the TF2 classes into multiple separate heroes.

This leads to one annoyance of mine with Overwatch. The heroes are more limited than TF2 classes because they’re stripped of options.

The easiest comparison is to compare Overwatch’s Pharah with TF2’s Soldier. They both serve the same function of being a frontline fighter for the team equipped with a rocket launcher and possessing superior mobility compared to the other classes. The Soldier, however, is a fairly skill intensive class who utilizes his rocket launcher to perform a manoeuvre called the “rocket jump.” This is accomplished by shooting your feet with your rocket launcher while you are jumping in the air to provide yourself with a significant vertical and speed boost at the cost of taking splash damage from the explosion of your rocket.

In comparison, Pharah has an ability called Jump Jet that propels Pharah into the air before going on an eight second cooldown.

On one hand, I recognize that the rocket jump is both unintuitive and difficult to perform for new players. I’m not even certain it was part of the original TF2 design so much as it was discovered by players and then incorporated by Valve. There are jump maps for practising and honing the rocket jump ability and the mobility around the map that a very skilled Soldier has is unparalleled.

For Pharah, it’s mostly a liability. She has far less mobility from her jump jet and it provides very little horizontal coverage not to mention you don’t have any sideways control. You can use her concussive blast to give you a bit of a faster push but that’s it. I may be bad at rocket jumping but I can get around faster than this. Even worse, it makes Pharah really easy to hit and track in the air. Which is awful in a game that possesses a sniper that can shoot her out of the sky like a clay pigeon. To add insult to injury, Pharah’s rocket launcher doesn’t even have the knockback that the Soldier’s rocket launcher has so it’s near impossible to rocket juggle your opponent.

To add insult to injury, Pharah doesn’t have any secondary weapons to swap to. She just has her rocket launcher. As a Soldier, it’s very common to swap to your shotgun especially when dealing with multiple enemy engagements or if you’re facing a Heavy. Pharah simply has to reload and hope she doesn’t get blown up like a chicken. And this isn’t even covering the issue that there is far more health floating around in Overwatch than in TF2 on heroes and Pharah’s rockets have much smaller splash radius.

This is a long-winded way of saying that Pharah is kind of bad in Overwatch. But it also addresses one of the issues I have with Overwatch. The way the game is designed is for a rock-paper-scissors between heroes. Pharah is countered by Widowmaker. Widowmaker is countered by Winston. Winston is countered by Reaper. Reaper is countered by McCree. McCree is countered by… well…

The idea is that you need to swap your hero to match what your opponents are running. There’s this element in TF2 in that if you’re facing Engineers, you grab a Demoman. But that sort of hard countering was more a criticism against the game than not. Competitive play revolved around really only Scouts, Medics, Demomen and Soldiers (with the odd Sniper). People wanted the other classes made useful but it’s just the nature of design that those four rose to the top.

Outside of competitive play, you could certainly get really good with Spy, Pyro, Engineer and Heavy. Their weapons just simply didn’t have the flexibility and power of the others. Partly because of the role they filled but that didn’t stop Valve from trying to release a bunch of different weapons in an attempt to elevate those classes. It’s the reason I’m excited for an actual TF3 because I’m curious to see how Valve would design a game from the ground up knowing what they know now about balance.

But, Overwatch is made by Blizzard and we’re already seeing some of the mistakes that Valve made. While we have this rock-paper-scissor design which encourages a rotating class swap during a match, the reality is that some heroes simply end up being better than the others and those are the ones you see on teams again and again. Widowmaker, Lucio, Winston and McCree have taken over the early strategies. You can see this in public play as well. Widowmaker is such a powerful class that she shows up in nearly every match. McCree is perhaps the best solo character with a stun and incredible burst damage.

My concern is that the design space of Overwatch is going to exacerbate this inequality. Because heroes are restricted to a single weapon and their abilities have such narrow application, if they don’t have answers to the popular hero choices then they’ll simply not be played. McCree’s kit is so good in a general sense that his only real counter is to not engage him. But that basically leaves Widowmaker as the best way to fight him, assuming maps allow sightlines that put him in the open. But there’s not a lot of ways to really counter him and you can’t really change his abilities because he was designed to keep other heroes from having no answers and running out of control (Genji and Tracer).

If there isn’t a good answer to McCree then either he’ll be seen everywhere and a vast swathe of heroes will basically shrink from play. Or, he’ll be weakened and the prior heroes that were running out of control will squeeze out the others. Or they have to design yet another hero to counter McCree and hope that hero doesn’t spiral out of control.

I also think that there’s far too much emphasis placed on accessibility. I don’t say this as some elitist “git good” competitive player. I mean that there’s a number of heroes designed to be played by basically someone who has never picked up a game in their life and still be effective even against the high skill heroes. How this achieved, however, is by making the new player friendly heroes with a really low barrier of entry but a really high performance. It’s the Engineer problem if the Engineer were actually made even stronger than he is in TF2. Bastion and Winston are the two heroes that stand out. Bastion has some of the highest damage output without any real effort. You put yourself in sentry mode and mow down enemies with just the click of a button. Winston doesn’t even need to aim, possessing a lightning gun that hits everything on your screen assuming you’re close enough.

Bastion is essentially playing the Engineer’s sentry gun. His immobility provides a weakness but, just like the sentry, he can ruin beginners who aren’t coordinated. And the best counters to Bastion require more skill to execute than the Bastion play meaning that new players are going to have to face the inevitable “get good” comments before they can get past the issue with Bastion.

Winston, currently, is just really good which is why he shows up in competitive so frequently. His leap and gun will do about half the health of most heroes that aren’t tanks in a few seconds. Two Winstons will kill them outright if coordinated. There hasn’t been a good counter to this yet. There could very well not be a good counter to it.

In TF2 the beginner classes were Pyro and Engineer and, as I mentioned, while they had a low barrier of entry they also had a low skill ceiling so the better you got, the less you saw of them.

My other big concern is that a lot of the Overwatch maps are awful. TF2 had awful maps at the start (Hello 2Fort) but I’m sad that Overwatch didn’t learn any of the good map design lessons that Valve did by studying the later releases. Overwatch also doesn’t have dedicated servers so there’s currently no way to avoid the worst maps and you simply have to play through them when they come up in rotation. And I don’t know anyone that likes Hanamura.

So this has been 2,000 words of griping. What’s the issue? Clearly it’s bad.

Well, the game is fun. There are some heroes that are quite entertaining, even if I have far more complaints that I can’t put into a short blog entry. And all my complaints come back to a single point – this isn’t TF3. Overwatch makes me want to play a game that doesn’t exist. So I’m left with an unfixable issue. Do I pass on this because it’s not perfect enough? Or do I explore it more because at least it’s willing to start exploring the concept of a sequel. Or do I just stick with TF2?

I mean, I still like TF2. But it’s core issues are still present on top of the fact the game is nine years old. It’s a little bloated and at this point it’s a bunch of bandaid solutions piled on top of each other. I think a TF3 would be fantastic but there’s no sign in sight that Valve has any intention of doing it.

So… yeah. I don’t know. Overwatch is fun. Flawed but fun and I don’t know what to do.