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?

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.