Overwatch

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Overwatch

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Sun Mar 06, 2016 9:17 pm

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Re: Overwatch

Postby KleinerKiller » Sun Mar 06, 2016 10:53 pm

It looks pretty great from what I've seen on YouTube. TF2's a classic, but it's good that someone's competently innovating on the old formula. And it's on consoles, too, so I can actually play it, unlike TF2, so that's very nice, thank you Blizzard.
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Re: Overwatch

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Fri Mar 11, 2016 10:33 am

TF2 was multiplatform on release, actually, unless you were calling it unplayable as in badly ported?
Nvm, this lists out the differences, apparently the game was abandoned on consoles in 2009, which makes sense since some really important stuff like community weapons (almost all non-stock weapons are community made) seems like an annoyance to deal with rights and updates wise in the console. So probably just unplayable.

Also Overwatch is pretty good but the TF2 thing seems like a big red herring to me. TF2's way more of what I call arcadey, while Overwatch is more of what I call RPGey. TF2's also a lot more twitchy in the old quake way (of which the original TF was a mod). It's an arena shooter at heart.
Overwatch matches are way longer by design and I've seen players who aren't even that good have incredibly high survivability. It's a lot more like a MOBA than a competitive MP co-op shooter. There are TF2 classes in there too, but they're not really balanced in much the same way. In TF2, loadouts are a function of a class, so any balancing done to a single loadout will have to be placed in context with not just the meta of the full game with the 8 other classes, but with each of the atleast 3 other loadout options for that slot, counting also the synergies with the other two slots that class has. It's a difficult and time consuming task that's almost impossible to do without people screaming for your head. Take for instance the pyro weapon called the Phlogstinator: (spoilered for length)
Spoiler: show
It's a loadout for the pyro that eliminates his role as a support character (normally pyros can put out flames, reflect all projectiles (including arrows, which is fucking epic when you do it)). It quickly built up a reputation for being a weapon with a non-existent skill ceiling, and people who played Phlog pyro were often considered noobs who didn't know any better. Part of this is that reflects are a pyro's main line of defense against a very large array of things intended to hurt him, and the phlog didn't /have/ an airblast to reflect with. Another feature of the Phlog is that the more damage it does, the more a meter is filled up, which, when activated, gives you crits for 10-15 seconds and refills your health to full. It's a point at which Valve replaced one form of high skill survivability skill (reflects) with a low skill one (causing damage as pyro giving you a heal).
This then had to be balanced for the upcoming rollout of the competitive mode.
December 17, 2015 Patch (Tough Break Update)
The base Flamethrower's damage fall off over distance has been decreased, resulting in higher damage output at range.
Changed attributes:
Removed 10% damage penalty.
When activating 'MMMPH', the taunting Pyro gains temporary invulnerability and immunity to knockback effects
January 20, 2016 Patch
Changed attributes:
No longer restores player to max health on MMMPH activate.
Increased amount of damage required to fill MMMPH meter to 300 from 225.

The first change didn't really affect /anything/ in the meta (because pyros are outclassed in pure damage by every other class) and people screamed that Valve made a shitty unbalanced weapon overpowered. The second one makes the Phlogstinator impossible to actually use. Since the survivability feature the original had, which healed you to full health for doing low-mid range damage to people, was removed. Meaning the Phlog gameplay is now both "Chase after and kill as many people as you can" and "take care of your health, you're not getting it back". But the first one was an issue because the phlog's meter builds with /any/ damage. Including spamming with a shotgun or a flaregun (pyro secondaries). In fact, three of the secondaries can inflict afterburn status on enemies, farming damage for the pyro. The second attempts to solve this by making secondary damage even /more/ valuable to pyros, which means Valve is training pyros to be good at flaregunning. It removes the health increase so that pyros don't try to inflict too much primary damage in the first place. They're trying to make the Phlogstinator the 'real' secondary, because it will only come out when the mmph meter is full now.

I think Overwatch won't have such problems because it doesn't have mixed loadouts. Each class is its own independently balanced thing. It's a completely different focus than TF2's system. The only things you have to worry about synergizing with are other players.

I expect the end result between Overwatch and TF2 being the same as between LoL/DotA and HotS. Blizzard is going to make a game that's attractive to a new-ish audience that wasn't really the core of the already existing game's player base. HotS didn't kill or even affect LoL, Overwatch is going to do nothing to or against TF2. The people it's aiming to pick up are the people who don't already like TF2. Just like Heroes wants the MOBA players who don't want to play MOBAs. People who aren't interested in the grind that mobas usually have, as evidenced by HotS' streamlined gameplay. And as far as I can see, from the drop system to the making learned TF2 skills actual activatable skills to making seperate loadouts in TF2 their own classes in overwatch (Widowmaker and Hanzo are simply regular sniper and huntsman sniper with some fresh skills, Bastion and Zarya are different takes on Heavy, Tracer is a BFB scout with a grenade ultimate while Reaper is a Bonk scout with his invuln mode, Torbjorn is a regular/frontier-justice engi while symmetra is a turned-up-to-eleven gunslinger+wrangler-engi, Junkrat is a regular Demo and Reinhart is a Demoknight), it looks like Blizzard is streamlining TF2, much like HotS streamlines MOBAs.

Usually marketers assume game genres appeal to people instead of the games themselves, which results in the thousands of games trying to do WoW 'better'. But the reality is that a lot of games are their own genre. I think Blizzard understands this pretty well, since it's not trying to REPLACE TF2.
Spoiler: show
Blizzard are confident that there’s enough difference between the two; so much so that Overwatch will have it’s own niche in the market. (emphasis mine)

“[Team Fortress 2] is one of my favourite games of all time” said Overwatch's game director, Jeff Kaplan. “But we’re going in a different design direction than they are.”

The comments came in answer to a fan's question during at Blizzcon.

“If people want to compare Overwatch to Team Fortress 2, we would take that as the world’s greatest compliment," said Kaplan. “We love that game; it’s probably one of my favourite games of all time. Those guys are geniuses; that guy, Robin Walker, up at Valve - I had the honor of meeting him.

“I think though that as you start to play the game, you realise the differences there are to Team Fortress 2. Sure, there are some similarities in the team-based objectives, but already at this show we have twelve heroes here. Team Fortress 2 does something very different. They have nine roles that can be customised; your Demoman could be suddenly charging you with a sword. But we’re going in a different design direction than they are.”

It's a phenomenon mentioned by Steamspy in his article here and Blizzard would most likely be aware of this, since it's their game he's talking about.
Spoiler: show
World of Warcraft market
A good example here would be the success of World of Warcraft that, as analysts explained to us ten years ago, has “vastly expanded MMORPG market beyond all expectations”.
Except it didn’t. It created a new market, World of Warcraft market, gathered new audience from other games in different genres, attracted quite a few people that haven’t played before, but haven’t expanded MMORPG market much. There were no big successful MMORPGs after World of Warcraft not because WoW took all the audience, but because there were never too many people in “MMORPG but not World of Warcraft” market to begin with.
I think when you start thinking in terms of audiences for individual games instead of broad vague “MMORPG crowd”, “MOBA crowd” you’ll start to realize that sometimes a huge success of one big title doesn’t mean much for everyone else. It doesn’t expand existing market or destroy it, it creates a new one.
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Re: Overwatch

Postby sunglasses » Fri Mar 11, 2016 3:03 pm

It looks cool, and I"ll probably stream twitch to watch some ppl play it, but I won't play it.
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Re: Overwatch

Postby Arakiven » Wed Mar 23, 2016 4:21 pm

I actually was lucky enough to play in the beta (on computer), and I have to agree with what the Lemon above me said. Each of the characters I was allowed to play (limited pool because beta) felt unique from one another and could be played differently based on how you leveled them (the mushroom guy could be played as a Mage/healer who stand back and tosses out damage while healing allies, or a healer/harasser who runs in with the Merle characters.)

The game also implements the different roles (Tanks, bursters, healers, etc.), deciding team comps before the game, being stuck with who you're teamed with, leaving games being frowned upon, and individuals and teams have a chance to 'snowball' (become ludicrously stronger than the other team). All of which are very MOBA like.

Also, the inclusion of minions in several game modes make the games main objective differ from kill everyone, unlike monopoly. You can also snack on the minions like your mom snacks on Twinkie's to level up.


TLDR: The games a first person MOBA
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Re: Overwatch

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:46 pm

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Re: Overwatch

Postby Absentia » Sat Mar 26, 2016 8:27 am

When I heard Blizz was doing a take on the TF2 formula, I was excited because I love TF2 and Blizzard makes really well-polished games. What I didn't want was yet another fucking MOBA. At least I was smart enough not to preorder it.

And I'd feel happier about putting another 2500 hours into TF2 if Valve actually updated it with anything besides hats and weapon skins anymore, but that's a gripe for another time.
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Re: Overwatch

Postby Askias » Wed May 04, 2016 9:48 pm

Friendly notice that there'll be an Open Beta starting May 5th, ending on May 9th. If you want to try the game, now's your shot.

If you pre-ordered the game, you had access since yesterday.
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Re: Overwatch

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Wed May 04, 2016 11:49 pm

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Re: Overwatch

Postby BROWNRECLUSE » Thu May 05, 2016 12:30 am

I'm thinking about getting this. It looks like it could be a hoot.

Hopefully this doesn't turn out like Battleborn, which was the most MEH demo I've played.
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Re: Overwatch

Postby Absentia » Sat May 07, 2016 10:36 pm

Tried the beta, and I have to say that it's better than I feared but still pretty underwhelming. It's so centered on tank-and-heals that it's almost entirely about teamwork rather than individual skill, and playing with randoms is a total crapshoot (incidentally, that's exactly the same complaint I have about WoW). Also the rounds are too short and the map changes too frequently, and a few of the heroes are wildly overpowered. All in all it's something I might screw around with for $20 or so, but I expect it's going to be awhile before the price comes down that far.
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Re: Overwatch

Postby BROWNRECLUSE » Sun Jun 05, 2016 5:05 pm

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Re: Overwatch

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Tue Jun 14, 2016 8:17 pm

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Re: Overwatch

Postby Askias » Wed Jun 15, 2016 4:07 pm

Image

My tag's Arrazio#2916. If you feel like your games tend to have an overly high concentration of people who have a clue about what they're doing, you can add me.

Sidenote: while pulling out Mercy's blaster as anything other than a last resort is a bad idea, it's worth it for her kill lines. When she defeats an opponent, she'll say things like ''Say aaaaah'' or ''You might not want to tell your friends about this''. She's not the TF2 Medic (''Second opinion? You are also ugly!''), but it's pretty funny.
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Re: Overwatch

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Wed Jun 15, 2016 5:09 pm

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