Okay, so a few days ago, I started playing Overwatch. Overwatch is an Online Multiplayer First Person Shooter with a handful of MOBA elements. For those of you who get this comparison, Overwatch is a bit of a mixture of Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends, both in concept and presentation and my own interactions with these respective series. If that doesn't convey exactly my relationship with Overwatch, allow me to explain.
Overwatch is a Team Based Shooter that, like Team Fortress 2, has a way of saying "The game exists, and you can play as all the characters that are there but if you want canon information on story and narrative, you'll go to the comics, animated shorts, and biographical descriptions."
However, unlike Team Fortress 2, where all the characters are just there for the sake of the game and the shorts simply comic relief to push the game, the opposite seems to be the case, where the game is simply the medium to get people interested in the events, the story, the characters, and the community.
In this respect, it has more in common with League of Legends. You see, unlike Team Fortress 2, where Valve could often take the piss with the characters because they were just media through which jokes could be provided, there's an air of reverence that covers the characters of Overwatch. There is some levity to the characters and the situations but none of them are intended to be the butt of any joke or to be disrespected in any capacity, despite what fan art and comic dubs may lead you to believe.
This is an approach that is directly inspired by League of Legends, or at least MOBA's that make use of similar characterization. The story promotes the game, the game sales allow more shorts and media to be made, which pushes the popularity of the story and game marketing even further and it's an endless cycle where the two sides mutually benefit each other.
However, there is a distinct difference in my relationship with Overwatch in comparison to TF2 and League of Legends. TF2 and League of Legends were games that I heard quite often from people in High School and College respectively that they were good and fun. I heard characterization quotes, I got into the lore, and I even heard some high level strategies for using a lot of the characters. However, I never actually got around to playing either of these games.
For as much as I enjoyed the lore and characterization, there were too many things that got in the way of my wanting to play these games. TF2 is a First Person Shooter, which is a genre of games that I've always felt bored me. The First Person perspective always made me feel very limp and lifeless because I was unable to pull off feats of agility and acrobatics that could be accomplished so much more easily in games like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, both games where wall jumping, wall running, agility, and acrobatics were major players. For the life of me, the only First Person game I've tried that ever attempted to capture the feel of acrobatics that my favorite games did so well was Mirror's Edge and, to the developer's credit, I don't think it could've been handled any other way in that game but the camera stuff was too disorienting and the button layout made parkour a lot harder than it was in Ninja Gaiden especially, where all you had to do was jump at a wall and you could immediately do a wall run, a wall jump, or run on water.
On top of this, TF2 is a game where you generally played on teams of as many people as 9-16 players, which meant that you were a small part of a larger team but that never really appealed to me. I'm not against playing on Teams or Teamwork or anything like that but, if I'm going to work on a team, I want to feel like my contributions matter. And, on a team with that many people, the only way your contribution will matter is if you stray far enough from the middle in either direction that it's clear you were either bringing everybody else up or pulling them down.
League of Legends didn't have these problems, but it did have others that were just as bad if not worse. For starters, League of Legends has a very toxic community. Some have said that it's just because of how large it is but that's simply not true or at least it's not the whole truth. League of Legends is a very competitive game, so much so that many players got into the game thinking they could practice and build a team so they could become champions of some tournament, something TF2 never had to deal with. Because of that, more people in teams are more likely to berate you for being slightly off your game, rip into you if you're behind, or blame you for their own lack of skill if you're trying and failing to pick up the slack.
League of Legends also has a lot of characters, a really large roster of characters. This inevitably means there's going to be balance issues for characters that are too weak or too strong, and while monthly patches and banning of characters in ranked helps, it always has been and still is an ongoing issue. And, because a large number of those characters are locked behind a paywall, and the ones that are free get swapped out every now and then, the only way to ensure that you get the character you want when you want them is to purchase them so you can use them whenever you want, and that's assuming that particular character doesn't get banned in the process, because like I said, ranked matches allow character banning.
Let me give you an extreme example of why this was an issue for me. Let's say I have around 5 or 6 characters that I'm comfortable playing as, my current rank doesn't matter yet, but there are six characters that I have that I know I'm good with and will make the best use of in comparison to the rest of the roster. Now, let's say I go into ranked. Both teams are allowed to ban 3 characters, making for a total of six bans. Now, let's say the six characters that got banned were the six that I bought and was best with. In this situation, whether intentional or not, I'm going to bring the team down because all of my competent characters were banned, which means any other character in any role I pick will be sub-optimal at best.
And finally, League of Legends just looks really slow to me. If my previous blog posts on here haven't made it clear enough, I like a game a lot more when the pace is fast, and I'm able to move quickly and go around at a good enough pace that I feel like I can make the best use of my time. But in League of Legends, pretty much every character I've seen in terms of movement and attack speed, only showed any amount of speed that was acceptable after using a skill that increased speed by so much but was temporary or was so late in the game and required an expensive item that it was long past the point where I cared to attempt it.
Overwatch is different. Overwatch I actually played and while I haven't played as every character, I did play as six in total: I played as Soldier: 76, then Mei, then D.Va, then Genji, then Zenyatta, and Reaper last.
Mei and Zenyatta were the ones I had the most fun with because they were the ones I got accustomed to the fastest and got to the point where I feel I could play them competently with enough practice. D.Va was a good third for just in case a team I play on needs a tank instead of a Support or Defense. I did enjoy playing as Genji but he was really skill intensive in terms of his moveset, from traversal to combat, so he's one that I'm not comfortable tackling just yet. Soldier: 76 is a good one for when I need a healer who can also deal damage but I felt the only reason I enjoyed playing as him was because he was a Call of Duty character with an Aim-Bot. And Reaper was my least favorite because aiming with him was garbage but, in his defense, I was playing on my brother's account because my account doesn't have PS+ and on that account Reaper's sensitivity is set to the maximum so I'm going to have to play around with him a little bit more before I'm comfortable using him.
I'm getting around to trying out other characters but, while I do enjoy the game at least more than other FPS games, I will say that I still enjoy the story of the animated shorts and the comics much more than the actual game. But Blizzard managed to take a genre that I usually feel is not that good and make playing a game in it tolerable. And that is among the highest compliments I give.
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