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'Overwatch' Is Not That Bad

Why Blizzard’s Extraordinarily Successful FPS Could Be the Perfect E-Sport

By Douglas KulowPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
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The popular opinion about Overwatch, currently, is one of unpopularity. Sure, the Overwatch League looks grand, and the game is relatively fun to play, but it has glaring balance issues and the matchmaking system needs a lot of work. However, the Blizzard team has performed reasonably well given unfavorable circumstances, while managing to create possibly the ideal platform on which E-Sports can become globally legitimate.

One of the main operating factors in deciding a game’s success is something known as a “skill ceiling;” essentially, how much better a player can become before reaching a plateau of completely diminished returns (the proverbial “ceiling”). The higher a game’s skill ceiling is, the more time individual players are going to want to spend improving, and thus the more successful a game will be (longevity being one of the main indicators of video game success).

In most FPS games (think 'Battlefield' or 'Call of Duty'), the skill ceiling is high, but is mostly tied to aiming ability. This makes sense, as the weapons within those games can kill so quickly that positioning/strategy are not as important for success as eyesight, reflexes, and good aim. That which separates good players from great players from the best players tends to be a simple matter of who can click the fastest and the most accurately. Movement, positioning, and meta-game knowledge (knowing what the “standard” of “good” gameplay looks like) take a backseat to high-powered bullets from fast-firing guns.

By contrast, the MOBA genre (i.e. 'Dota' or League of Legends) retains a skill ceiling related largely to strategy; team fights are decided by who combines the correct moves and who can surprise the enemy the most. Deaths matter a lot more because respawn times are longer, and characters have a lot more health to compensate. In addition, the nature of most MOBA attacks, as well as the distant third person camera, places a lot less stress on aim in terms of deciding how a fight will progress. Lastly, the necessity of teamwork and coordination means that how “good” a player is has as much to do with his or her knowledge of the game, communication skills, and ability to predict enemy movements as with how well the player controls their character’s actions.

These two skill styles are polar opposites; innate ability (aiming, reflexes, eyesight) vs. learned knowledge (knowing the metagame, understanding different character’s roles and how they relate to each other, creating strategy)

Overwatch functions as a balance between these two competing gameplay types. Certainly, hitscan heroes like McCree, Soldier 76, and Widowmaker rely largely on headshots to create value for their team, but difficult to kill heroes such as Tracer, Roadhog, and D.Va create fights in which simple aim is (usually) not enough to win. Similarly, by playing around his team and planning out his Jump Pack cooldowns, a Winston can help his team greatly without having to aim at all (I use the masculine possessive because of Winston’s gender, not due to the Overwatch demographic).

This balance is predictably difficult to maintain. If Blizzard were to approach Overwatch as a strictly competitive game, finding an equilibrium would be an attainable goal. However, because the game has been manufactured to appeal to all audiences (FPS, MOBA, young, old) as well as being a competitive game, Jeff and the Overwatch team have essentially been balancing the game blindly. I do not say that as a criticism, merely a fact; to market the game as both accessibly casual and supremely competitive, the game must be fun in both worlds at the same time. Think of quickplay, where the most enjoyable heroes like Genji, Hanzo, and Pharah reign. Bronze, where the lack of both aiming and strategy places Bastion and D.Va at the top of the ladder. Now, the newly-christened Overwatch League, where Mercy, Zenyatta, D.Va, and Winston are essentially ubiquitous. This is why balancing the game is so difficult; making a change to a hero impacts its play on all levels. Jeff and his underlings are plugging holes in the proverbial Overwatch dam only to see four more holes pop up in unforeseen locations.

Looking through this lens, many of the seemingly brain-dead changes the team has made make more sense. I’m sure they received quite a lot of data telling them that Mercy was a boring hero to play; the buff they gave her certainly made her gameplay far more interesting, while also inadvertently making her extremely overpowered. That being said, other balance changes were both quite uninteresting and as egregious as the Mercy mistake; Junkrat simply receiving a second mine certainly increased his play rate, but the exponential increase in burst damage buffed his most annoying traits while removing the finer-tuned skills like positioning and knowing when to deal damage (as one of Junkrat’s biggest flaws before the buff was his inability to finish kills, often resulting in his damage just yielding ult charge for the enemy healers).

This also creates problems with the matchmaking system that Blizzard has put in place. Because both game knowledge and physical ability are so important to the Overwatch ethos, players strong in one area but weak in another often feel like either they or the rest of the players in the game are not placed correctly. This not only results in the ubiquitous intra-team toxicity we’ve all seen when playing Competitive, but also generates a lot of anger towards Blizzard and the perceived failures of the SR system, when in reality the algorithms to predict how good a player will perform would be nigh on impossible to manufacture. Not to mention the fact that oftentimes players will simply perform abnormally (for the player) well or poorly in any given match, a prospect much of the community refuses to allow for.

Of course, there are ways Blizzard could improve their skill rankings. Many influencers have noted that performance in placement matches does not seem to matter as much as rank from the previous season in terms of placement SR; thus, it can be difficult for players to climb out of the quagmire of Gold/Platinum without a full reset on stats every season. The fact that Blizzard has not significantly altered the SR system since Season 1 belies their lack of coordination on the subject, along with an inability to create avenues for meaningful feedback from the community and thus improve this system, as well as gameplay itself.

Thus, the main takeaway from this article is identical to the title; Overwatch is not that bad. It has accomplished a lot, and with the continued success of the Overwatch League, could become one of the pivotal games in terms of the growth of E-Sports (as long as we keep poorly made PUBG and Fortnite clones from taking over the gaming market altogether). However, in order to push their game over the edge into prolonged success, Jeff and the Overwatch Team need to make significant steps in the way of refining their game.

first person shooter
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About the Creator

Douglas Kulow

UVA class of 2021. Sagittarius, with Pisces tendencies. Actor, Gamer, Singer, Writer.

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