Last Wednesday we managed to head down to Capital D Studios and play some competitive Overwatch courtesy of Power League Gaming. Overwatch is a first person shooter that borrows elements from games like Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty as well as MOBAs. Players can choose to play as one of the 21 available heroes in the 6 vs 6 games. After two hours of clinching close victories, escorting payloads, resurrecting fallen allies and going ape crazy, here are our thoughts on Blizzard’s latest game.
Video of event above
Khalid
Blizzard has this knack of creating fantastic games — not original games, but certainly ones that we grow an attachment too. How they accomplish that is by taking the best parts of different games out there, wrapping them together neatly and producing a testament to gaming lore. Overwatch is no different when it comes to Blizzard’s plan and as a result combines aspects of First-Person-Shooters and MOBAs.
Daniel
As for the games Overwatch has borrowed elements from: If Call of Duty and Team Fortress 2 had a child and then one night all three walk down an alley, only to come across a mugger who fatally shoots both COD and TF2, leaving the child orphaned. However, this would lead the child to be brought up by the trusted house butler – Blizzard entertainment – and one day the child would dawn the cowl of being the next biggest FPS MOBA thingy. That would be Overwatch.
The first thing I noticed, that I adored as well, was the visual style. It was oddly reminiscent of Borderlands but less off the cell shading. It was a delightful break from the modern day gritty visuals we see ubiquitously across a lot of shooters, Battlefield being an example that comes to mind. I think the art style they chose suits the game because it doesn’t make it overly-serious but at the same time it doesn’t give the game a whimsical persona.
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Khalid
Indeed its art style is quite comical and similar in aspect to TF2, another cartoonish FPS, but Overwatch transcends the visuals in TF2 by quite a large margin and for quite a simple reason: there’s depth. In the spawn areas we’re given a beautifully detailed environment that visually paints us a story of that map whilst also giving us sense of levity by giving numerous objects in said spawn area dynamics, letting you wreck havoc to the place. And while in the greater part of the map you can’t trash everything you see, the story is evident in the maps itself, whether it be a picturesque monastery in the Nepal mountains or a deactivated Overwatch base, due to the amount of visual work that went into said maps. The characters themselves are given a huge amount of detail which in turn makes them more relatable and which can be exemplified when players customise their favourite characters.
The biggest treat was that each character’s look was unique and not just a repaint or a re-skin. You could easily distinguish each character which drove home that sense of uniqueness that a player gets when taking the reins of each hero.
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Daniel
Unlike most games, especially of such scale, Blizzard did not just stop at visuals when it came to depth. The gameplay is nothing less than immersive. It should be known that right off the bat that there is a learning curve for each character. It’s not just enough that you learn to master one hero and then apply the same formula to another hero – that would lead to humorous disasters. Even the skill layout varies for chunks of characters; this adds a dynamic level to the way you approach each match. Some characters are straightforward to use while others are a bit more complex but offer just as much satisfying results.
Khalid
Furthermore, characters aren’t even bound to the same mechanics; some have multiple weapons whilst others only have one, some skills on some characters are off the toggle kind rather than activate-and-wait-for-recharge sort. The 21 characters are split into four categories: Offense, Defense, Tank and Support. As a result nearly every match you go into can have different outcomes that aren’t solely based on who gets the most kills or if your team has no offensive heroes which is something I love about Overwatch. While it is easy to feel that some characters are overpowered, Blizzard has done a fantastic job at balancing them all. Yes while a support character is not great fighting an offensive hero, that doesn’t relegate it to a “weak” category.
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Daniel
Definitely, and I think it comes down to how you strategically use each class. Such as this one time where I saw Zenyatta (a hero from the support class) go toe to toe with ReinHardt (a hero from the tank class) and still manage to defeat him. I’m not saying each class is equal in terms of offense or defense, but that doesn’t mean you’re outdone. Overwatch demands strategy, both on an individual level and more importantly on a team level. And I think that’s vital to not just Overwatch but even the current climate of games, where at one point multiplayer games where all about guns blazing and little teamwork, but now it’s almost imperative to come together as a unit if you want any fighting chance of winning.
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Khalid
Yes it is punishing to attack on a point with defensive heroes whilst it is also difficult to attack with just offensive heroes. Overwatch calls upon players to adapt to the ever changing landscape of each game, necessitating players to switch characters and rewarding them at the end of the game for recognition not just for damage dealt, but also for damage blocked, healing given and other supportive traits that are overlooked and forgotten in other games. However counteracting that praise for support is the oddly placed “play of the game”, a short video that plays at the end of the game of what the server believes the best moment of a player was. Only one player in the entire server is awarded it and far too often it’s simply glorifying a person who kills a lot of people in a few seconds, or someone who activated their “ultimate”; not once was a healer given “play of the game” recognition for keeping their team alive during crucial pushes.
Daniel
We got to experience two game modes – Assault and Escort. Assault is the equivalent of attack and defend – one team tries to capture a point while the opposing team must defend that point, in total there are two points to capture. Escort is as obvious as its name states, one team has to escorts the payload to its destination while the other team must slow them down till the time runs out. The developers have custom-tailored maps for each game mode, this is important as it gives each map the appropriate vantage points to suit the gameplay style. It is quite common for developers to generalise their maps for their game modes, the trouble being that those maps, inadvertently, end up favoring either the attack or defensive team. In the case of Blizzard, they created the maps around their game modes. The downside being that each game mode ends up having roughly 3 or 4 maps which can get tiresome after a while.
Khalid
Yeah, unfortunately, there are only 8 maps in total so far for Overwatch and I have a feeling people are soon going to be bored of the maps, even if they love the gameplay. Luckily for us, Blizzard have confirmed that any future maps will be available to all players of the game so we can expect the list of maps to expand. That being said, each of the current maps are unique and add levels of verticality to them that aren’t often seen in FPS games; as a result, mobility is a key to playing Overwatch strategically. However, due to the scale of the maps, a team wipe on either side often resulted in the loss of an objective due to the slow movement of most characters.
These impressions reflect the current standard of the game in closed beta and not the final product.
