I've returned to playing Overwatch after a year of not playing. Here are my thoughts after playing after about 20 or so games.
Overwatch
For those of you who don't know, but you probably do, Overwatch is an objective-based team shooter game with different heros to choose from similar to a MOBA. Each have a range of different abilities Overwatch. The different objectives range from King of the Hill, capture the objective, escort the payload or a hybrid of the two latter game modes. Overwatch is one of the most popular shooters out there despite the new craze for battle royal style games such as PUBG and Fortnite. Success in Overwatch is usually determined by how well you are able to work as a team rather than individual performance, unless of course you are just godlike at the game.
My History With Overwatch
I first started playing Overwatch when it came out almost 2 years ago. Before its release, I was uncertain to whether I would enjoy it as I was into playing CSGO (I'm not anymore) at the time. But my friends were getting it so if I wanted to play with them, I'd need to get the game as well.
I was pleasently surprised by how much fun the game initally turned out to be. I think I played easily 100 hours in the first month alone, both with friends or by myself. This was before I started to take the game seriously. There wasn't even a competivie mode. When competitive was introduced, I was placed in gold after my placements, but this was when the game started to change in my eyes. It started to get a more serious as tends to happen when you add a rank to any sort of multiplayer experience. You're always trying your best to win. Or at least thats the way I look at anything in life, not just video games.
With this new level of seriousness came the aparant flaw to the game's design with regards to how it's matchmaking system work and its relation to the general playerbase. At least when it first came out, and at lower ranks where people were still learning to play the game and understand its mechanics. People didn't seem to fully understand the different roles of heros and tended to all pick dps characters as opposed to picking heros to form a balanced team composition. The other two roles are tanks and healers.
After years of playing World of Warcraft, these roles and the need to have each, seemed rather intuative and obvious. That wasn't the case for most players I came across however. I usually played a healer in WoW and continued to do that in Overwatch. And with that usually came a rather large expectation from other players that I would keep them alive, no matter how stupidly they play. I am, of course, used to this after playing WoW, but I feel that expectation was pretty much justifed in WoW as you couldn't switch roles midway through a dungeon for example. This isn't the case in Overwatch where you can change hero at when ever you're at spawn.
So it always baffled me as why people just didn't seem to understand that all the roles are needed and you needed to work together. It is as though these players have never worked as a team before in their lives. This seemed to be the case at the rank I was playing at.
Despite this, my friends and I contiued to play the game for the next six months, slowly getting more and more frustrated with other players. Thats not to say there were no problems with the game design, there were (Roadhogs hook for example was a big one), but most of these little annoyances slowly got patched out.
Why I stopped Playing
After about 6 months, I had had enough of Overwatch. People weren't learning the game's core mechanics and the need and imporance of positioning, as well as generally just staying alive and together, prefering to go all Rambo and try and take the whole enemy team on their own. This isn't the type of game where you can do that, where one person can carry the whole team to victory.
It came down to knowing within the first minute or so whether you were going to win or lose, and just have to stay in the game to not get any penalties to requeuing for your next game. All while feeling powerless to do anything about it. I would play my very best despite this and get nothing from it. It became very draining on the soul.
So I stopped playing. And so did my friends. We moved over to Rainbow Six Seige, which isn't a perfect game either, but its more homogenised design to heros (or operators) limited my major complaint with Overwatch's playerbase at lower ranks. I think by the time I had left I had achieved a mid Plat ranking despite how much effort I put into trying to win. Now, I'm not saying I deserved to play at the highest ranking. I'm very well aware that I'm not the best at the game, or fps games in general, but I was hoping for a chance to consistently play the game the way it was meant to be played, as a team with team compositions that make sense. From what I had heard though, Overwatch's problems with players happens all the way to almost the highest levels of play. Its a wonder that anyone actually ranks up at all.
Whats changed?
Since I've been away from Overwatch there has been a few changes that I won't go very much into detail here. New maps and heros were introduced into the game. The Overwatch League was also introduced to the worldas a premier esport with more mainstream backing for players and teams. This is a major change in the way esports are structured to be more like traditional sports leagues as opposed to the way it usually is with other esports such as StarCraft, Dota, League of Legends, CSGO and the like.
Why I came back
After about a year and a half, I came across a livestream of one of these Overwatch League games. I'm usually interested in esports and tended to watch CSGO tournaments on Twitch.tv. I had never really got into waching Overwatch tournaments however as it was difficult to follow the games because of how hectic it tended to be. But in this leauge match I watched, it was much clearer. Blizzard has really put a lot of effort into improving the spectating experience of watching Overwatch games.
After watching the game, I was reminded of initial hopes for the game and wondered if things had improved. I don't remember who exactly was playing but the teamwork and strategy genuenly put a smile on my face. So I decided to give the game another go. My friends weren't interested but I didn't mind playing solo queue if they weren't around.
My thoughts of the state of the current game and my hopes for the future
From what I heard, the playerbase hadn't changed much, but to my surprise, for the games I had played, they had. People were actually aparently willing to play different roles such as tanks and healers as opposed to just dps. It still happened on occation that team composition just made no sense, but it was noticably much much rarer. I can just recall 3 or so of the 20 games I have played were this way, and I even won one of these games. After my placments, I was put into just above the cut off for silver and I am currently mid Gold.
I think its also important to point out that I'm not taking the game as seriously as I probably once did. I wasn't getting angry with stupid decisions people were ocationally making and was just trying to have fun. That is afterall the reason I love video games. I don't know if this change of mindset comes from me simply having much lower expectations for the game or I'm just getting older but my enjoyment of Overwatch has certainly increased.
The new maps and heros added to the game are great and add more variety of gameplay and maybe a little more flexibility to hero choices. I'm still playing a healer and I'm happy too. But with better team compositions this is less of a chore. There's still a slight issue with teamwork but its definately better than before and there was a noticable improvement from even just silver to gold ranks and I'm hoping that continue to get better as I rank up.
I've watched several videos on Youtube about the current state of Overwatch and apparently my experience isn't always the case with players still being stuborn with their hero picks as it was when I originally played the game, but I now understand that this isn't necceccarially a bad thing as they are probably playing their best hero. The matchmaking system should probably do better at creating teams with a variaty of roles.
There have been a number of suggestions for solving this issue including creating a role queue for matchmaking. I'm in favour of this as it will at least attempt to create viable team compositions more consistentsly while still allowing for players to adapt by switching when needed. There have been some critizisms of this system stating that since a majority of players want to play dps, there will be longer wait times for these particular players compared to tanks and healers, but I personally don't see this as much of an issue considering the number of people actually playing Overwatch. This system is used in WoW for example. It both incentivises people to play different roles while creating a better play experience. I may be biased in my opinion as I play a healer and would probably have shorter wait times in this system but I'd rather play the game with people who are happy to play these roles as opposed to being frustrated. It does make it more enjoyable, win or lose.
Conclusion
I'm definately going to continue playing the game while I enjoy it and will definately try to get my friends to come back as well. It is after all more fun when playing with friends. From my experience since returning to Overwatch, I've enjoyed the game quite a lot and would recomend it to anyone who hasn't tried if you're looking for a team-based objective shooter. There's a lot to learn when getting into it but its definately a lot of fun.
I may have rambled on a bit longer than I originally intended. Let me know if I should put out shorter articles for anything I write in the future. I'll also try to update my thoughts should anything change. If you've read all the way down to here thanks and have a lovely day!
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