Overwatch: An Awesome Game Wrapped in Used Chinese Restaurant Paper Placemats
What fascinates me about Overwatch is that on the cover, it is almost undeniably unappealing -- I’m just trying to figure out why. Now I’m not hating, I’m just a complete noob starting way late, that’s the perspective I’m coming from. So here it is:
Overwatch is a game with high intensity, riveting gameplay and gorgeous maps but its characters are stupid and the backstory is irrelevant. And that last part is what would allow me to glance at the cover and toss it back into the bargain bin.
Part one: The characters are stoopid.
I have to work on this because if you’re a die-hard fan, you may not have figured it out on your own. Blizzard hit it big with the fantasy realm and they got that down – Warcraft, World of Warcraft, they put what we knew about fantasy and made a world that was inviting to us. Starcraft was Warcraft rebranded into the sci-fi genre. But Overwatch isn’t really a rebranded sci-fi World of Warcraft, and this matters since many people switched to Overwatch from WoW and are coming in with certain expectations.
In Overwatch you choose a character. That’s it. You don’t grind to level up your character (you level up YOU, the player), add weapons and armor, or learn some goddam trade like skinning and collecting flowers. You don’t get to personalize your character except to change the entire skin you found in a loot box or bought with OW currency. The skin change can add a slightly different shade of red or it can completely change the character to the extent that you broke the story (good thing there is no story). Pretty much the same as Street Fighter although you know you’re definitely not playing Street Fighter.
While some characters look pretty cool, if you didn’t know the abilities you’d say many are just stupid. I just don’t see anything special about Tracer the flagship character, she looks like someone who Winston could bite in half. And then, while moving past formidable and capable looking characters you accidentally hover over – Mei??? You’re going to play a shy Asian girl with glasses and a puffy coat with a mini super-soaker?
The classes are not obvious and, for some, they make no goddamn sense. Here’s the problem. Let’s say you designed World of Warcraft -- it is easy coming up with fantasy DPS, healers, tanks and magic shenanigans. In Overwatch, you’re in the future. How the hell do you create healers? So you say “Ok, bear with me – there’s this sniper, right, and if she shoots the bad guys they get hurt, right, but if she hits the good guys with the VERY SAME BULLETS, right, they get healed.” So congratulations, it was a great solution, counter intuitive maybe, but it makes no goddamn sense.
Reinhardt is a serious problem for me to explain. It’s a sci-fi shooter and he’s a huge knight with a rocket-powered hammer he can’t use because he’s holding up a shield. You either play him or you don’t, and if you don’t you have absolutely no idea how to play along-side him or against him and it would help if you could frigging figure out how to get on voice chat.
I know this is sci-fi, but many of the weapons make no goddamn sense. What the hell is Lucio shooting? Ok, soundwaves or something, whatever. Why does it use cartridges? Why does Winston’s Tesla rod cartridge pop out? Seriously? Is there a reason for the low-damage trickle to have to reload or did you figure everyone reloads, why can’t he? How can Junkrat shoot grenade after grenade, then when he reloads he shoves in just one grenade? What the hell is up with Symmetra, why are her powers so embarrassing when you could have said she invented a new type of battery or something?
Part two: the backstory is irrelevant.
Everyone my age (old) has played centipede. It doesn’t really matter what you are doing, you are shooting crap and hopefully having fun. Then you learn that you aren’t shooting monster bugs from a spaceship, you are an elf with an arrow turning friendly bugs into toadstools and your real enemy is a wizard who doesn’t appear in the game and you take something the writers were obviously using and laugh and laugh and end up in the ER or in the gutter. Overwatch is pretty much the same thing. After a while, though, you may feel either curious or guilty that you have no idea what is going on and some nagging questions emerge.
Question one: Who the hell is everyone? It is pretty easy to pick out something about every character that sort of explains how they got their abilities. But who are they overall? It slowly becomes apparent that some characters are good guys, some are definitely bad guys, and some are in between. Then why are you all working together? And even worse, how can the opposite team choose the same characters? Which comes to question two:
Question two: What the hell are we doing? We’re killing an identical set of characters only to have them respawn and then kill them again. We are delivering a payload – a space shuttle (that can’t fly?) a tank, or an empty pickup truck. What is it, what’s it for? Why don’t we drive it, why can’t we shoot it? We’re capturing an area. Why? Are we rescuing the gong in the temple? What from, if you’re fighting the same characters, good and bad? Which makes me wonder…
Question three: What the hell is Overwatch? Unfortunately, I was listening to some of that awful automated banter between characters – “I heard Overwatch was destroyed. Maybe it should have stayed that way.” What??? If Overwatch was destroyed, what the hell am I playing? And again, if I’m playing Overwatch, what is the opposite team playing? Shouldn’t we be doing whatever Overwatch was made for in the first place? Or is that too much like the Terminator story?
Too full of questions now: If Hanzo thinks he killed Genji but didn’t know Genji came back as a cyborg, isn’t it awkward when they are on the same team? Isn’t Ana still pissed at Widowmaker for shooting out her eye? (Everyone makes fun of Ana for sniping through her eyeless hole. It’s a cyborg eye, sheesh, even I knew that.)
The game itself is no help whatsoever. The first thing you do is the tutorial. And the clueless character you learn on is…Soldier 76, the guy who frikking FOUNDED OVERWATCH, you think he’d already know where he put his hyper rockets. Maybe he forgot when he got that scar on his head? Oh yay, here’s TRACER of all people to show the founder of Overwatch how to jump.
So you may not get into Overwatch unless you either play it or watch the pro vids, and then nothing can make you stop.