2426: If You’re Going to Play Multiplayer, FFS Stick it Out Until the End

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I played my ten placement matches for season 2 of Overwatch’s Competitive mode earlier. Nine out of those ten games featured at least one salty asshole quitting the game early because their team lost a round — both on the team I was on and on the opposing team on different occasions — and in Competitive mode, the game doesn’t backfill positions with people queued up to play like it does in Quick Play; when you queue for a Competitive game, you’re put into a game from the very beginning rather than immediately joining one in progress if a space is available.

This was mildly annoying the first time it happened, but with each subsequent time it got more and more irritating. It’s not only bad sportsmanship to strop off in a sulk if you’re losing, it’s also a major pain in the ass to the rest of your team. It would be akin to Wayne Rooney suddenly deciding that he doesn’t feel like playing any more and wandering off the pitch in the middle of a football match. Except in Overwatch, the teams are only six people, so the loss of just one person is keenly and immediately felt.

The trouble that these early leavers have is that they can’t handle losing. They’re unwilling to accept the possibility that the team who just “lost” could enjoy a comeback in the subsequent round — this can and frequently does happen in Overwatch, which is mostly very well balanced like that — and instead ditch the match altogether, leaving their team a man or more down and on the way to what is now pretty much a guaranteed loss rather than something that could be fought back from.

What’s particularly dumb about early leavers is that when they leave a game, the match is counted as a “loss” in their records anyway, so they’re taking the worse option — a 100% chance of getting a loss versus a less-than-100% chance of getting a loss by staying and trying to help the rest of the team to a comeback.

I sort of understand. It can be demoralising to feel like you were steamrollered by another team who perhaps genuinely were more skilled than you. But it’s the very height of special snowflake syndrome to believe that you are entitled to win every game you play — perhaps these players were the kids who grew up in schools that had sports days with “participation trophies” rather than actual winners. And clawing your way to a victory when the jaws of defeat were closing on you is immensely satisfying — my favourite games of Overwatch are the ones that end up being really close, not the ones where my team smashes our opponents into the ground.

Blizzard have penalties in place for those who leave matches early, but they’re clearly not severe enough. For the Competitive scene in Overwatch to succeed, early leavers need to be actively discouraged through harsh punishments. I hope that the Overwatch team are paying attention to this problem and that it gets resolved in the next season of Competitive play.

In the meantime, if you’re an online player, do the decent thing and see your matches through to conclusion, even if they don’t seem to be going all that well. As I say, you keep playing, you have a less than 100% chance of getting a loss recorded on your all-important statistics. Leave early, however, and you absolutely definitely will get that loss. So stop being selfish pricks and play your damn matches to completion.

2407: Looking Again at World of Warcraft After a Good Few Years

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I last played World of Warcraft in the Wrath of the Lich King era. I played it off and on ever since launch, to be honest, but it was Wrath of the Lich King that saw me finally get to the level cap, although looking back on my time with the game through the eyes of an experienced Final Fantasy XIV endgame player, I now realise that I barely scratched the surface of what WoW had to offer.

World of Warcraft is one of those games that I consider to be part of the ill-defined, amorphous “gaming canon” — it’s a game that I thoroughly believe everyone should play for at least a short time to understand what an impact it’s had on the games industry as a whole: its importance to popular game design, the influence it’s had on other games, and the aspects that it’s drawn from its successors back into itself to evolve and adapt.

Like most MMOs, it’s fascinating to chart how WoW has changed over the years because it’s virtually unrecognisable from when it first hit the market. This most recent time I’ve been taking a look at it represents probably the biggest change I’ve seen to the overall game structure and experience, and among other things it’s put certain aspects of my Final Fantasy XIV experience into a broader context.

My time with Wrath of the Lich King was spent primarily playing PvE (Player vs Environment) in the game’s open world. This is still an entirely viable way to play World of Warcraft right the way through until level cap, unlike something like Final Fantasy XIV, which gates significant portions of the main story behind group content, albeit only of the most casual, straightforward variety right up until you reach the original level cap of 50.

The pacing of WoW is also very different to Final Fantasy XIV. While Final Fantasy XIV is relatively slow-paced with an almost turn-based feel thanks to its long “global cooldown” — the period of time between which you can use most of your abilities — WoW is relatively fast-paced and frantic. This comes at a slight cost, though: whereas Final Fantasy XIV’s encounters are, for my money, much more interesting thanks to their strong emphasis on dodging and being in the right place at the right time — a distinctly Japanese approach to encounter design — World of Warcraft appears to be, to my limited experience, much more about gearing up and overpowering your enemies as much as possible. There’s still an element of “don’t stand in the shit” at times, but not to anywhere near the same degree as Final Fantasy XIV.

The two approaches are both valid, although the fact that it’s possible to WoW-style overpower some of what used to be Final Fantasy XIV’s most formidable encounters leads to a certain feeling of dissonance at times; there’s always that feeling of conflict between the beautifully paced and choreographed encounter that the designers of Final Fantasy XIV put together, and the players’ desire to bulldoze their way through it as quickly as possible. It’s sort of a shame to see what a mockery modern groups make of fights like Garuda Extreme, although when you take this in the context of Final Fantasy XIV being a JRPG at core, it could simply be likened to the experience of level-grinding to a ridiculous degree, then steamrollering everything that once gave you grief into oblivion.

WoW also feels a lot more “free” than Final Fantasy XIV thanks to its diminished focus on storytelling — something which I always used to regard as a bit of a drawback to Blizzard’s game, but which with more seasoned eyes I can see allows it to feel much more explicitly “game-like” than Final Fantasy XIV. This may sound odd, but it’s true: FFXIV very much likes to put everything in some sort of narrative context, necessitating unlocking everything manually by completing various quests, whereas modern WoW simply unlocks things automatically and organically as you level up; you can jump into a dungeon as soon as you hit level 15 without having made prerequisite progress through a questline, whereas Final Fantasy XIV brings you to your first dungeon as part of its main scenario.

Modern WoW also features something I like very much, but which further contributes to its “game-like” feel: the Adventure Guide. This screen can be popped up at any time after level 10 and gives you suggestions of what to do next, allowing you to automatically start questlines without having to manually go to the location first, jump into dungeon queues the moment you’ve unlocked them, and even review strategy guides for dungeon bosses to save the tedious cries of “go watch a youtube video, noob” when a more inexperienced player enters group content for the first time.

WoW also seems to have taken some inspiration from Final Fantasy XIV’s FATE (Full Active Time Event) system in the form of its pre-expansion Invasions. These are events that occur in the open world and require the cooperation of multiple players (albeit not in an organised manner) to accomplish various challenges. WoW’s Invasions are much larger in scale than FFXIV’s FATEs, however; an Invasion typically encompasses an entire zone, with objectives scattered around the place, whereas FFXIV’s FATEs are constrained to a smaller area.

WoW also makes use of an incredibly elegant scaling system for these Invasions, where the monsters that appear as part of the event appear at different levels according to each player’s own level. For example, I was participating in one earlier tonight as a level 12 character, so the enemies were appearing as level 12 with appropriate amounts of health and damage. Meanwhile, my friend Cat came to join me on her level 100 character, and the enemies appeared to her as level 100, with appropriately inflated amounts of health and outgoing damage. The higher-level characters still have an advantage due to better gear and a wider selection of available abilities, but it’s nice that it’s so simple for people of different levels to be able to cooperate on something and get meaningful rewards from it — it’s a bit more elegant than FFXIV’s slightly clunky Level Sync system in that you’re not artifically gimping yourself to participate; the encounter gimps itself to lower-level players.

One thing where I’ve felt WoW has always had the edge over Final Fantasy XIV is in terms of gear. FFXIV has a strictly vertical gear progression system, with very little in the way of variety within each tier of equipment. As you’re levelling, you get a new set of gear roughly every 5 levels or so until you reach level 50, at which point a few dungeon runs will allow you to purchase gear that will take you to about level 58 before you need to replace it. Once you hit 60, there are generally two or three “tiers” of gear that are “relevant” at any one time — one that is available with the endgame currency that has no weekly cap on it, one that is available with the endgame currency that does have a weekly cap on it, and, depending on what stage in the patch cycle the game is at, one or more tiers of raid gear from either the 24-player “casual” raid or the 8-player super-difficult “Savage” raid. In other words, everyone at an equivalent gear level in FFXIV will be wearing the exact same stuff as other people playing that class, though the last set to be introduced did at least encourage the insertion of Materia for limited customisation of secondary stats.

WoW, meanwhile, has a huge variety of gear right from the get-go. Shitty grey gear, poor white gear, slightly more exciting green gear, very exciting blue gear, mega-exciting purple gear and OMG I GOT IT Legendary gear. (And possibly some more tiers besides.) WoW throws a lot more loot at the player than FFXIV, particularly during dungeon runs, with green gear in particular taking an almost Diablo-esque approach to itemisation with prefixes and suffixes denoting variations on a particular item level’s gear.

FFXIV does have an item “rarity” system along these lines — there are white, pink, green, blue and purple items — but in practice, getting a blue item simply means that you’ve acquired some level-cap gear, and purple items are, so far as I know, exclusively for the grind-tastic Relic and Anima weapons at levels 50 and 60 respectively. The only items that have any real variety to them are the pink items you find in dungeons while levelling up; these have standardised basic stats for the item level, but randomised secondary stats. In practice, though, it never really feels like the secondary stats make that much difference; perhaps this will change at higher item levels, but at the moment, adding 5 points of Determination on to your armour doesn’t feel like it has a big impact on how powerful you are, and this is, I feel, a real weakness of FFXIV that should be addressed in future expansions.

Do I like one better than the other? No, I actually like them both for different reasons, and can quite feasibly see myself playing both, since they’re both enjoyable and distinct experiences from one another. Oddly enough, spending a few hours playing WoW and getting to level 20 has made me appreciate the things that FFXIV does better, and also given me a certain amount of understanding as to why some players are the way they are. That doesn’t excuse their behaviour at times, of course, but if you look at how they play in the context of having had previous experience with how WoW does things, certain behaviours like the desire for speedruns or overpowering encounters start to make a little more sense.

All in all, it’s been a positive experience — and if you’re a lapsed WoW player who has been thinking about checking out what the game looks like in 2016, I’d encourage you to do so. The experience for new players has been made a whole lot smoother, and the whole package is significantly slicker than it once was. Plus, regardless of whether or not you bought any of the previous expansions, all WoW players now get all the expansions up to Warlords of Draenor completely free, with only the impending Legion requiring you to spend any additional money. The game as a whole seems much more friendly to short, casual sessions than it used to be, and that can only be a good thing — though naturally once you hit endgame, it doubtless won’t be long before the desire to raid kicks in… and that’s when things get a bit time-consuming!

2328: Play of the Game

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I’m really enjoying Overwatch. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I think it’s the first competitive multiplayer game that I’ve actually wanted to “git gud” at enough to be truly competitive in the online sphere. I don’t know if I actually have the skills or the talent to be able to do that, of course, but I’ve been performing reasonably well in the current “Quick Play” mode — effectively a “pre-season” warm-up — and getting a good feel for characters. So much so that when the proper Ranked Play mode makes an appearance in the near future, I feel confident stepping in and attempting to prove my worth.

Overwatch is also helping me to understand the appeal of e-sports. I’m still not entirely sure I would ever want to sit and watch a game of Dota 2 or something (as opposed to actually getting stuck in and playing it) but, playing Overwatch, I certainly feel something while I’m playing. It’s particularly thrilling to claw back victory from the very jaws of defeat, and all of Overwatch’s various game modes are well constructed to always make this a distinct possibility, meaning it’s pretty rare to feel like you’re being completely dominated unless your team is particularly incompetent.

It’s quite entertaining to see the varying reactions of people you play against. Competitive gaming culture has, for the most part, instilled the impulse to type “gg” (Good Game) after a match has concluded — the online equivalent of a friendly handshake after a sports match — and more often than not you’ll see this shorthand pleasantry being exchanged once the victor has been decided. (It’s occasionally accompanied by “wp”, which means “Well Played”).

But there are some people out there who don’t like losing. Some people like the guy who responded “no” to my “gg” after one match because he lost, and he didn’t like losing. People like the guy who, in all caps, told his entire team to uninstall the game and that they were a “useless fucking team” after losing; he didn’t like losing, either. And people like the guy who judged everyone on which character they picked, with sniper Widowmaker obviously being “for noobs”.

Then, of course, there was the Chuckle Brothers my friend James and I encountered earlier, who starting sniping at each other in chat during the match and gradually escalated to threats to “wreck” each other. I may have prodded the fire a bit, but it was too hilarious not to troll a little bit; by the end of the match they’d both made themselves look like complete douchebags to the other participants, and one in particular (who was on the opposing team, who lost against me and my comrades) seemed to think that the fact he’d killed my character several times somehow made him superior than me and the rest of my team.

Me, I don’t mind if I win or lose, because games of Overwatch are good fun, and the game is balanced well enough that I’ve only had one or two matches that I felt were completely imbalanced, and that was largely because the opposing side was using unconventional tactics that none of us knew how to counter. (Six Torbjorns is a force to be reckoned with… until you figure out Roadhog and Pharah.) It’s a competitive game, after all, so by its very nature there has to be a winner and a loser in each and every match. If you want to win more, you practice and get better, just like anything — just like real sports. There’s no sense getting angry and throwing a tantrum over it, because, more likely than not, that’s just going to alienate you and make you less likely to be able to put a coherent team together — and coherent teams with good communication will always perform better at this sort of game.

I’m very interested to see how Blizzard plans to implement the ranked system into Overwatch; while I’ve never played Starcraft 2, I understand its online ranking system is pretty comprehensive and gives you a good idea of where you stand in relation to the rest of the community, so I’m expecting something similar here. I’m also expecting the game to have a good, long lifespan; Blizzard has a good track record of continuing to support its games over time — particularly those with multiplayer components — and with Overwatch proving as popular as it apparently has been so far (the amount of fan art out there already is insane!) I think we’ll be seeing Overwatch tournaments and leagues for a good few years yet. And, for the first time, I want to be part of them.

2320: Never Pick One Main

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This advice is true for many different class-based games, be they massively multiplayer online RPGs like Final Fantasy XIV or competitive games like Dota 2 or, indeed, Overwatch. (Yes, it’s another Overwatch post, for which I make no apologies.)

Overwatch is an interesting case study, though, in that unlike the other examples I gave above, you can change your character and indeed your complete role in the team at any time — either immediately after dying or if you’re back in your base. This leads to a whole new interesting metagame where your team isn’t bound by the principles of the “holy trinity” of tank, healer and damage-dealer (or, in Overwatch’s case, the holy quartet of tank, support, offense and defense) and can instead evolve and change as a match progresses according to the team’s needs.

Because this is such A Thing in Overwatch, you absolutely shouldn’t pick a single character and “main” them like in other character-based games like competitive one-on-one fighters. At the bare minimum, you should be familiar with a hero in each of the four roles, and ideally you should at least know what every hero is capable of, even if you’re not particularly skilled in playing as them.

You can read guides about this, but the best way I’ve found to learn which hero is good against which opponent is simply to experiment and see what happens. That way, you’ll naturally figure out which heroes you enjoy playing and who they’re effective against.

I have a number of heroes that I’ve started gravitating naturally towards so far. I intend to expand my repertoire over time, but for the moment here are my favourites.

In the offense role, I’m a fan of Tracer. Her rapid fire guns immediately hit their target when you fire them, so there’s no need to lead targets in the same way as you need to with those who shoot more obvious projectiles — you still need at least a reasonable degree of precision, though. Her absolute best features are her special abilities, though. Her Blink ability lets her teleport a short distance up to three times in succession, letting her quickly dart across doorways and passages that are covered by dangerous sentry types such as Bastion or Widowmaker. And her Recall ability is great for confusing an enemy, as well as providing a means of self-healing by not only rewinding her location, but also the value her health was at a few seconds ago.

For defense, I like Mei. Her Ice Wall ability is great for blocking off specific routes and funneling the opposing team down a route you can cover more easily. Her weapon also has a great deal of flexibility; the short-range “ice thrower” acts a bit like a flamethrower only, you know, colder, and also has the added benefit of freezing enemies, initially slowing them and eventually freezing them completely for a brief moment. Her alt-fire, meanwhile, fires an immensely accurate icicle bolt that proves devastating to snipers such as Widowmaker, dealing a huge chunk of damage in a single hit at medium to long range. Combine this with her ability to freeze herself, making her temporary invulnerable while self-healing, and her Ultimate, which causes a freeze and damage effect over a decent-sized area, and you have a great defensive hero who is more than capable of going toe-to-toe with dangerous, occasionally insurmountable-seeming threats like Reinhardt.

In the tank role, I enjoy D.Va. D.Va is interesting to me in that she’s not necessarily designed to soak up a huge amount of damage in the same way as some of the other tank characters, but is instead a rather mobile unit that can put out a good amount of close-range damage while having much better survivability behind enemy lines than the Offense heroes. Her absolute best thing, though, is her Ultimate, which self-destructs her mech suit, taking anyone in a significant radius with it, including herself if she doesn’t get out of the way. What’s fun about this ability is that you can combine it with her mech suit’s jump jets ability, effectively “throwing” the self-destructing mech at the enemy team from a distance while she skips off happily into the distance. Also she’s adorable.

Finally, in the support role, I’ve had most success with Lucio. A speedy character with a passive “aura” effect rather than a more active healer like Mercy, Lucio is an excellent support character who is very capable of putting out a decent amount of damage in his own right. His decent mobility thanks to his high speed and Wallride ability allows him to move unpredictably and avoid damage, while the relatively short cooldowns on his abilities let him provide either speed boosts or decent healing to nearby companions on a pretty consistent basis. Not only that, but the fact his buffs and healing work as an aura mean that he can concentrate on wrecking some fools while he’s benefiting the team, meaning he can help out in several ways at once.

I’m sure I’ll discover new favourites in the near future, but for now these are the ones I’ve had the most success — and fun — with.

2319: Pass into the Iris

Overwatch is still excellent.

I’m tempted to leave it at that, but I should perhaps qualify my statement.

It’s difficult to pin down a single, truly appealing element of it because there are so many, and that’s perhaps it’s biggest strength: there’s something in there that will appeal to most people who are at least vaguely receptive to the idea of competitive first-person shooters.

For me, the absolute best thing about it is its accessibility. There’s a wide variety of different heroes, some of which are more difficult to use, but all of which are rewarding. Plus some absolutely wonderful balancing has clearly gone into the game’s development, since each hero has a clear “counter” that is eminently suitable for dealing with them when they start giving you grief.

It’s a game with accessibility for casual players, in other words, but one which has sufficient depth to keep competitive players interested in the long term. It will be interesting to see how the community as a whole takes to the ranked competitive games when they launch soon, and whether the game as a whole takes off as an e-sport.

It’s rather enjoyable to be in at the very beginning of what is clearly going to be a thriving game with the longevity of Valve’s classic Team Fortress 2, a game to which Overwatch is often compared, and not unreasonably so. However, where I found Team Fortress 2 to be completely intimidating (due to the fact that by the time I had a computer and Internet connection that could handle running it, everyone else who had been playing for years was infinitely better than me, and it felt impossible to get any better), with Overwatch I’m finding it easy to contribute to a team effort, pick the right heroes for the right situation and help get the job done.

What seems nice about the community as a whole — at least on PC, I can’t speak for the console versions — is that the player base isn’t afraid to have a bit of fun. Earlier tonight, for example, I had a game where the opposing team started out by posting three Winstons (a giant Tesla cannon-wielding gorilla with a rather refined voice and attitude) outside our base, and gradually, as the match progressed, everyone else participating switched to Winston too, until by the end of things we had an absolutely chaotic melee made up of twelve mutant gorillas all going all HULK SMASH on one another at once. The results of that game really didn’t matter in the end, because everyone involved had such a great time, and of course it was followed up with a couple of other matches in which everyone picked the same character again. Six Reinhardts bearing down on you is certainly a sight to behold, though this situation helped me realise Pharah’s value in that she can leap high into the air and rain rocket death down on Reinhardt from above while staying well out of range of his big-ass hammer.

Overwatch is a game that hasn’t forgotten a core reason we play games is, well, to play. It’s a consistently joyful, smile-inducing experience that the vast majority of the community seem to play well and with a good attitude; you get the occasional ragequitter yelling “uninstall the game now” when their team loses, but they are relatively few and far between in my experience so far, and when this happens most people just shrug and move on. Overwatch’s excellent matchmaking coupled with the significant player base means that their team slot will be filled in a matter of seconds anyway, so it’s no great loss to the other players if that person wants to ragequit.

Assuming Blizzard keeps supporting Overwatch as much as it claims it will — we’re promised free new heroes and maps on a fairly regular basis; the only “premium” paid content is the ability to purchase the Loot Boxes containing skins and other customisation items that you acquire for free every time your account levels up anyway — I can see myself playing it for a long time. And it’s a nice feeling to find a multiplayer experience like that: it’s one I can easily share with friends, since there’s none of the MMO issue of you “outlevelling” each other, getting to different stages and being unable to play together due to the disparity in your characters’ power levels, and its 5-10 minute matches make it eminently friendly to the more busy people I know who perhaps only have half an hour here and there to play some games together.

So yes. Overwatch. If you’ve been on the fence about grabbing it but you like the sound of it, stop hesitating and grab it. Then we can go and shoot some fools together.

Cheers luv.

2316: Overwatch is Out, and It’s Awesome

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Well, it’s here: the only multiplayer-only first-person shooter I think I’ve ever actually been genuinely excited to play and be on board with from day one: Blizzard’s Overwatch.

The servers went live at a little after midnight my time, and aside from one incident where I lost connection from a game, everything seems to be running extremely smoothly. I am happy about this.

Here is a list of reasons why I like Overwatch when I typically haven’t got into other competitive first-person shooters:

It has characters. Call of Duty is boring to me because soldiers are boring. Overwatch has a wide variety of characters that includes cute girls. So that’s a win.
There’s no complicated metagame. No challenges to unlock weapons, no perks to worry about, no loadouts, no higher-level people dominating you through use of higher-level unlocks: everyone is on an equal playing field.
The “you must be this skillful to play” barrier is lower than a lot of other shooters. The thing that puts me off a lot of competitive shooters is the fact that it’s extremely difficult to learn how to play them effectively when some 10-year old can snipe you from halfway across the map before you’ve even got anywhere near the objective. Overwatch’s characters cater to a wide variety of skill and confidence levels, and most don’t require pinpoint accuracy to have a good time with.
The objectives are simple to understand but challenging to complete. The game modes may be straight out of Team Fortress, but they work. The Overtime mechanic makes for some genuinely exciting last-second turnarounds, too.
The weapons are satisfying. Each character only has one or two weapons at most, and they’re all great fun to use. They make good noises and feel powerful.
The game gives excellent feedback. Through the use of sound and HUD elements, Overwatch keeps you nicely informed on what’s going on. If you’re getting shot in the back, a nearby character will tell you. If you’re successfully hitting an enemy from a distance but can’t see it very well, a sound effect lets you know that your shots are on target. And most characters’ HUDs are designed so that you don’t have to take your eyes off the action to know important information.
The abilities give characters unique identities. Not only that, but you need to know the best ways to avoid and/or counter these abilities. That keeps things interesting.
The support characters are more than just healbots. Most of them are more than capable of putting out respectable damage, too, and some even have other interesting abilities to support the team.
D.Va. Say no more.

Now I’d better go to bed before I get tempted to stay up all night blasting fools… doubtless there will be a lot more of this over the next little while, though!

If you’re playing Overwatch on PC, feel free to add AngryJedi#2260 as a friend. If you do so, let me know if it’s on the North American or European servers, because Blizzard inexplicably region-locks its friends lists rather than having one global one.

2304: Blizzard’s New Phenomenon

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I know I wrote about Overwatch the other day, but having been, well, present on the Internet for the past few days I think it’s fairly safe to declare that Blizzard has an honest-to-goodness phenomenon on its hands.

Overwatch’s open beta (read: free demo — the best marketing tool they could have possibly used) ended at the start of this week, but people haven’t stopped talking about it since. They also haven’t stopped producing fan art, incorporating Overwatch characters into memes and cartoon strips, discussing strategies, taking the piss out of people who play nothing but Bastion and admiring Tracer’s admittedly fine posterior.

It’s kind of remarkable, really, because it seems to have come out of nowhere and evolved organically without a trace of interference from the marketing or PR machines. A few weeks ago, I knew very little about Overwatch and had little interest in it; after a couple of days with the beta on both PS4 and PC, I’m well and truly sold and am happily enjoying the wealth of fan-made content that’s been produced seemingly in just the last few days.

Blizzard has always been a somewhat unconventional developer-publisher, producing wildly popular games that eschew popular conventions — mechanically, aesthetically and even functionally. Their insistence on using their own proprietary client Battle.Net to distribute, update and even sell their latest games initially drew criticism — particularly in the case of Diablo III — but as the world has become more and more comfortable with the idea of being always online and multiplayer-centric titles, these complaints have started to fade into the background until now, Blizzard’s ecosystem allows it to have extremely successful titles without having to rely on the more established distribution channels such as Steam.

Overwatch’s stealth marketing is another example of this. While there have been TV spots, video ads and site takeovers for the game, it has never felt like an aggressive marketing push in the same way that a Call of Duty or a Battlefield sees. Instead, Blizzard chose to rely on the most powerful marketing tool in the world these days: word of mouth. Putting their absolute confidence in their game and releasing it to the public for free for a few days achieved more than any multi-million dollar marketing campaign ever would; it allowed people to try the game for themselves and either confirm that yes, they did want to play it, or, in many cases, sate their curiosity as to what it was all about. In more than one case, the satiation of that curiosity has led to additional sales.

So why is Overwatch such a phenomenon? Well, a lot of it has to do with its striking visual design — it’s immediately recognisable — but I think the biggest contributing factor is its wildly varied selection of playable characters. There’s something for everyone in Overwatch’s cast, whether you’re into moody, dark types; big, stompy robots; hot girls; cute girls; frightening muscle-bound girls who probably have a Tumblr page; Westerns; sci-fi… there’s a bit of everything. And somehow despite this massive variety in its cast, Overwatch feels coherent and none of its characters feel like token inclusions.

This, naturally, leads to people picking favourites — never underestimate the power of the waifus! — which, in turn, leads to people producing fan-created content based on their favourite characters. And, from there, other fans can enjoy this content and express how much they like their favourite character through sharing these fan-made productions or engaging with the artists. Over time, a whole meta-community outside of the game builds up, even bringing in people who don’t actually play the game but just like watching it, or appreciate the art direction, or like the look of the characters.

In short, Blizzard would have to do something absolutely spectacular right now to fuck up Overwatch. I’m really looking forward to giving the full version a go at the end of the month, and if you’re up for a multiplayer rumble in its wonderfully colourful world, be sure to hit me up.

2301: Overwatch

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I decided to give the game everyone seems to be talking about — Blizzard’s new first-person shooter Overwatch — a bit of a go this weekend. They were running an open beta, after all, so there was no risk whatsoever involved in downloading it and giving it a shot.

And what do you know — it’s actually pretty good. I’m not sure if I’m sold enough on it to want to pick up a copy when it comes out later in the month, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with it over the last couple of days.

For those who have perhaps heard of Overwatch but not found out any more information about it, it is, in many ways, similar to Valve’s classic Team Fortress 2 in that two teams made up of various different characters with different capabilities face off against one another in order to complete an objective of some description. In the game as it stands at the moment, the objectives on offer include a “king of the hill” type affair, where over the best of three rounds, each team has to control a particular area on the map for a certain amount of time; an “attack and defend” situation, where one team has to defend a point against assault from the other team; an “assault” variant, where the attacking team has to escort a slow-moving “payload” vehicle from one end of the map to the other while the other team stops them; and a mode that mixes the “attack and defend” and “assault” objectives together.

Like Team Fortress 2, the different characters have different roles on the team. Offensive characters are nimble but fragile, with their weapons and abilities concentrating on inflicting damage efficiently. Defensive characters have the ability to do things like lay down turrets or, in the case of one particular character, turn themselves into a turret. Tank characters have a huge pool of health points so are designed to act as a distraction for the other team. And support characters generally have some sort of useful ability to help the team out — usually some form of healing, buffing or both.

Where Team Fortress 2 only had one character of each archetype, though, Overwatch has several, each of whom has a unique weapon and loadout of special abilities. Weapons have clips of ammo and have to be reloaded when empty, but you have infinite clips, so there’s no hunting around for ammo or any punishment for spray-and-pray gunplay. You can restore your health by returning to your home base, similar to how Blizzard’s MOBA Heroes of the Storm works. And if you find a hero isn’t working out for you, you can switch either when you die or when you’re in your base.

Overwatch strikes an excellent balance between simplicity and tactical depth. The characters are all easy to learn in terms of mechanics, but applying their weapons and skills to situations throughout a match is the real challenge. That and not blowing yourself up in some instances; my favourite character so far, D.Va, has the ability to self-destruct her mech suit, killing anyone nearby, which is an absolutely devastating skill, but also very likely to take you with it if you don’t immediately run away.

There’s also a fun metagame that doesn’t fall into the Call of Duty trap of excessive challenges and skill levels: you simply have an experience level, which gives you a “loot box” every time you level up, and the items in the loot box are randomly selected skins, animations, spray paint logos and voice clips for the various characters in the game. None of these have any effect on the characters’ abilities — they’re just there as cool collectibles as an incentive for players to keep playing. The choice to make Overwatch a full-price game rather than a free-to-play affair also seems quite sensible, too; while some may balk at paying full whack for a multiplayer-only game, there’s a substantial amount of content in here, both heroes and maps, and Blizzard claim that they’re going to support the game post-launch with new, free add-on content rather than paid DLC. A round of applause for them, then; doubly so since their parent company is Activision, who loves milking the annual Call of Duty installments dry.

The other nice side-effect of it being a full-price game is that everyone has access to everything from day one. Everyone can pick a favourite character and get to grips with them without having to wait for them to come around in a free-to-play rotation; everyone is, in other words, on a level playing field to begin with, with no advantage given to someone who has paid up for characters, boosters or whatever.

As I say, I’m not yet sure if I’m convinced enough by the beta to hand over 50 quid for the full game when it releases later in the month, but I will say it’s the most fun I’ve had in a first-person shooter for a very long time indeed, and I generally don’t go in for competitive first-person shooters. The beta seems to have had some positive attention, too, so hopefully it will enjoy a solid community for some time — long enough for it to be worthwhile for Blizzard to keep adding new content.

If you want to give it a go for yourself, I believe you have until Monday morning to try it out. Better hurry!

2261: Tracer’s Ass

In yet another disappointing example of developers caving in to the demands of a minority of players, it seems that World of Warcraft developer Blizzard has made changes to a character in its upcoming game Overwatch, apparently for little reason other than to placate one poster who played the “sexualisation!” card. Here’s an archive of the thread in question, in case it mysteriously disappears.

Now, normally I would say that everyone is perfectly welcome to give their opinions on character design and appropriateness and whatever. But what we have here is Blizzard explicitly stating that they’re going to change an animation for one character because a poster is worried about it sending the wrong message to their young daughter, who is already interested in the character through trailers. This goes a step beyond someone just stating their opinion, and it’s a dangerous road for any developer to embark on, because if you make changes for just one poor soul, where do you then draw the line when someone else claims to be offended by something you found to be quite innocuous and may even be proud of or happy with?

There’s an argument, of course, that there were people in Blizzard who already wanted to change the pose and this simply provided a convenient excuse, but I’m not sure I buy that. Even if true, it doesn’t send a great message to the community, and it has the potential to put Blizzard in a sticky situation down the line, as previously noted.

The pose in question, incidentally, can be seen in the picture here. There’s nothing particularly offensive about it; the only even vaguely sexualised thing about it is the fact that Tracer is wearing very tight trousers indeed, and that some people have chosen to interpret this as her “presenting” (you know, like baboons do when they’re in heat) rather than, you know, just doing a cool action hero pose.

I’m not going to argue about whether or not this is sexism or objectification or sexualised or whatever because I’m frankly really, really tired of that discussion happening over and over and over and never, ever going anywhere. Instead, what I wanted to do was share this response — and my own thoughts, too.

“Today, I feel like my voice no longer matters to Blizzard,” writes disappointed Blizzard fan and longtime World of Warcraft player Ginny Higerd, a 30 year old woman who goes by @mahoumelonball on Twitter. “I’m not attractive. I’m not skinny. I’ve been teased about my appearance since elementary school. […] I love being a sexy night elf character. I love being Tracer. I love being Nova. I LOVE these strong women that can be confident in their abilities and their appearance, because in the real world, I’m none of those things. These games were an escape for me. I channel myself into these characters, because I would give anything just to be like them.”

Higerd’s words resonated with me a great deal, because it kind of sums up how I feel about the whole thing with “sexualised” or “sexy” characters. When I play a game with an attractive female cast — or deliberately make my custom avatar, where available, to be an attractive woman — I am not doing so to get my rocks off. I’m doing so because I like the way the character looks, and I like feeling like I’m taking on the role of someone else — someone who’s not me, and someone I’d like to be, but will never get to be. Much like Higerd, I am none of the things that these characters represent, and I love having the opportunity, however limited it might be, to feel like I’m if not one of them, then certainly at least hanging out with them.

To take things a bit deeper, I’ve always been fascinated by what it would be like to be female, for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons are sexual in nature, others are simple curiosity about the differences between the sexes — and the different ways people respond to men and women. I have recurring dreams and fantasies about having the ability to switch between being a man and a woman at will, and it’s sometimes frustrating that I can’t do that, even though it’s obviously an impossibility. This isn’t an indirect means of coming out and saying that I want to make any sort of transition, I might add — it’s just something that has fascinated me for a long time, and here’s the thing: video games have always provided me with a means to explore that fantasy in its most idealised form. Because what’s the point in getting to live out a fantasy if it’s not quite perfect? Assuming you can recognise the difference between fantasy and reality, of course, which all but the most deluded, mentally unstable have absolutely no problem with, what with the escape from reality into fantasy being one of the main reasons people like to game in the first place.

Games are, at their core, pure escapist fantasies of various descriptions. Like any other form of art, they can be autobiographical, realistic, fantastical, historical, abstract, stylised, childish, provocative, erotic and any number of other descriptors you might care to mention. I have an almost infinite amount of respect for the talented men and women who make these experiences come to life on my television and in the palm of my hand, and I would never, ever question how an artist has chosen to represent a character that they created, nor would I start demanding that there are more characters that look like me for the sake of that increasingly irritating buzzword “diversity”. Instead, I would look to understand the character in question through playing as them, and determining what I can learn about them — and about myself — through how they play and how they act. Over the years, I’ve found far more characters I can relate to that don’t look like me than those that do.

Characterisation is a great deal more than just physical appearance. And, ironically, it is the ones who judge characters like Tracer based solely on their physical appearance who are the ones indulging in objectification, not those who enjoy the designs of these characters for whatever reasons they might have. And I’m growing increasingly impatient with those who cry “sexualisation!” at every opportunity without 1) offering any “solutions” (to this non-existent problem) and 2) explaining exactly why it’s somehow bad to have characters that look nice in our interactive fantasies.

2009: Into the Nexus

Up until a few days ago, I thought I hated MOBAs¹. Turns out I just hated Dota 2.

Actually, let me qualify that. I hate playing Dota 2, but I don’t hate it. It’s one of those games that, like Dark Souls or any fighting game released after the original Street Fighter II on Super NES, I feel like I’m doomed to never be any good at, and consequently have reached a point of acceptance where I feel I can and should respect it from afar, but not even attempt to get into it. And that’s fine by me.

Let me qualify that further by saying that I feel there are way too many MOBAs on the market these days, as many developers appear to be seeing it as the new² fad to latch onto in the (usually vain) hope that they will attract a large, world-beating multiplayer community.

With all that in mind, well, Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm is really good.

Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA that brings together a series of characters from Blizzard’s various games from over the years — primarily Warcraft, StarCraft³ and Diablo, with a guest appearance from The Lost Vikings — and throws them into battle against one another in the usual 5v5, destroy-the-other-team’s-base-before-they-destroy-yours MOBA gameplay.

Heroes of the Storm has a few little twists on the formula, though. For starters, individual players on your team don’t level up independently of one another; you have a collective pool of experience that you share, so you all level up at the same time. You still need to do your part to make sure your team levels up faster than your opponents, particularly in the early stages of a match, but there’s less feeling “left behind” than there is in stuff like Dota and League of Legends, in my experience anyway.

Tied in with this is the fact that a lot of the stupid arbitrary maybe-skill-maybe-luck-based bullshit that Dota includes — “Last Hit”⁴ being the one that always wound me up the most — is conspicuously absent from Heroes of the Storm, and it’s much more fun as a result. It means you can focus on the overall team strategy rather than micromanaging your character to such a degree that it can become very distracting — if you’re a newcomer, anyway; I’m sure veteran Dota players can Last Hit pretty much at will.

Then there’s the fact that there’s more than one map, and each map has its own little quirks. Some have two lanes to attack down, some have three. Some have objectives you need to defend to gain a temporary advantage, some have special enemies you need to defeat. Some have collectible items to unleash powerful attacks, and one even has an entirely separate “dungeon” map for you to descend into when the time is right. The objectives and the rewards you get from them don’t necessarily make or break a whole battle, but they can make things swing one way or the other — and even provide a means for a struggling team to make a spectacular comeback, rather than being stomped into the ground.

All of this is wrapped up in matches that generally don’t take any longer than twenty minutes to play, as compared to the 30-90 minute slugfests that games of Dota can easily become. It’s simple to understand, accessible and actually enjoyable to me, even as a newcomer and someone who is not generally very good at strategy games.

I haven’t yet dared play a game against human opponents, but I feel much more inclined to give it a shot in this than in the notoriously elitist and short-tempered communities that play a lot of Dota and League of Legends. If you, like me, have been skeptical about MOBAs but like the idea of them, give Heroes of the Storm a shot. It is free, after all.

¹ MOBA: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, a team-based game where two teams compete for dominance of a map by attempting to destroy the other team’s “core” by infiltrating their base.

² Well, not that new any more, I guess.

³ The way they’re capitalised differently has bugged me for years now.

⁴ Last Hit: a mechanic whereby you only get experience points for a kill if you were the last person to deal damage to it. Satisfying to veterans, the most fucking annoying thing in the world for newbies.