Overwatch

We say that we like new and inventive games, but I don't think that's really true. I think the reality is that we prefer the familiar ideas repurposed in a way that feels new. Blizzard is blissfully unaware of this and their games in no way reflect that design intent.

If you squint, Overwatch is more or less TF2 with specular highlights. They both have a set of differentiable abilities via classes and the game modes are more or less identical. Though I think Overwatch uses the classes in the game design in a more meaningful way. Their classes feel very personal and tangible as real characters in a story. The abilities are part of the personalities and that's tied to their effectiveness in the game. I think this is the part of the game that the designers really fucking crushed.

When I was younger, FPSs were my thing. I loved them intensely. After college, I hardly touched them. Other than a nice holiday with COD4, I haven't really enjoyed them since. I missed them and was genuinely optimistic that Overwatch was going to be fun. The gameplay sessions were short and consistent so I could see it actually fitting my schedule. I also had a bunch of friends that were crazy about it. The optimism didn't seem misguided, which is a weird experience as an adult.

Sadly, my joy faded pretty routinely. As the community got more familiar with where to defend, meat grinders became the mainstay. If your team lacks the coordination to adapt, then the games feel pretty similar most of the time. I am guessing that in higher-level of play, inflections in strategy are actually what are meaningful and fun. For the rest of us playing with stoned insta-lock hanzo mains, that isn't really a practical reality. I think some of this could be minimized by adjusting level design or creating different mechanics for breaking stalemates.

Instead, the main tool for breaking stalled progress is killing the entire team at once.

The game modes have no push and pull. If you lose an objective, you can't reclaim it in a later resurgence. There is no reason to acquiesce anything unless its to slow progress after a preliminary objective is already hopeless to defend. There isn't much strategy in how you defend. Map progress will nearly always converge to the last one or two checkpoints. This happens naturally just due to distance from spawn points. I'm being dramatic, but the entire game could be reduced to coordinating effort to kill the other team at the last two checkpoints.

Ultimately, I think the oversight is poor handling around the trade-offs in respawn mechanics. Recent FPS games seem to want to optimize uptime at nearly all costs. Players shouldn't have to wait when they die! They should just run back to the fight! The downside being that death becomes a little too cheap. You don't have much opportunity cost, so the concerns about the quality of player uptime slips.

I just feel like we justify a lot of weird decisions because we're scared of showing players a grey screen.