It’s surreal to watch all the talk about 6v6 versus 5v5 and no one is talking about what I feel is the real problem. Format doesn’t matter. I know that might be a hot take but this past month has shown me that it is almost irrelevant. Because playing 5v5 and 6v6 has me just as annoyed and frustrated with OW2 either way. Yet when I go to MR I can play for hours and leave in a good mood. The problem with OW2 is the same that was wrong with OW1.
GAMEPLAYGAMEPLAYGAMEPLAY!
I became clear of a very simple thing while playing 6v6. It doesn’t matter what format you play in if it’s still annoying to deal with a widow sitting afk in the back of the map. If you still have to deal with immos being thrown out like they’re candy. If AoE heals are dominating a game. If you explode before you can blink from high burst dmg.
OW2 whether it is 5v5 or 6v6 has one very clear difference that MR which is casuing it to lag behind.
In MR if I land my abilities and make a good play you get rewarded more than you do in OW2.
This is the #1 thing that makes the game more enjoyable than OW2. Despite it being incredibly wacky and unbalanced it has this major W that blizzard seems incapable of noticing. I’ve come to realize this 6v6 playtest is a waste of time. Until they actually make the GAMEPLAY fun then it doesn’t matter if they go back to 6v6, 100v100 or whatever.
I’ve been in the mindset that format is irrelevant. That’s not real content. This game needs to take a step back and realize that format and balance isn’t content. It just isn’t. That’s a foundation. They need more content that isn’t format and shop skins. Things like prop hunt and junkenstein lab is the most well received content we’ve had since the 2. And I just wish they didn’t fomo these great modes.
I don’t know if I’d agree with that entirely. I feel like MR is still in its honeymoon phase and has yet to have the fun fully optimized out by players. I can definitely see some characters becoming really annoying to deal with when a good player gets their hands on them.
Though I do agree that the gameplay has been lacking in OW. Everything feels too same-y and all the recent kits haven’t really felt that unique (outside of Juno, but even she borrows speed manipulation from other heroes). Not only that, but the events have been entirely absent or have felt completely uninspired/unoriginal.
They really need to focus on what makes a player pick up a Hero Shooter in the first place. Unique, fun, interesting characters and their stories.
I wouldn’t say is unimportant. In fact, it is extremely important to how the game plays. Both the numbers (5v5 or 6v6) or the restrictions (like Role Queue).
But I do agree with you that the hero designs greatly influence how the game feels, and even when 6v6 (IMO) feels better, it is still very frustrating to face many of the heroes. Instant, no-skill escapes, incredibly strong heals that is hard to deal with, unless you can insta-kill, CC that takes little skill to land…
You work your butt off to try to make a dent, and it is just paved over trivially by defensive abilities so easy to execute and so powerful, that it dwarfs the effort you just put in.
Just a very frustrating feeling overall.
I talk about it all the time. As much as I love Reinhardt, he is only one man. Is Reinhardt better than anything in Mahvel? Yes, yes he is. But he is the only one. Everyone else lost their fun and it feels like a chore to slog through the game. You have to play characters you do not care about if you want the easiest path to walk. In Mahvel, if I am stuck on tank or support, I am playing a character I actually love and that makes it okay. I would rather play a boring hero such as Magneto because he is freaking Magneto. If I have to heal, I would rather do it on a really cute character such as Luna. Are they as fun as Sigma or Lucio respectively? Not really. But I hate Sigma and Lucio. That’s the difference.
And those are just the “bad” examples. Most heroes are genuinely more fun in Mahvel to begin with. Squirrel Girl is way more fun than Junkrat. Namor is way more fun than Torbjorn. Black Panther is more fun than Genji. Magick is more fun than Doomfist. Psylocke is more fun than Sombra. Starlord is more fun than Tracer (in a sort of lame way). Punisher is more fun than Bastion. Hawkeye is more fun than Hanzo. Bucky is more fun than Cassidy.
You get the picture. Why the hell would anyone sit in queue to play any of those heroes when you could just wait a few seconds and dominate in Mahvel? Make it make sense…
I think this is correct but rather its the balance and hero design that is the main problem of OW. Characters like doom, orisa, ball, sombra, junkrat, sojourn, pharah, mercy, moira etc can be frustrating to players across ranks. Too much CC, too much invulnerability, too much one shots its honestly insane that we played OW for so long like this lol.
In Overwatch you can execute 10 difficult actions with perfect, timing and positioning and it can be just cancelled with button press . And sometimes even 0 button presses depending on role.
That isn’t the case in Rivals or even other games and that is what makes the gameplay sooooo frustrating at times.
In Rivals and 6vs6 I can still carry a match if you play good and that gives a good feeling. But especially 5vs5 it doesn’t matter what you do and all the odds always seem stacked against you.
It’s been hilarious watching ‘professional’ Overwatch content creators realise that the secret to balancing hitscan sniper characters is to simply remove the one-shot. Many of them have spent years screaming that you can’t remove Widowmaker’s one-shot “because it’s high-skill” and yet they praise Black Widow’s design because they’ve done exactly that - as if it wasn’t the most obvious thing in the world.
This game has been held back by Blizzard catering to the demands of Top 500 idiots for literal years, compromising actual gameplay to satisfy whiny man-babies Twitch and Youtube.
I feel the same, except my experience with MR is that their gameplay is MILES behind OW2. It just feels bad to play their game, lol. It does remind me of playing a mobile game - mild amusement, but at the end of the day, it just doesn’t feel good. I don’t think it will be around much longer
The format though, yeah, doesn’t mean much. I don’t think 5v5 would make MR more fun to play…(maybe a little bit)
I dunno, I feel that the 222 mode is really fun. I think it’ll run into the same problems it did before, and I agree that there’s some dumb stuff in OW that apparently is never going away like Widow or immortalities-on-other-players, but Rivals has plenty of that sort of stuff too. It’s pretty much an eyeroll moment when the other team goes Hela and Hawkeye.
but for some magical reason, immortality abilities that aren’t ultimates feel worse, even though they’re not disruptively lethal, but disruptive by saving people from dying…
I think by gameplay you mean team play. Thats the key issue here.
Every single team game will have this:
The game is designed around the min/max impact 1 player can have on its own.
MR is just more flashy, clunky, and “in your face” with melee specifically but its pure imbalance really.
OW2 stays on the other side, where there are too many play denials as opposed to “playmaking chances” and then the max impact a single player can have is pretty low (yes, Widow is an exception) in comparison.
Role Queue is the original sin of the OW dev team. And who asked for that? Oh yeah, top 500 wannabe pro players who wanted to get properly structured teams playing solo. Everybad change in the game flows from that first one.
