That’s bad, due reduces creativity.
They did the same with diablo3. Some heroes had cheat death, today. Each class has one. In there works because folks can play alone and there’s no need to teamwork.
No hero should be viable on all scenarios, your team should make viable your pick if someone counters you. If there’s less players on the team, means less players helping you. So, you are more responsible to fix your problem. More negative impact doesn’t mean more agency, tho.
Which is why, in general, 5v5 increases the negative impact and barely changes player agency. Due now the player has less potential targets to go after if there’s a counter in the game.
You should neither make heroes be equal on playstyle or kits. That’s the whole problem created on OW2 and also by sigma and brig on their launch at OW1.
No tool should be good enough on all scenarios. That way you don’t have stale metas and more options. Counterpick and Counterplay is important, as much as teamwork. Due keeps at bay heroes in a way that not entirely disable them.
Pharah being more similar to echo is a bad thing. Similar to venture and reaper proximity. Not even entering on bad designs on risk/reward ratio.
If you have a hero who is generalist, you often shift the teamwork aspect towards 1v1 duels. At that point a game with objectives and team, loses it’s purpose. Becoming a generic game, which means getting rid of other elements who makes OW be OW.
On mobas works due every part tries to defend something, even without teamwork, there’s an easy way to have intel on the entire map, enabling teamwork intuitively.
OW is a hybrid of some genres, at same time, master of none. You can’t go too much on moba or too much on fps without getting issues.
As map design, ow2 is leaning towards moba. Way more than did on ow1, which reflects a shift from more fps centric maps to more moba centric maps. On hero wise side, they’re going towards fps. Which means they’re working on opposite direction from ow1, which were more moba-like heroes and fps-like maps.
Yet on this shift, they needed to re-introduce CC and several moba-like mechannics on heroes. Which means making heroes more aligned to fps being a mistake, otherwise they wouldn’t re-introduce more hero designs aligned to mobas.
The situation becomes problematic with 3 points:
- They want the game lean towards fps, which is why the normatization of heroes kits are in place.
- They’re needing to increase CC and moba-like aspects due most heroes being moba-like ones, in favor their so called fps direction.
- map design bigger shift towards moba, than fps, due faster development time (design half map, duplicate and invert it).
Which makes their goal of making the game lean towards fps, making heroes bland and pretty much less creative. Making game styles being repeated and barely having different forms of heroes. Stacking on bland maps from moba-like genre.
That’s bad, due overwatch being a game of hero expression prior to any other element. Which was the case of the game being action game first, with elements of shooter and moba. Each new hero, folks are becoming less tied to the said hero. There are some exceptions to this rule, but most heroes are becoming generic and most folks aren’t identifying with them anymore. They’re not working much on story telling and linking folks with heroes.
They’re effectively changing the game and those changes are already being reverted in some fashion due how badly was going.
So, instead. In terms of balance, to achieve that is way more adviseable to simply work on risk/reward on heroes kit. Firstly going after overperformers and nerf them, yes toxic meta can be problematic, but overbuffing stuff requires changing the entire game to do so and those changes have way more potential to break stuff than actually help fixing problems.
If mobility is too dominant, you increase the risk of it. CC was a tool for that, but too much of it bleeds on other roles. Which did on tanks on ow1. Instead, increasing animation time, increase cooldowns and reducing hp can increase the risk associated to it and the inverse of it you reduce the risk of it. While if you reducing the damage you decrease the reward and increasing the damage you increase the reward.
Which is why, instead of normatization of kits. They should just address risk/reward of abilities by adjusting casting times, vulnerability windows, hp, mobility and damage based on what specific abilities does.
Which is funny due ow1 had less CC but way more ways to nullify ults than OW2 has. Yet, folks called ow1 a game that 1 button to win while ow2 is way easier to do so. There are less overall team kills on ults on ow2, but ults are mostly non-cancelable aside a few heroes and most ways to cancel an ult is often tied to ult abilities too.
Is funny that most folks enjoys more moba centric maps than fps ones. While heroes going on fps direction are effectively being revisited due how bland the game was becoming. Yet they’re trying to make heroes too much similar, in some cases, which can make the cast bland and show some lack of creativity.
On top of those things, they planned Juno which was an example of everything being done in a proper way of risk/reward management and yet folks asking for buffs to it became generalist, killing it’s expression and purpose.
Ow2, redefining what sequel means, are also struggling to find it’s own identity. Either it changes completely or not, is more tied to what they see OW is.
I would rather have a diverse cast with different abilities with their risk/reward being managed properly. Sym bigger hp, tracer lower hp, aligning pressure and burst damage by adapting armor and hp pools are examples of those methodologies.
Yet they also are doing normatization, by making more heroes being similar to each other. Reaper/Venture, Pharah/Echo, kiriko/illari, queen/mauga
All prior heroes had clear identity. Yet, now there’s another one with similar. Pharah rework is great but her risk/reward is not in a good place, because echo also doesn’t have a good risk/reward either.