Yikes, hot take out the gate, sorry. I wholly expected to be flamed for this and frankly I welcome the feedback and earnest discussion. I’ll give special favouritism for critical discourse and try my best to disregard non-contributive comments. At the end of the day, I want what you all want: The most fun Overwatch experience.
I believe that a lot of the current problems that OW2 is facing are due to moving towards 5v5, and are creating excessive work for the OW team. I believe strongly that the move to 5v5 and removing 1 tank per team was a mistake. Hear me out.
Let me start by saying that OW2 does feel better. I’ve adjusted to the more FPS-heavy playstyle and away from the RPG-playstyle that was required of my rank in OW1. I attribute a large amount of this to the (yes) the removal of 2 players per match, the reduction in CC, and the modern map design (more flow, more flanks, less focus on each map being 3-lanes and lane control).
However, with that, we should call some things out.
OW1 maps were designed with 6v6 in mind. The whole philosophy of lane control was imperative to how to play those maps, and two tanks meant the possibility of leaning into two 3-person squad style play (or alternatively, RPG style 6-person deathball play as was more common). With these maps being played now with one less tank, these more-open, lane-based maps favour poke-style plays – and you guessed it – favour long-range characters and one-shots such as Widowmaker. Whereas previously, an offtank could divert their attention to distract the sniper, now there is no real counter. If the tank leaves to deal with it, often their team is left exposed to the enemy tank while they rotate to deal with the threat. The only really consistent and successful strategy is either a skilled flanker, or a sniper battle, which currently occur way too frequently for my tastes. Restoring the extra tank and 6v6 would solve this problem.
Hero reworks for balance. Many of the heroes were designed with 6v6 in mind. Simply put, now that the game is 5v5, many heroes have and are expected to have reworks to fit into the new world. This isn’t entirely due to a reduction in player count per match, but it is a contributor. By returning to 6v6, the amount of “rework” for heroes would be reduced.
Giga tanks. Having a single tank on your team requires that the tank upholds their role. Previously, this responsibility was shouldered by two persons, which meant that each character could be designed as an “equal contributor” to every other hero on their team – each character was “equally powerful” as the rest. By moving to 5v5, tanks had to be buffed. This led to a cascading effect where any non-rolequeue match greatly favoured having multiple tanks (ironic) given their over-powered nature, and ultimately leading to what I affectionately refer to as GOATS 2.0. Blizzard has taken steps to resolve this pain by nerfing tanks within arcade and non-rolequeue game modes, but this is a workaround to a clear problem: giga tanks. I believe a better solution would be to return tanks to being equal-contributors as the other teammembers.
We have not seen OW1 style game with the reduction of CC. Simply put, the reduction in CC might have been enough. A similar change could made for deployables given that an original motivation for moving to 5v5 was to reduce the number of things happening and objects on screen. For all we know, this was the only necessary change.
Likely I have more thoughts that are simply not with me currently. Thanks for reading. I’m looking forward to your thoughts and responses.
Edit:
Respawn/reinforcement timing. Fight timing has changed now that reinforcements and kill-rates have changed. I don’t think this is necessarily bad, but it often means that a fight which was expecting reinforcements now gets them too late to matter, leading to a lost fight. This is just how the game is played now and I don’t think there is any real action required for this one.
Fight win/lose timing. Much like #5, fights often are now lost more easily by a single death, usually caused by a single mistake by a single player. 5v6 was still reasonably winnable by underdogs, and while 4v5 is too, the chances are generally lower. This means that each death has the cascading effect of creating more lost fights. Given #5, the respawn timing, this means that teams spend even more time regrouping and walking from spawn, and less time fighting/doing the interesting thing.
Cause it also destroyed a lot of the synergy for teams. I mean double barrier was definitely an issue, but with only 1 tank most supports are forced to huddle behind their single tank at the threat of being instantly ground into a fine dust by the enemy tank or dps. And even then, the tank’s ability to protect their team hae been greatly reduced as now there is no secondary tank to act as redundancy against overconfident flankers or off tanks.
All the OW1 maps have been modified to have more cover. So this issue is mostly remedied.
This is technically true, but I think this is a minor issue. And I think hero passives are a good remedy to that as well.
This is a good thing. Tanks and supports needed to become harder roles. In 6v6, DPS was by far the hardest role. Support was the easiest. Tanks were the middle. DPS was the hardest because of the sheer amount of damage mitigation between healing and shields of some kind. DPS players really had to thread the needle. Tanks and supports just got so much value.
In 5v5, I still think the order of difficulty is the same, but the gabs between the difficulty is lessened. Tank is now harder (as it should be) because they have more responsibility as a lone tank. Support is harder because they’re more exposed. DPS is still hard because it’s still the most mechanically demanding role, and because DPS have only one form of value. Damage. While tanks and supports can do their respective functions AND do damage.
The thing is, two less powerful tanks is still more powerful than two DPS which lead to the afformentioned issues.
Tanks are harder to kill now, which is fine. They’re tanks. At least they don’t kill things better than DPS anymore.
This might be true. I do sometimes think 6v6 should come back in some form while also keeping 5v5. That could be a nightmare for balancing, but I think 6v6 with the option of running 1-3-2 could’ve worked. At the very least, 6v6 coming back as an arcade mode would be cool.
Not sure what you mean by this.
I do agree with this. This is one of the disadvantages to 5v5. The thing is, I think both 6v6 and 5v5 have their own pros and cons. There are indeed things better about 6v6. And I think there are things better about 5v5. Personally, I think the pros outweigh the cons more for 5v5 though.
With the giga tank argument that I think people vastly underestimate how much a second tank divded heals. Mainly because its not always clear which tank is the one needing heals. Now its just heal the one tank forehead = profit. So its simplfied targrting massively.
And this isnt even any roles fault. Its a everyone loses to accommodate a change thing and I dont think its ever going to be healthy because kits are going in downard deathspirals that turn people off the game.