Hello everyone.
i just want to preface this by saying I am not a game designer, and repsect the entire overwatch team for there passion for the game and their perspective on game design. I am 23 and have been playing video games since i was 8, and have been playing competitive games for 6 years. I am, by no means, an expert in game design, though i have plenty of insight. This article is based on my experiences playing competitive MOBA’s (smite) and other team based shooter (tf2, paladins). i have been playing overwatch since junkensteins revenge 2016, and have seen many reworks, buffs and nerfs to many characters in the game and how the community reacted to these changes, as well as how they affected to meta, and game as a whole.
DISCLAIMER: I was doing my research for a few days and was planning to post my findings today regardless. However, the overwatch team has announced new changes to some characters that definitely affects this article and i haven’t been able to thoroughly test these new changes and how they affect the game. The article here is based on the current live game and doesn’t include the ptr changes.
So what makes a “good” character? is it the look? the kit? the lore? well to some degree, all of it makes a good character. however in a competitive game that has its own esport league character design is very important to provide a fun game to play, watch, and compete in. in this article, i will go over three major aspects to character design; 1, Are they fun to play? 2, Are they fun to play against? and 3, how does the character affect the team comp/aspect of the game? After reading this article, i hope that you have a better understanding on what makes a good character design and what makes a bad character design. So lets begin.
Are they fun to play?
Some of the aspects that relate to a fun character to play inculde; impact, role designation, and how easy the character is to pick up and play.
Impact: does the hero feel like they have an impact in the match? what i mean is does playing them feel like you are directly affecting the team positivly? a hero in overwatch that can have a huge impact is Tracer. she can get to the backline, takeout a support, thus halting a teams advance. it is incredably important for a hero to feel like they are making a difference to the game. a hero that didn’t feel like they had a large impact in the game was old lucio. his shots were very hard to hit due to the speed of the projectile, and that you just needed to “exist” to help your team. this made the character very boring to play, especially with a new player. the changes they made to lucio made him feel impactful in the team because his positioning became much more important and it felt like the character could carry a game. key word is “FELT”.
Role Designation: They’re are many role in ovewatch. they’re are tanks, supports, offense, and defense heroes. but thats not all, there are also many sub roles, such as main healer, flex support, off-tank, main tank, flex dps, and main dps. these are the major role that generally need to be filled in a successful team comp. there are also character roles like, area defense, pick off heroes (widow), supportive off-tank (brigitte, see my other post about this for an explaination), and so many more. But when a charcter does fit into a role, it makes the team feel like you are inhibiting the team, or you feel like the character just doesnt feel right. Symmetra is a hero that is lacking a role. she is in the support role, acts like a dps, her kit is meant for area denial, and her ults dont feel like fight winning. (except the cheeky teleport back cap) Her design is confused, and this is why her pickrate is so low, because she doesn’t necessarily filling any of the roles for a winning team comp.
Easy to pick up: The core of overwatches design philosophy is to make the game easy enough for anyone to pick up the game and play and have fun while doing it, whilst also having characters that have high skill ceilings and can take time to master. A low skill floor is exactly the first point in their philosophy. a prime candidate that illustrates this is Reinhardt. His whole design is meant for anyone to pick him up and get impact playing him. He has this big blue shield. shields tend to stop things from hurting you, so putting up the shield should do the same, and it does. it even has a health bar. why does my sheild have a health bar? the shield has visual indications that it is breaking. the shield is starting to get cracks when the shield is low. that means the shield can break, and a broken shield is a useless shield. but wait, the shields can come back? the health can go up and be usable again. This is such a good example of great character design; using general logic to figure out how the character is supposed to be played. these aspects, at their core, is what makes a character fun to play and have a great design.
Are they fun to play against?
Now this portion, is the long one and can be very hard to design. this section will go over punishability, counters, fairness, and some bad hero design, and how their design can be abused.
Can they be punished?
Punishability refers to if a hero can be killed based their poor cooldown management, ability usage, and poor positioning. For exampe, in smite their is to purchasable abilities that can make you invulnerable to damage, called aegis, and make you CC immune, called beads, for a short period of time. (CC is short for crowd control, CC can be stuns, knock ups, and slows, as well as many other) the best time to gank someone is when their beads or aegis are on cooldown. (both have a 180 second, thats 3 min, cooldown.) in overwatch you don’t have these types of safeguards so when a winston jumps in, he doesn’t have a jump for some time, and with some coordination, is quite punishable. another instance is when zaryas bubbles are down. this is why pro players call out when these abilities are down, so that they can punish them and possibly kill them. if a hero can jump in and get out without a significant risk, then they are not fun to play against. Tracer can blink in and one clip a support, then recall out, however a tracer without recall is very vulnerable. on the other side doomfist punches in or leaps in, gains more tankiness via extra shields, imparts a load of CC, and then can get out relatively without risk. this is a un-fun character design as it dosen’t have a window of punishablity.
Can they be countered?
Is there a character that is designed to beat another character. For example the spy in TF2 directly counters the Engineer. he is designed to sap the buildings, destroying them and making the engineer hard to use effectively. also the pyro counters the spy as his flamethrower leaves an afterburn affect on the spy and he cannot be cloaked. an example in overewatch, pharah counters junkrat. she can attack him outside of his range, and destroy traps with a single rocket, and cant be affected by his drop bombs when he is killed. a skilled junkrat can still kill a pharah, just as a skilled engineer can kill a spy, and a spy, a pyro. counters dont mean that if you pick the character you automatically win the game, but can sway a game in your favour given the right amount of skill. overwatch does this right because there are characters that are designed to have an edge over others and rarely is there a character that doesn’t necessarily have a strong counter to the. The only character that i can think of that doesnt have a strong counter is D.va. Her mobility, with her tankiness, and damage output is very high and can be hard to deal with, without another d.va. this is why she has such a high pickrate in the pro scene. she even has a get out of jail free card with her ult, where she can pop ult when her 500 hp mech is taken out, and you have a very short period to take out mini d.va without being killed by her bomb. and if you dont, she gets her 500 hp mech back, effectively making you kill her twice, then deal with mini d.va. She has an effective health of 1148 hp with her ult up and 649 hp without her ult. (499 because she de-mechs a with 1 hp left, she can bomb, get her mech back, go through another 499 hp, then 150 hp mini d.va) this can be very tedious to deal with in a game and isn’t vary fun to play against.
Fairness?
This is the part where i am most likely going to get hate on, but, does it feel fair to die against them? Thats right we are tanking one shot friends.
Does it feel fun when a widow headshots you across the map? no, its never fun to be forced to stop playing the game, but your okay with it because it takes alot of skill for the widow to make that kill. Does it feel nice to be killed, back when doomfists punch hitbox was the size of mei wall, by doomfist punch? no his hitbox was massive, and it was fixed a while ago, but is still trying to tweak it to make him more viable. doomfist is incredibly fun to play as, but feels so bad to play against one that has an once of skill. unfortunately this makes a poor character design. and i feel bad for overwatch as when they first mentioned doomfist, they said that he can knock down an entire skyscraper with one punch. this forced the design team to make his punch a one shot kill. and when the community first heard about doomfist, everyone was so excited to bring him into the game, so the design team was forced to create a character that didn’t necessarily need to be in the game. The character is great from a lore standpoint but not a game design point. imagine a character in super smash bros that can end a match with one move. not very fun to play against and, if not dealt with care and consideration, can cause the community to rage about nerfing a character into the ground , or possibly kill the game because its full of unfair killers.
design abuse.
This one is going to be short but important to consider when designing a character. Old Hogs hook. the original “unfair” one shot kill. for those who do not know, hog had a hook that you didn’t need a line of sight (LOS) to connect, and his gun had much higher damage to it. (i believe it was 33% more damage then current hog gun). hog was designed to hook an enemy that was in a poor position and the team to pounce and kill that player. however, the more fun and frankly better way to play hog, was to flank around and pick people of from the backline. this made playing against hog very un-fun. his design would have been great for the game but gamers are notorious for being able to abuse character design to make the other team feel aggravated (salty).
Bad character traits.
A character trait that is not fun to play against, but is very fun to play as is the One shot kill. now a one shot kill isn’t entirely bad, as long as it takes skill to pull off. Doomfist punch isn’t really a high skill ability. and can kill up to a 400 hp target. that meant that there are only 4 characters that can survive his punch. D.va, Rein, Winston, and hog. and the most health they will have after this punch is 200 hp, excep d.va (100+150 mini d.va).
Secondly are “no-fun” heroes. Now im sure you have heard this term before. no-fun heroes refer to characters that force you not to play the game properly. this includes silences, slows, and prolonged stuns and roots. now these CC’s are perfectly fine in a MOBA, and can be considered a “soft” CC. for Smite a knock up is considered the hardest CC in the game, while in overwatch knock up isn’t very detrimental to the playing experience. In a FPS slows are incredibly unfun. as it makes your character feel like you are moving through tar, let alone not being able to escape from a slow as the slow persists. this make mei really un-fun to play against. her whole kit revolves around slows and stuns. (a stun is when a hero cannot move, shoot or use abilities for a period of time.) Mei first can slow a hero, stun them for 1.5 seconds, pop ult, and stun everyone for another 6 seconds. being unable to move, shoot, or use abilities for 7.5 seconds feels like an eternity in a fast paced game like overwatch. Strong CC is also part of sombras kit. her hack disables abilities, passive or not, for 6 seconds, not including her ult. having some many strong CCs that force people to not play the game is incredibly poor character design, and this is reflected in the vast amount of players hating these characters.
Another aspect that players hate in a character is the lack of skill to use.now don’t confuse this with a low skill floor, this refers to the design of the character that promotes poor game mechanics. where rein teaches about positioning and awareness. symmetra promotes w+m1-ing. For those who don’t know wm1ing refers to holding mouse 1 (left click) and walking forward. In TF2, players hate wm1 pyros as they show no skill or comprehension about the game. symmetras design benefits you walking and holding down m1. her primary is a lock-on (a rather generous lock on that has no LOS rules and shows a lack of skill) that ramps up in damage the longer you hold m1 on a person. this makes playing symmetra very boring, and incredibly annoying to play against.
Now the final section of this novel of a post is rather short and are questions the player needs to think about as well as the designer. 1, does the role this character benefit the team? and 2.does the hero thrive on this map?
Does the role of this character benefits the team? this question is more for the player to ask when picking a character, but the designer should ask a similar question, does this character benefit from playing with other characters? for example, Zenyatta, does the design of zenyatta, benefit from playing with a rein? well it can but has a lower impact to playing in that comp. does the design of zenyatta benefit playing with winston or d.va? definitely. he can put a discord orb on an enemy, and the team can dive that character and kill them. his healing isn’t high but his utility meshes well with how d.va and winston are designed.
Does this hero thrive on this map? A hero like widow thrives on maps with long sight line where she can pick off characters without putting herself at risk, while she struggles in maps that are close, and tight. when designing a character the designer should think on how this character can be played on the maps currently in the game.
Tank you so much for taking the time to read this novel of a post. i do apologize as i was running out of steam at the end of typing this. it took me hours to right this which shows how passionate i am about the game and how much i want this game to succeed. i hope i could enlighten you on good and poor character design. as a reward for reading this whole thing here is nyancat.
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Your friendly Canadian Support/tank main.