overwatch is a first person shooter. Or at least was.
The problem is that the game originally was designed to be AND WAS a first person shooter with some elements of moba mixed into it. Now however, it’s a moba game with some small pieces of fps left.
The only thing moba-like is the role interactions.
And w/o all the other aspect of moba, the role interactions become near impossible to balance.
Which is why we got close-to-balanced tanks and supports but tank/support players crying out. And we got a dps that’s not op but people cry out against it.
People just can’t get over the fact that role inbalance were arbitarily countered by picking more dps before because of other reasons. If everyone disregard their preferences and also is similarly good on most heroes, there was no need to pick dps.
I played more than a couple games, lol, but it would be correct to say I was not a “grinder”—the game I played in that sub-genre regularly was GRAW2 (I tried COD as a "reg’ for awhile, but didn’t really like it—also forgot to mention all my time playing SOCOM (showing my age))
So really, I do know those games
And what I’m saying is that those “military sim” tactics like planting are all secondary to aim and aren’t really needed in a game following TF2’s lead
I played LOTS of TF2—still fire it up occasionally, and I prefer that groove to the military shooters
OW is meant to be more like TF2 than a military shooter, and while TF2 as well as OW has less reliance on aim, they still involve skill—after all, in TF2 you can’t take a pub player and throw them into comp—they’ll get rekkd
Insomuch as those games are different and reward different skillsets, I am fine with it rewarding more of what TF2 rewards than what CS rewards
/I do think it would be interesting if OW had heros that played with information more—right now off the top of my head, only Widow and Hanzo play information, and that is getting more for their team, not denying it to their opponents—Blizz may have opinions about sight-blocking abilities, but I think they should experiment with it
What changed?
Mercy, reinhart, sym, were always apart of the game.
People who mostly/only play dps seem to forget that other portions of OW have existed since day one. The only change was that those portions got fleshed out overtime.
What changed was a lot of things.
Gradual power creep, massive healing output increase, addition of multitudes of CC’s, addition of very low skill ceiling characters that could outperform the higher skill ceiling heroes with ease at any level, and of course, let’s not forget the main one. Game transitioning from aiming and at least some level of fps being a part of it to becoming completely based on who has ult, who has his cooldowns ready, just like a moba.
It’s kind of hard to realize how drastic the changes were, unless you see the overwatch of year 1~2, before the addition of any of the new heroes and then look at the current one.
To give you an example:
Soldier 76 was considered so far ahead of every other dps during season 3 that he had no contender. And that hero is weaker than soldier’s current state. Now is soldier even in top 10 dps choices? Doubt it.
Just because its in first person doesn’t mean it should look and play like valorant. OW succeeds due to the many different gameplay styles offered by all the character variety. If OW ever became a only shoot game, it will have truly killed itself.
As others have already pointed out: a game is an FPS if it’s played in first person and you can shoot in it. That’s it.
Overwatch is an FPS.
The powercreep is in dps. The class is not balanced at all and the devs keep adjusting the tanks/supports to avoid the headache of adjusting the standout dps.
When doomfist and hanzo were hard to use, your next best choice were widowmaker and tracer.
Here’s a question that no one ever answers. If burst is just as easy as sustain, why would you use sustain at all?
Go ahead and nerf all of the healing, erase shields from the game and you still wouldn’t pick sustain over burst. Make burst more difficult to use and sustain would actually have a place in the game.
Problem 2 in OW is that niche characters aren’t niche, they’re just bad. Generalists are almost always better and slightly worse at niche situations than specialist.
Ex: hanzo after rework was slightly worse than junkrat at shield breaks but was way better at everything else.
The biggest problem with dps is that they compete with each other for spots on the team, but are never balanced so that more can be used.
Cool its an fps. Is it still an fps when I’m playing reinhart, mercy, Brigitte? I’m technically not shooting when using those characters. Aslo what does this definition lead to? What type of Fps should overwatch play like? It seems to have always had a focus on abilities over raw aim. In fact the only characters I can think of that focus on raw shooting over abilities are widowmaker,mccree, soldier, hanzo and ashe.
Most characters in this game spend most of their matches spamming abilities left and right.
The correct term is Class Based FPS.
They just call it Hero Shooter to make it sound original, it isn’t.
the fact that you think dps are the problem is funny actually.
the problem isn’t dps power creep. it’s EVERY ROLE. All of them are too powerful. more than what they should be.
Yep pretty much. If you’re looking for an “aim is god” game, then you’ll have a much better time in the competitive fps subgenre
Except tanks/supports have been adjusted. The new ones are either trash compared to there original competition have or have been adjusted to being closer to their completion
Which patch adjusted all dps to being weaker or weaken most of the standout dps. The root problem in dps has never been addressed and that’s why sustain is still weak despite tanks and supports getting either trashed or nerfed in their core mechanics.
A hero shooter doesn’t imply first person moba either.
That was more the marketing/internal-politics point as when Overwatch was being developed MOBAs were “proven” and many people didn’t think a class based shooter (that wasn’t made by Valve) could be successful. Blizzard especially wasn’t known for Multiplayer first-person-shooters, despite many attempts that remained in prototype stage.
I’m glad we’re past that point.
Maybe if Blizzard had shown all their cards at the start “this is a real proper multiplayer shooter” then the suits at Activision would have done more to stop Overwatch seeing it as competing too much with Call of Duty. Then Overwatch may never have happened.
Were they even merged at that point in time? I thought the Activision acquisition of Blizzard was post OW release, I could be wrong.
It’s confusing because there are 3 entities:
(1) Activision (who make CoD)
(2) Blizzard (who make Overwatch)
and
(3) “Activision-Blizzard”
“Activision-Blizzard” =/= Activision.
“Activision-Blizzard” =/= Blizzard.
“Activision-Blizzard” =/= Activision + Blizzard.
Clear as mud, huh?
The company called “Activision-Blizzard” is the name of a holding company that owns both Activision and Blizzard. That’s the sort of “merger” that happened. So it’s pretty complicated who acquired who but this all happened long before Overwatch.
Exactly what this merger is depends on the office politics as people are moved around but Blizzard and Activision are nominally separate, it’s like two kids adopted by a common parent and they’re told to share their toys. Except the parent is a robot that both kids built and both kids can theoretically change the programming of this robo-daddy.
I’m terrible at analogies.
I get what you are saying 
Basically shady Corp sh!t designed to dodge taxes ect. Gotcha
Shooter implies shooting
Shooting implies aim
Your post says Shooting doesn’t imply aim.
Wtfbro
That’s why they reworked mercy and released brig tho 