A partial analysis on why overwatch was always a bad game

General Discussion
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The original Overwatch was already a bad game, and it never was a good game to begin with. The majority of people are just tired of Triple A devs being hacks, and Overwatch at least has style, which is enough for most bored gamers to enjoy.

Unfortunately for Blizzard, a bad game with a good paint job is still a bad game.

Let’s talk core game design.
6v6 games with a roster of 20+ characters to choose from was stupid in MOBA gaming, and it’s stupid here.
Team Size directly correlates to how important each team member is. If 1 player dies in a 2v2, that’s half your team; in a 10v10, that’s only a tenth. This importance puts extra pressure on players to perform optimally, which segways into the next part about team size:
Specialization Vs Generalization.
The ability to excel in many situations will always win out over specializing in a specific role, so long as the team sizes are small. When every player counts, you need to be able to quickly adapt to the situation, which is impossible if you’ve gimped yourself by picking a hyper-specific character.
(That’s why everybody hates Hanzo, btw)
Meanwhile, larger team sizes afford enough of a buffer for players to specialize, which often makes teams even more effective when done properly.

Overwatch… completely and utterly fails to understand these concepts, and that incompetence bleeds into player frustration.
The fact that Overwatch had problems with [The Meta™] even before the reboot should’ve been a red flag. You could not play a casual game without forcing yourself to abide by what is optimal instead of fun, or you would be banned due to excessive reports.

This problem isn’t even exclusive to Overwatch.
6v6 TF2 is straight up an inferior game for the exact same reasons, despite its classes being far more flexible. The only reason it’s even remotely respected is because the base game is 12v12, so only competitive players have to deal with the flaws of 6v6.

One of the only games I’ve seen that get low team sizes right is CS:GO, and that’s solely because nobody is tied to a specific class. Yes, the weapons can influence how you play the game, but you’re not restricted to them in the slightest. It’s just you, your team, and your enemy.
The other game I’ve seen pull this off well was the now defunct Magicka Wizard Wars. Every player had access to eight magical elements they could mix together for various effects and dueling with your magic was purely a test of skill, because you had access to the exact same tools as everyone else.

Everything regarding Blizzard’s inability to “balance” the game, or their lies about PvE… it means nothing.
Overwatch itself was doomed to suck from the moment Blizzard chose 6v6, and they killed any hope for the game when they made it 5v5.
Overwatch SHOULD have been a massive 10v10 brawl at the smallest. It’d be a bit chaotic, but it’d also force the Special Effects department to not just vomit neon colors everywhere and call it a job well done.

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GOTY…

its been a combination of bad decision making and people sucking the fun out of the game ever since though…

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Overwatch didn’t have much competition for GOTY in 2016. Dark Souls 3 (a niche series), Uncharted 4 (a Playstation exclusive), and Doom 2016 (a largely singleplayer boomer shooter) were basically it.

As for Overwatch “always being a bad game”, no. It’s always been a good game, the community just expects too much from what was always a secondary Blizzard dev team. The community wants the game to be what it’s not, to twist it to conform to their desires. They throw a hissy fit when they don’t get their way instead of moving on to another title.

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I can’t in good faith say OW has always been a bad game. Or even is one now. The amount of hours of entertainment both OW1 and OW2 have given me make it pretty difficult for me to argue it’s a bad game.

2 Likes
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My argument is that Overwatch doesn’t understand how to balance Team Size and Specialization.
Players will naturally gravitate towards what is more flexible when they don’t have room to experiment, which makes the majority of the roster useless.
It’s also why MOBA games are honestly pretty garbage, since they have the exact same problem.

TF2 struck gold with 12v12, since that guaranteed that players would have enough freedom to actually experiment and have fun, instead of being berated by their team for not obeying [The Meta™]

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OW was a good game from 2016-2018. After Brig, you can clearly see the incompetence even from people like Jeff. That refusal to accept being in the wrong is why it is bad today. But it wasn’t always bad. If they just ignored people who wanted OW to be an unfun competitive PVP game then it wouldn’t have been turned into the mess it is today.

This game should have been an accessible family friendly fun game before being some esport clown show. But Kotick interfered cause money is apparently more important than being a human being.

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ive called that “my overwatch” in the past…many times :stuck_out_tongue:

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I don’t know if I necessarily agree, but I really really miss the days of large team sizes. My first multiplayer game was Tribes 2 which could have 64v64! Obviously wouldn’t work for OW, but I’m really just sick of 3v3/5 in every single game.

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As for “Bad”, it should be self-explanatory. A bad game is one that fails to have a functional gameplay loop that results in “Fun.”
The objective of playing a game is to have fun.
If players can only have fun when they are winning, then something is wrong with either the player or the game or both.

Overwatch utterly fails to have a functional gameplay loop that consistently results in fun, and I have yet to hear an argument able to convince me that it is functional.
The mere fact that Overwatch has attracted such elo-obsessed goblins is a red flag in and of itself that the game design is broken on a fundamental level.

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That’s, like, your opinion, man.

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For a time I sorta enjoyed Overwatch.
But then the community butted in.

Torbjorn and Symmetra were the only characters that felt fun for me to play, but always felt like they were missing something. I was interested in pushing myself to figure out their full potential to see what that missing something could possibly be, but then tryhards kept reporting me for stuff I didn’t do.

I burned through three accounts back when Overwatch was full-price due to Elo-Goblins reporting me in casual lobbies.

Now that I’ve had time to mull it over, I think that a small team size combined with a massive roster is the breeding ground of Elo-Goblins, since they’re the ones most likely to optimize stuff like that.