This part concerned me about the game changing to much the TTK, which is one of the things that makes Overwatch feel different from other FPS.
I love team fights that get drawn out, where you feel constant pressure.
This as an example, today I had this match which I loved and got a lot of fun from it.
I hope they don’t destroy one of the parts that makes Overwatch fun and different from other FPS like COD or BF.
Even without long-drawn out fights, this game will still be much different than the likes of CoD and Valorant. Two thirds of the heroes in this game aren’t even FPS-styles heroes.
I agree completely, OP, this is why I loved GOATs. Fights didn’t end instantly.
It’s a fine line. If every fight is like this, then not only will the ones that are like this feel less special, but it will likely lead to quicker burn out.
It’s all fun and games until you get several matches with super long overtimes in a row and you start to feel the burnout. OW attracted a large casual audience I think in part because how fast paced fights and matches are. You don’t have to set aside 15-45 minutes just to play one match, you can just hop in and out.
I know Overwatch is different in many ways, but I don’t want the team fight to become too fast, and now with only one tank the team that kills the tank almost automatically wins, what I’m afraid of is the TTK (time to kill).
Interestingly, the community manager mentioned that while yes, losing a tank is bad, that applies to any situation. Losing 1 player will always be bad, such as losing a support means less utility or healing for your tank and DPS to do their jobs, or losing a DPS can mean less pressure which enables the enemy to do more.
And also tanks weren’t always to first to die, because having two healers on one tank is a huge sustain buff versus having two healers try to keep rein and dva healed.
And I think some people forget that in some ways, removing one tank actually lowers damage because for one thing, you have one less tank to do damage. Compare a Reinhardt Zarya comp to just a Reinhardt. No Zarya beam on your frontline, no Zarya on an off-angle trying to pressure out support, so less damage.
Also, one less tank means your team doesn’t get enabled as much to do damage. Back to the rein zarya example, in current 6v6 a reinhardt will get bubbled which enables him to walk in and swing without getting punished. In 5v5, the zarya wont bubble him, causing him to do less. Or similarly, no shield or beefy 500 hp rein with armor causes more focus to go to zarya which forces her to play more slowly and do less damage. It also applies to DPS, such as in a normal dva comp, you wont have the dva to give resources to the DPS like matrix or body blocking to enable more positioning.
At the end of the day tho, it’s all speculation. We have a fraction of an inkling of an idea what it’ll be like until we actually try it. I’m optimistic for 5v5 and the effect it’ll have on the current problems that plague the game
I love the tension of long teamfights, some of my favourite moments on support are just getting sweaty keeping the team up for minutes at a time while dodging Genji blades and Sigma rocks lol. However, these moments are special because they’re the exception, not the rule.
Why do I already feel nostalgic after reading just this line.
Everything they say gives me the impression of a deathmatch. If the tank isn’t dying first, that doesn’t necessarily mean the tanks are good. It could just as well mean the tanks are irrelevant, particularly with all the open map style, flanking routes, and natural cover that’s been mentioned. I feel like ttk is going to go down a lot, but who really knows.
the longer a fight lasts the more skill differentiation is attenuated and padded away.
the longer a fight, the more your own efforts regress to team efforts.
your agency is washed away into an ocean of undecidedness.
You did the right cd sequence, target prioritization, and had good aim checks, but the fight prevails because we expect you to do that over and over again, until finally someone zigs when they should have zagged, or your team has slightly better apm or acc%, that finally forces a slight macro mismatch, allowing you to every so eventually clean up and follow through, hopefully faster than their people respawn and get back to stall and prolong.
I agree! Win or lose, games like that are really fun because they feel even and well-fought from both sides. Especially in Quick Play (the only mode I play these days), most games are a hard stomp from one team or another, so having an actual good game is a pleasant rarity. Sadly it shouldn’t have to be rare.
Probably one of the best games I ever played was actually a loss. It was on Lijiang, and for each round (of which there were 3), both teams got the point to 99%. It was fantastic, and the final overtime was at least 2 minutes long - likely more.
stomps and streaks are part of the competition. the game tried many times to rig for closeness, artificially contriving teams and even hitregs. This might feel good to a casual but is not a competitive experience.
Also, team fight sustain != match timer.
Regardless of ttk and the ‘feel’ of short vs. fast team-fights,
we need to break away from all-in grouped fights (clumped or spread).
Design for teamfights always follows this script: poke, if lucky pick engage, otherwise bait push until ult economy, all-in ults, snowball everyone together, take key part of map and/or point and/or push payload for free while reset/regroup.
it’s a script that, while hard to execute, takes away a lot of solo agency, solo/duo impact/synergy, creativity, and map utilization. the biggest issue being that 90% of these beautiful maps are rarely used, or when used are used in 6v6 (soon, 5v5) type engagements. i think too much teamplay makes laddering for most people repetitive, toxic, and stressful.
I would like to see more simulatenous 3v3+2v2, or say 1v1+2v2+2v2. we sometimes see 1v1 widow or tracer duel with the other 5v5 happening around point. In OW2 it would be nice to see critical flank routes matter, and ur best duelists vying for that map/resource control (whether fast or slow ttk interactions).
I see longer fights as actually the opposite. If people are not dying usually it means there are a huge number of flaws from both teams and everyone screwing up very badly.
It can be people are not choosing their optimal engagements. Rather than Winston targetting 200hp heroes, he’s targetting Sigma.
Doomfist is going in and not dying and getting out, but sucks too much to secure a kill. The enemy team is not coordinated enough to stop his solo push from getting out, but no one on doomfists team is helping secure a kill.
A super long fight especially at this point in Overwatch’s history is actually a complete set of blunder after blunder after blunder after blunder from both teams. One could go and say its an issue with teams doubling up on Orisa/Sigma/Ana/Bap for super high sustain, but it also means that team with all the sustain doesn’t have the coordination to concentrate fire power into the enemy team or the enemy team lacks the raw fire power to break the double shield.
long prolonged fights can be evidence of suboptimal play, that is true.
But I offer that in many games, top ai engines play for weird lategame tie-breaks, in what humans might describe as turtling. bait_depth=12 succeed.true() into force pawnmismatch at depth=64. Which is why engine A tiebreaks engine B after 3000 playouts, gaining +4 elo to hit 3415. Believe me in my years of game complexity and AI i’ve seen it all.
So typically, this top gameplay involves caution and mistake minimization, which also draws out the team fight (because of backwards induction). The equivalent in OW, alpha.watch bots turtling around unable to complete the fight because of risk/regret minmaxing. It’s boredom and uneventful, until a slight economy advantage (literally down to a frame or 1sec diff), compounds itself into a forced line and win.
This happened in WoW, where much of the endgame pvp came down to mana management, and they had to implement “dampening” as a workaround.
The problem is that if you design the game for normies to have long, drawn out fights, through a series of confirm/deny buttons, then the top AI (and players) might find equilibria that are even longer and more sustained.
You might also promote more of these all-in, many-onto-one burst combos, because massive cd stacking the only way to break the deadlock. That ends up with everyone copy/pasting the best-known branch of the game tree, meaning u get 1 viable meta at a time instead of several. And it’s usually a 1shot burst macro that u try and fail and wait to try again until success. You train one thing, swap, train another thing, swap back. Very moba-like, not very shooter like.
For laddering, longer ttk teamfights leads to more impatience, less solo/duo agency, and as mentioned less of the map is ever visited or respected. Too much of this mistake buffering via tanks/heals leads to attenuated expression, less micro impact, and more emphasis on standard macro. It’s also less creative, because you’re never seeing these 3v2+1v1+1v2 breakaway conditions, always a 5v5 or 4v4+that widow duel.
For OW2, they should be looking to curb the value of reset, group up, all-in, moba, sustain, punish, turtle, repeat. They should try and get back to hero-shooter roots, where side-flanks matter, taking duels or holding off areas of the map matters, handling urself in an arena/tdm environment matters, multiple 1shot angles and respecting geometry is a thing, and maintaining high k/d per resource matters.
you right. instead of instantly dying from getting in los of an enemy, it’s the enemy zipping in, instantly killing you without many tools to actually prevent/counter that, and then they zip out. 
It’s also why I liked the valk/res reset thing for mercy. It was ludicrously overpowered and I didn’t (and still don’t) like the way they changed mercy, but I still liked the way battles went on for ages with people constantly coming back.
It can go overboard though, my main example would be 2CP points.
If we’re talking purely TTK though, I also prefer when it’s longer.
You don’t like playing a respawn and walking simulator? 
We’re going to have to get used to it. For some reason, the dev team is bound and determined to turn OW from a fast paced, team based arena shooter to a tactical shooter without buy rounds. Three seconds of action followed by 30 seconds of set up, or in this case respawn and walking. 
There is difference between “drawn out” and simply outhealing all the damage.
I also like longer fights. I am not in favor of other games where its more like a respawn simulator like battlefield where everyone is just running around for a bit then insta killed and respawns 2 seconds later.