hey don’t lock it mods it’s legitimate constructive criticism
I’ve been noticing trends in apex that made me think about overwatch and what the source of some of my frustrations are. There’s a lot of things that apex does right that overwatch also does right, sometimes. Here’s a few examples of things I really like in both games, but I feel Overwatch would benefit more from doubling down on:
The first thing that stands out to me the most is how apex handles ultimates. It’s really well done. They’re fight winning and you can clutch with them, but they’re not like nanoblades, they’re not grav dragons, they’re not even pulsebombs. I would personally say every single ultimate in apex is weaker than pulsebomb is in overwatch in many direct scenarios. In more situations than not, you have to use them pretty strategically. You can’t just yeet out a bombardment and expect it to get a kill in the same way you can a pulsebomb or a nano boost because it rarely works. Support ultimates (and abilities in general) don’t make your team bullet sponges. Tank ultimates don’t make you want to unplug your mouse keyboard when they completely turn off your character or push you across the map. They serve to augment your gameplay, not to directly and almost completely counter some aspect of the enemies gameplay.
All of the ultis in apex have a lot of utility in their design because they often aren’t designed to do one specific thing (except maybe supply drop). They aren’t perfect and some are better than others, but I find them to be vastly less frustrating and often even more rewarding than overwatch’s, simply because you have to work for the value through judgement and strategy in many cases. The only ultimate in overwatch that I would hold to a similar regard is primal rage. Nanoboost can come in as close seconds, but I feel even then the utility it offers is completely lost on how easy it is to secure kills by pairing it with another offensive ult.
The second thing, which I understand is almost necessitated by the BR design, is that the “Legends” in apex have abilities that augment the fundamentals of the game, the game doesn’t exist to augment the abilities of your character. What I mean is, you don’t pick healer in apex because you don’t have a healer (even if she is objectively one of the best characters). You don’t need one because the ingame mechanics are sufficient enough to win without one. You don’t need a tank character because the tanks in apex don’t exist to either immobilize the enemy team or invalidate all of their damage. They aren’t designed to frustrate the enemy players. That’s something I noticed was very obvious.
In OW the lack of these kinds of very flexible heros and options leads to issues including losing at hero select, losing because the enemy is more meta, losing because your skill is devalued when the enemies abilities are designed to counter yours. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying rebuild the game, you’d alienate a lot of the audience by doing so, I’m not that naive. But there are heros in overwatch that you pick because you can fill many niches with that hero, rather than picking them for that niche, and I find heros that give you tons of options the best to play.
One of my most favorite aspects is the communication ping system, but it’s been talked about a million times before I would imagine so I won’t bring it up.
tl;dr:
I think overwatch should double down on having more ults like pulse and primal, more flexible heros that don’t exist solely to fill a role (like “she literally exists just to rez people and heal people”, “she literally exists just to kill tracer”), and better social/team oriented features.