I see a lot of people online making the argument that one of the reasons that OWL isnt as big as other esports is due to the fact that Overwatch is a hard esport to watch. I dont really get this. Dota 2 and League are just as hard to watch in my opinion. I had no idea what I was seeing the first time I watched a pro League game. But I took the time to play and understand the game, and after a few weeks I can watch and understand League games pretty well.
I dont think Overwatch is a hard esport to watch, just hard for those who never play the game and dont understand it
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I think OWL is much simpler than some esports. For example, MOBAs. Team fights in Overwatch are much easier to read than team fights in League of Legends, I can’t even tell what’s happening sometimes.
If Overwatch is confusing then LoL must be the equivalent of Astrophysics.
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It’s more the families or groups around it, I think.
Like how Soccer Moms can get. (And how some Teammate’s Dad is also a ref.)
It’s only for a certain group of people and South Korea.
“Hard to follow” doesn’t mean the gameplay, it refers to just motion sickness.
The issue isn’t that it’s hard to watch in terms of seeing the action, the issue is that there’s a flurry of visuals that don’t need to be there, mostly from the viewpoint of a player who is waving their camera around wildly.
Most teamfights in Overwatch are exceptionally easy to follow when they use the overhead or “security” free camera views.
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Using the viewer in Battle net makes it ok to watch, since you can follow who you want instead of them snapping all over the place.
I can’t follow a broadcast at all, except in the most vague of senses, because they jump around constantly.
The 3rd person views are also often horrible, because there are so many obstructions.
I would say it’s notably worse to watch than any physical sport I can think of.
It is hard to watch due to the speed and chaos of a lot of the fights. The different heroes puts a large burden of knowledge on the viewer. The casters do a good job of explaining what is going on, but anyone not familiar with the game struggles to keep up and make sense of what is happening.
LoL and DotA have the same issue and is one of the reasons they don’t have many viewers that don’t play the game. They just make up for that by having such massive playerbases to pull viewers from.
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This. LOL does well because LOL fans watch it, not because soccer moms sit down to watch it. Any esport with the longevity and playerbase that LOL has would do well just due to having so many people.
Hmm…
Not exactly
Sure the abilities would make for some interesting visual clutter.
I mean, Trading Card Games are probably the harder one to watch, because you legit need to know what the cards do and then the RNG in the game in order to not questioning yourself “Why the hell is the 10 damage spell card damages his own unit that makes no sense?”
Totally not salty because I lost a 10/10 card to my own 10 spell damage card in Hearthstone
At least in OW, even with all the abilities being thrown around, the objective is still the same: “Shoot/Kill the bad guy” and that makes a bit easier to view.
Ironically the thing people always want to see in OW is hard to watch/follow…dive
A lot going on in the fights, that’s why.
OWL balances the budget around indoctrinating hordes of normies into dumping tons of money because city colors.
Unsurprisingly, they do reach such people but can’t actually make them care, so the game is “hard to watch”.
Just one of many fatal flaws.
Its really hard to watch for me, first of all the colors.
They should apply the red and blue corners in the stage, so OWL looks exactly same as the game.
Their camera work is pretty bad. You spend most of the match glued to a DPS or occasionally tank. It’s difficult to get an appreciation for the movement of the whole team.
Also, I think a big part of the reason OWL isn’t doing as well as it could is just because Blizzard has successfully ticked off and alienated a sizable chunk of its potential consumers with the changes and such they’ve made to the game to try to force OWL into popularity. Instead of letting it organically grow like many of the other super popular eSport titles did, Blizzard, to my understanding, pretty much made the game with the eventual intent to squeeze an eSport out of it to monetize. That’s just bad business and is inevitably going to make people unhappy, so they disengage and OWL suffers for it.
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The streams average 20k maybe ,
but the vids have lots of views
It isn’t just the visual clutter, but also the rapid movement. A first person view of Tracer can be incredibly disorienting as she blinks around for someone that doesn’t know the maps particularly well. Compare it to a game like CS:GO which is much slower paced and overall simpler in how things will play out. OW also doesn’t get as much down time for the casters to explain what happened in a fight or what a team is about to try to do, priming the viewer for what is about to happen.
I’ve never watched hearthstone or any other card game so I can’t comment, but I have tried watching DotA even though I have never played it. Even with the casters I struggled tremendously to even keep track of where the characters were. How I felt watching DotA is probably how non players feel watching OWL.
Heh, I was just trying to watch the Shock game and stopped because of this. Honestly, I can’t believe OWL has been around for this long and the “camera” guys are still this horrendous. You absolutely have to know basically every map and every hero to have any clue what is going on. Even with that knowledge it’s hard. I tried introducing my gf to it who doesn’t play and it was impossible. How something can be this bad for this long is mind boggling.
They need to stop using first person camera for 99% of the match, the only time I should see first person is highlights. Keep the camera as an over head view watching all the action. Switching between 30 different perspectives every 3 seconds really really doesn’t make for a good viewing experience.
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Dota is one of those games that you legit have to play the game to even know what is going on cause the game is stupidly complicated. The casters themselves are mostly very well done, as when a teamfight happen, they just choose the biggest one and talks about it (with additional hype casting as well). That’s what I often see with many well known Dota 2 casters.
Heartstone is a lot of fun to play ngl, but the competitive scene of Hearthstone is more soul crushing than the other esports. It is because of the the game RNG. Like for my example, a 10 damage spell. However, the card description just said “Deal 10 damage”, but not “Deal 10 damage to the enemy unit”. So RNG kicks in and kills my strongest card on the field.
Yeah, that might be really fun to look at from a spectator but extremely soul crushing as the player themselves. Another card is Yogg-Saron, which has the effects on play of “Cast a random spell you’ve cast this game (target chosen randomly)” . So depending on your RNG, you are either decimating the other guys or Yogg-Saron just gives you the blue ****.
I think part of my problem with DotA was that I couldn’t quickly scan the UI and rapidly identify the heroes on the screen, which I think is going to be just as much of a problem for non-player Overwatch viewers. I just couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing fast enough to understand what was going on. I think Overwatch gets a lot of sensory overload into non-players.
Another interesting thing is that I do watch LoL even though I do not play it and am able to follow along fairly easily. I’m not sure what makes LoL so much easier for me to follow along with but the art style of the games probably plays a big role in that.
LoL is a lot easier to grasp than Dota, even though the combat is more fast paced.
It may also have to do with the more cartoonish hero designs with vibrant colors as well.
Cause you know, nothing screams an ultimate than a giant freaking polarbear come crashing down onto your face or a Jojo character slamming someone to ground.
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