Even from that perspective Hammond is an oddball. When metagaming, Hammond is easily the weirdest tank in the game as people do not know whether he should be a main/initiator tank or an off tank, and this makes him difficult to work in comps. He is very powerful when played around properly but he very often feels like the square peg in the team compās round hole. If you run him as a main tank, you have no barrier to play around, and if you run him as an off tank, you donāt have much peel at all as Hammond needs to be played very aggressively.
About that in particular. I feel like nobody had anything about Deadlock written down and tried to tie the loose ends together blindfolded.
No hero this year had extensive lore, and we only got one comic. Whatever vagueness is happening lore-wise is most likely planned because internal changes and preparations. Whatever those changes or preparations are, we donāt know.
Moira was absolutely brilliant. She killed a lot of bad Mercy theories, filled in a LOT of gaps when it comes to Reyes turning into Reaper/his abilities, and she was both interesting in design AND personality - plus her gameplay was some of the most balanced post release. Sheās what we needed when we needed it - another main healer with the ability to take care of herself, and a MASSIVE lore drop in terms of how she fit in the narrative and what her story brought to the OW world as a whole and the connections she had with the other heroes.
Ana was very much the same - visually interesting and important to the narrative, and her gameplay was at once unique and also incredibly fun.
To me, itās just that I can only ever be invested in one thing fully and unconditionally and Overwatch is that thing for me right now. It fits my interests as a fun video game with this specific near future SF-ish genre that allows for a lot of fantasy elements to be explained through science and Iād love if something as popular as OW makes it acceptable to do more representation in the genre without really focusing on making the story specifically about LGBT drama.
Itās the epitome of āHave all of these unique and fun characters from all over the world that are so easy to relate to and get attached to and they all go around doing fun and amazing things and saving the world, oh and also some of them are gay.ā Nothing more than that, they just are who they are because thatās how some people are, now letās focus on the fun part.
Youāre wrong, people were outraged because how terribly āhaha iām gay lets bangā Cortez was shoehorned into the game, right into your face. It was incredibly dumb.
As opposed to how other romances were so shyly implemented?
Theyāre all right into your face. Itās not like you had to go through an ordeal to discover that you can romance available female characters as a male Shepard.
The only thing thatās up for criticism is that Cortez wasnāt given the proper storyline because it was rushed so the mourning of his husband was kinda downplayed. Also dead husband, not the gay story weāve never seen before, couldāve gone without that. Otherwise, I donāt remember any of the romances being exactly hidden from you unless you dig deep.
not deep, but you played atleast half of the game to know your ālove interestā and their background, and you waste your whole ME1 game trying to get Taliās interest but youāre denied in the end. Compare this to ME3 nonsense, yikes.
If my memory serves me right (and I played the trilogy 4 times), Cortez doesnāt initiate his story with āIām gay letās bang.ā He initiates it by telling you about his husband who got killed. You have to go through the whole storyline about him taking time off, hanging around on the Citadel and visiting the memorial before you can do anything.
All together, maybe. But itās spread out through the game with mandatory breaks as you only get new interactions after certain missions have been completed.
Iām not saying the game handled it incredibly well, but the game was packed with a lot of stuff already, Cortez was an entirely new character without any prior connections and the romance had to be resolved before the end of the game. Romances that started in ME1 and 2 had more time to breathe due to sequels. Not saying itās an excuse to rush a romance, but Iāve found the complaints to be a gross oversimplification of what actually happened. Iām not a huge fan of how it was done either, but it didnāt start with āIām gay, letās bang.ā
Also, the outrage I was referring to began before the game even came out. I know people complained after as well, but a large portion of whining happened when gay romances were just announced. Nobody couldāve known how well written they wouldāve been, but the complaining happened. Not over writing, but over their existence.
Cortezā story is pretty bad all in all. But this is all just a symptom of not letting gay characters have a bigger influence in the story than just being gay. They did almost nothing with Cortez other than being the gay love interest.
But of course, I donāt think this person commenting wants bigger, more important, amazing gay characters you canāt skip and shove into the side. I donāt know what they are after, really. āā Gay guy being shoved into your face āā doesnāt really give much credence to much.
Whenever someone says a gay character is āshoved in their faceā the rest of their argument is meaningless because they donāt want to have an intelligent conversation.
Nobody here is asking for terribly written cringy āā forced token characters āā (as if you knew what a forced token character even means). Point to me one comment that implies we want that. Everyone with brains in the head will automatically want any inclusion of minorities to be done well, and for you to assume that we donāt just shows what kind of a person you are.
We have actually stated several times that we do not want tokenism even recently discussing how terribly LGBT characters are written in other games. By your logic of tokenism almost every character has a country of origin thats taken from the real world, is this tokenism too?
We do not just want a box to be ticked. Nobody here does.
We are speculating about characters sexuality (because we have been physically told there is more than Tracer) and wanting them be a good well written representative for the LGBT community. It isnt tokenism. Its a forum to discuss the ways this introduction of a characters sexual/gender identity can be done properly and it is a space away from the people that dont want to hear it and can willfully ignore it.
in this day and age where men are mocked for being emotional, sympathetic, or āunmanlyā, ironically by the people who regularly complain about masculinity, this does need more support.
![:smiley:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")