A bloated skill Kit is not the same as a mechanically demanding skill Kit.
I think Doom would be a great example of this.
Anyway, I understand your position but I don’t share it.
The real solution is to introduce tutorials that help players understand the game. Slowing down the gameplay, shutting down the content pipeline aren’t real solutions for a Free-to-play game.
When everyone’s a beginner, learning is much easier and less polarizing. It’s why Academia is structured the way it is, and why Overwatch’s MMR is crap. It needs to filter new players with fewer hours away from those with hundreds.
New modes isn’t really an issue, so long as they’re properly introduced with proper learning and understanding. The game does a passable job of this with road or lane markers directing you to the objectives; but it is still easy enough to get lost.
All of the above abilities were in the game BEFORE Ana was released in OW1.
Again, this is wrong. Winston, Reinhardt, Symmetra’s first iteration, Mei, Mercy, have little-to-no aiming demands or requirements. That’s five heroes from the launch. Additional heroes added include Moira, and Brigitte.
To say nothing of heroes like Torbjorn, D.va, Reaper and Zarya who light on mechanical aiming demands.
It would have been good to have more Damage-role heroes that were more forgiving on mechanical aim, though.
Kiriko’s primary healing is actually quite light on aiming demands. Her kunai, are also fairly wide comparatively, and some of the fastest projectiles in the game. That said, the original design for her did call for a heavy emphasis on critical headshots, which widens the skill-gap.
They’re bad at healing either way.
I can have an 8% hit rate on Juno’s primary fire and still be out-healing Mercy by 4k. They’re just constantly unclear on what to do.
In particular, on this forum, we have players constantly spouting off that Mercy should only stick to pocketing a single target; when that’s never been a valid or good strategy, and directly counters why Mercy should really be doing; active triage.
Reinhardt and…
Ramattra have the same number of abilities.
Maybe you’re talking about Lucio, a launch hero
being more bloated than Illari?
Newer heroes aren’t more bloated than older ones. It varies, but very few heroes ever reach the amount of “bloat” than Mercy or any launch hero ever had. Especially in the Support-role.
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The increase or decrease in individual hero complexity is mathematically negligible. The overall complexity of the game increases exponentially based on a simplified formula:
C = H * (H - 1) * F
where:
• C represents the complexity,
• H is the number of heroes,
• F is the average number of abilities per hero (assumed to be 5 in this case).
As shown in the table above, the complexity grows rapidly as more heroes are added, reflecting the increasing number of possible interactions and scenarios that players need to understand and manage. This exponential growth highlights why managing complexity is crucial for game design and player experience.
| Number of Heroes (H) | Complexity (C) |
|---|---|
| 10 | 450 |
| 11 | 550 |
| 12 | 660 |
| 13 | 780 |
| 14 | 910 |
| 15 | 1050 |
| 16 | 1200 |
| 17 | 1360 |
| 18 | 1530 |
| 19 | 1710 |
| 20 | 1900 |
| 21 | 2100 |
| 22 | 2310 |
| 23 | 2530 |
| 24 | 2760 |
| 25 | 3000 |
| 26 | 3250 |
| 27 | 3510 |
| 28 | 3780 |
| 29 | 4060 |
| 30 | 4350 |
| 31 | 4650 |
| 32 | 4960 |
| 33 | 5280 |
| 34 | 5610 |
| 35 | 5950 |
| 36 | 6300 |
| 37 | 6660 |
| 38 | 7030 |
| 39 | 7410 |
| 40 | 7800 |
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When I trained how to fly paraglide my teacher gave to me old , in very bad shape wing . First stage of the training is alway on a ground and I spent whole day fighting with that awful piece of …fabric. so afyer 6 hours he gave to me a new wing and I did my first flight like a pro. Usually that happens on a second day of training.
So the point is if you motivated enough initial obstacles just make you stronger
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ok now can you make that table for paladins but account for every single card deck loadout, talent, and champion?
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I think this student would have a brain aneurysm playing League of Legends
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honestly theyre probably playing fortnite, and building a 5-star hotel in 2 seconds so i wouldnt trust that opinion anyway
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Well, that sounds like a great homework assignment for you! Indeed, the complexity also increases with the number of possible team combinations, as different champions (heroes) can be played in various setups.
Are you up for the challenge to expand the formula accordingly?
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uhhhhhhhhhh no i think that will fry my smol hampter brain
teacher dude you should 100% assign it to your students as extra credit
I do think the overall core game would improve if they did this. We saw in the few years after echo came out when they stopped adding heroes that the balance of the game reached the best state it was ever in pretty quickly and more heroes were viable than ever.
But from a perspective of keeping the game interesting for the people already playing it as well as having stuff to market to prospective new players, new heroes are the most essential thing.
The game already guides new players towards easy to learn heroes, but as you said counterplay is still an issue. The thing is I think that kind of steep learning curve will always be a thing for games like Overwatch regardless of the hero count, but once you learn the game a little bit it’s very easy to adapt to new heroes. Even a game like Marvel Rivals which has like 20 heroes in it so far and who are generally more complex than OW I was able to understand to adapt to the basics of all of them within a few hours of playing just because I’m used to this type of game now.
I do wonder whether matchmaking plays a role though. With how many people smurf in this game I wouldn’t be surprised if brand new accounts are getting matched with high ranked players.
This one I somewhat agree with, I think 6v6 generally had better pacing to it even if there was some more downtime
Like heroes, I think once you learn how Overwatch maps work it’s very easy to pickup and adapt to a new map on the fly, but I still somewhat agree. I just don’t think new maps even add much value to this game at this point. Like they’re nice, but if they stopped making maps I’d barely care.
I also think what would help more is letting people choose what gamemodes they play for. It is really annoying for veteran players and I assume really overwhelming for new players how it’s just pure roulette which of the 6 gamemodes you get
I remember they did have a better version of the hero AI for doomfist that they tested out during Starwatch (one of the event modes) and it still wasn’t very great. In fairness, I assume it would be quite difficult to program an AI to be good at (other than by giving it superhuman accuracy) a game as complex as Overwatch
Also out of curiosity, what do you teach?
I disagree that the learning curve is a problem. If what they were saying is true, games like LoL and DotA would be completely dead, and yet they are thriving and popular games, even for beginners. And theyre way more complex too - not only do you have 100+ heroes, but they essentially have talent trees, shop items/mechanics, map mechanics, and fully invisible heroes too.
That’s not to say the game doesnt have its share of complexities, but “high learning curve” has been proven to not be that big of a barrier to entry for games. If it’s fun, people will learn it and play it.
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Believe me, the learning curve is always a challenge because it often dampens the primary purpose of any game: to have fun—ideally with friends.
We also shouldn’t be too impressed by big names like Marvel, etc. Complexity is a global issue across many games. What’s more interesting is to see how different publishers handle it. Fortnite, for instance, has found a good approach by tying new abilities not to heroes but to assets like weapons.
Another point to consider is the definition of “popular” and “player base.” There are various statistics available online for different games (like the number of accounts, active players per year or month, etc.). However, these are more technical parameters, and it’s easy to be misled by them.
I come from an economics background, where we have a much stricter definition of a player base. I’d be happy to share it here:
it’s about how many players are so satisfied with the game that they actually show their appreciation by spending at least $30 per year. This amount is crucial to cover the costs for developers, infrastructure, and to generate a small return for investors. (These numbers are just examples.)
I don’t know the exact figures for OW2, but I would argue they are strongly correlated with the fun factor of the game.
Back to the learning curve. Aside from the graphics and the look & feel of the game, the shape of the learning curve is important. This is true for new players but also increasingly important for existing players, especially when the curve starts to grow exponentially.
I’ll post some constructive suggestions in due course. For now, have a great weekend, everyone!
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literally jus typed this on another thread
Despite how “complicated” people think the “Overwatch gameplay” is, the “core gameplay” of Overwatch is extremely barebone and flawed.
We dont exactly have a “Overwatch core gameplay”, we have 40 different minigames haphazardly glued together through the basic FPS gameplay.
And Ive been saying this since 2017, Overwatch core gameplay need side objectives, it need map control mechanics, it need scaling and snowballing mechanics, it need comeback mechanics.
It need a set of gameplay and mechanics to be the centerpoint between and across all characters and all maps. Some thing that you will learn when you play ANY character, and as you get better at these “core mechanics” you get better at “Overwatch the game” overall.
Overwatch need an actual “core gameplay”
Otherwise there are absolutely ZERO overlap between, for example, a Genji’s gameplay and a Mercy’s gameplay. And if there is 0 overlap between their gameplay then how can we even say that they are playing the same game ? Picking up a new character in Overwatch right now is basically learning a whole new game.
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This is also why League of Legends is still going good and getting new players despite having 167 different champions. Because all champions have to abide to the same set of core mechanics. Laning, Farming, Itemizations, Wave management, Vision control, side objectives, gold management…
Sound complicated, but learning a handful set of core mechanics and then apply it to 167 champions is infinitely easier and more enjoyable than learning how to play 40 different heroes with barely any skills can be easily transferable between heroes.
That’s a great analogy that captures the basis of the complexity problem. On top of that, you also need to learn about every other hero to understand what’s happening around you, even if you specialize in just a handful of heroes.
Horrible 0/5 take from hypocrites saying they want to play the game casually, but in actuality care dearly about competitive aspects and playing the game competitively. Not only that, but all those suggestions are pure L takes and would detract from everyone or would be completely irrelevant. Especially expanding Practice vs. AI things that are completely unrealistic, take away massive amounts of limited resources from other things or have already been trialed only to fail, because players at large don’t care about some AI shenanigans in a PvP game
Overall I’d read and write an essay on how to stop being a delusional “casual-hardcore” andy since that whole category is fantasy on a purely individual level. Hypocrisy is a mindset problem that can’t be fixed by others.
The game should advertise the hero mastery mode as a tutorial, and add tutorial text into the easiest difficulty version on each hero.
Also giving all heroes their hero mastery courses should be prioritised with this in mind. (At least the easiest difficulty)
That way everyone could spend 2 minutes on a hero and get the basics of their abilities.
And as you mentioned, some improvement on the vs ai. I played a lot of vs ai when i started. It was a good way to learn the maps and basics of all heroes.
Not sure how they could give a “choose your map” option without breaking queue times.
I tend to create a private custom game with the skirmish setting when new maps come out, and just spend some time walking around and learning a few healthpack locations.
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No. The game is already slowed down to a crawl with the amount of pure sustain from supports into tanks with 800+ HP and damage-negating armor.
Maybe a select few heroes need damage nerfs (mainly Tanks, Supports, and a select few DPS), but alongside that, Supports also need their healing output nerfed equally so. Basically a revert of the Season 9 changes (all of them) with an additional reduction to the previously mentioned stats.
Strategy was robbed from the game by uber-heroes who were excellent at everything. Nerfs to them were usually spread out amongst every character with similar traits to those that were being nerfed. This never fixed the problem, it just ruined Niche heroes and forced an imbalance in the, …well, balance of the game.
This would be a waste of time and resources. I’ve never once thought about using Practice vs. AI to learn the game, since playing against actual players is far more efficient while learning.
They should instead remove the penalties from Quick Play, provide incentives to stay in those matches instead of punishing players who leave, and remove the social dampening shackles of the “Abusive speech” report system, so that people can actually socialize again without fear of some sore loser falsely flagging their account because they can’t handle being beaten in a casual game.
Quick play was meant for learning and having fun. A combination of oppressive ban systems and the format change has completely gutted that experience into essentially what is quaintly nicknamed “Competitive lite.”
Agreed. Also hire a good narrative team to push out actual cinematics and Hero Origin stories. Whoever they decided to replace the old narrative team with clearly doesn’t understand the story and is pushing out whatever little nuggets they can with the least amount of genuine interest possible to sate the community.
There are so many original cast members who still don’t have Origin Stories. It would do wonders for community satisfaction while being extraordinarily easy to push out.
The complexity is inherent to a team based game that is a hero shooter.
It would be easier to learn with less heroes and having less heroes released per year, but then again, you would sacrifice your “expert” players for the sake of new ones.
Since this is an FPS, slowing down the game play will cause less impact per player and more frustration,t hats a no no.
Reworking maps like Apex does can work, but even so, once in a while you still have to release new ones, otherwise it gets old , FAST.
Yes the tutorials are really bad. Hero mastery is a great addition but its definitely dull and many players will do the classic “skip tutorial” in OW2, get frustrated with a very unreadable game, and quit.
www. youtube. com /shorts/ y51absVI9_k
That’s exactly what I mean by “too fast.” This makes the tipping points in a fight come very, very quickly. It can be fun, yes — but I don’t think it will be for long.