First of all, I’m reposting this to General Discussion since it got deleted with no apparent reason from the Beta PVP General Discussion Forums.
The main focus of this post is to discuss the one thing that brought all of the changes in Overwatch 2: 5vs5 and 1 less Tank per every team.
Every issue currently pointed out by the vocal fraction of the community (support experience feeling miserable, queue bottleneck shifted on support, superman tanks, “deathmatchy” feeling, one-directional games, etc.) can be reduced to this single decision.
One thing I’d really like it’s to hear from the developers why the 5vs5 change was philosophically necessary. Why did the team decide to follow that path and to not search for solutions able to mantain Overwatch’s identity intact? Was it solely because of the sake of Esports? Was it to homogenise with most competitive games (MOBA’s, tac-shooters) that use the 5v5 formula? Was it to reduce queue times?
I honestly don’t know, but the consequence of this choice is that the game design pillars have changed, and with Overwatch 2 the development is heading towards a completely different direction.
We’re now in a Beta phase where the userbase will provide their feedback on problems, suggest tweaks and so on. Problem is I’d like to give feedback on single gameplay mechanics, but the more I try to write down my thoughts the more they seem to all be strictly connected to the 5v5 formula and the waterfall of changes it demanded.
- Polarised experience: A lot of players in the forum are reporting about polarising games where you stomp the enemy team or get stomped. This happens mainly because of the single tank which can single-hadedly decide game results. Overwatch has always been a shared responsibility game where one player can shine and repair other errors, where an experienced Tank can counterbalance the inexperience from the other one, and so happened in every role. That is now gone.
- Miserable Support experience: Support players, from now on will have to struggle to have fun. The impact of a single Tank on Support playstyle goes far beyond the protection of the backlines: it affects healing output, it affects healing feeling, it affects their Ultimate impact on the game, it affects the way they are able to roam the maps. Of course, there are limpid problems with their complete inability to deal with dive flankers, but is their whole playstyle formula that shifted from supports to baby-dps with heals.
- “Superman Tanks”: This point is strictly connected to an harsh constatation we have to make: Orisa is the only tank in Overwatch 2. Even if the other Tanks got minor reworks, her complete redesign is a manifesto of what a Tank should be in Overwatch 2, and this is why she is so dominant in the current beta. And this raises the curtain on the concept of superman tanks: in a single Tank enviroment, if a Tank decides that you must die, you are dead, period.
- CC and Backlines: We all know that the reduction of rampart crowd control has been a long time request by the community, but did the developers ask themselves why they were brought to the point of introducing so much CC into the game? With CC almost entirely removed from the game the backlines are constantly exposed to DPS dive flankers like Tracer with no possible counterplay. Some might object that now the counterplay exists and it’s pure aim: yes, you are right, now a Cassidy can’t stun and gun a Tracer down hand has to tap her down. At the same time, with 2 Tanks it was extremely difficult to catch the backlines off guard, while now it’s the normality at lower ceilings of gameplay.
- Secure kill impact: I think this point doesn’t need further elaboration. In a 6v6 comp if you pick a single DPS you have to deal with two tanks, a dps and two supports, and so on for every role. I think this will surge as a problem with time passing by, when heroes with high skill ceiling and the ability to insta-kill (Widow, for example) will prove their ability to single handedly turn the tides of battle before the battle even starts. The win-condition for a team fight have shifted to a more fast paced formula, which IMHO hurts the original game design pillars.
- The game is a deathmatch: While I think this will become the most controversial characteristic in Overwatch 2, I think it should be furtherly discussed by the community. The gameplay formula has completely shifted towards the FPS deathmatch formula. I think we cal all agree this is a fact as far as the current beta. Games are messy, maps are big (partially to accomodate the unneded DPS passive 10% movement speed), teams are smaller but spread, you feel that there’s something wrong map and positioning wise without a second Tank. Kills, ultimates and skills all feel unimpactful as a consequence. This leads to…
- Personal impact: Every single content creator or channel tailored around Overwatch said something in the lines of: “Less team play, more personal impact”. I think this statement is simply not true. Not because there’s no personal impact, but because “personal impact” is the same you can find in a Call of Duty Kill Confirmed match. You kill people, you flank Supports, that’s it. But in the Overwatch ecosystem personal impact used to go far beyond that: a Reinhardt shield could have more impact that any kill, same as a single callout, a focused heal, and so on. So I would say that there’s more personal impact only in the guise of mechanical skill, and everything else got watered down.
The main thing I left out of this write-up is hero balancing, I mentioned it only while speaking about Orisa and how she feels like “the only Overwatch 2 Tank”. I think it’s pretty clear that as of now more than half of the cast is part of the “Overwatch” roster, meanwhile some heroes are clearly born under the flag od “Overwatch 2”. Needless to say I’m worried about this situation because three years have passed and less than one-third of the roster got looked into.
Every feedback we could give as a playerbase is basically castrated by this status-quo: reworked heroes feel better in the current iteration, older ones don’t seem to be able to fit in the new formula. This doesn’t give anyone the opportunity to feel what the “complete” experience could be like, which is a huge problem because if we take the past as an example it will take 6 more years to investigate every single hero.
There are a lot of other things I’d like to discuss (like the terrible sound design for examplce) but I don’t want to go off-topic. I just wanted to point out how Overwatch 2 feels like it’s born from the assumption: “we have to go with one less tank” and then every single change or design decision waterfalled from this one, and wasn’t made to make the game feel better.