I came up with this idea when I was watching the ov2 presentation. Specifically the part about ‘‘role-passives.’’
Imagine that Overwatch implements a ‘‘perk-system.’’ It works like this:
You load into a game and you pick your role based hero, Now I get to pick a perk for my role, the same goes for my other dps player. I pick the perk ‘‘endurance’’ - After using an ultimate ability, you get a 10 second window of 30% damage reduction.
And my teamate picks the perk '‘Hit ‘N run’’ - When you are below 20% health, gain a 40% speedboost.
These 2 perks will only be active on the dps role. Now 2 healers pick their perks. And the tank picks his perk.
I feel like that would create an interesting game dynamic.
It’s sounds cool, but stuff like this makes the game even more difficult to balance than it already is.
2 Likes
I think this would have to be relegated to an Arcade mode that is knowingly unbalanced… because it would be very hard to balance this on top of a new game
Yeah this would only really work out in arcade, imo it would add in too many variables in normal gameplay.
Lots of nay sayers in here already, I like the uniqueness and the choose your passive idea.
Concerns: in competitive games there usually becomes a default choice, flash in LoL as an example or ghost in some CoD games. Also it would require some UI changes so you could quickly see what passives the other team picked.
Cool idea though!
I like this a lot, it would be hard to balance, but since they’re already going for the “Call of Duty” gameplay style, it might work
The entire game of overwatch is built around the concept of “when I see a tracer, I know exactly what that hero is/does, and your tracer is the same as my tracer”. As soon as you add something like perks, items, skill trees, etc. that whole idea is inherently changed.
Now you see a Tracer and have to think “am I looking at a Tracer with ‘stopping power’ or ‘juggernaut’?” and you don’t know. It makes the learning curve of the game even more difficult for beginners, to a point where the game might be even more frustrating and intimidating to pick up (especially multiple years in). The game should be “easy to pick up, difficult (or impossible) to master”; that’s the ideal. This goes against that core design philosophy.
Additionally, this would be an absolute nightmare to balance. Imagine not only having to deal with individual hero balance, but also perk balance, and how each perk effects each individual hero. For example, maybe Tracer is in a spot where she is balanced, but with ‘juggernaut’ she is extremely busted. Do you nerf the hero because she is busted with one perk? Do you nerf the perk that is more or less balanced on every other hero?
Ultimately it would just end up in a “perk meta” anyway, where if you don’t pick specific perks on specific heroes you’re “throwing” anyway. It would just end up another point of argument and toxicity. I think this would simply be bad for the game.
There will be skill trees and customization options for the PvE and that will be fun as heck. As for PvP, how it functions now is the way to go in my opinion.
2 Likes
Its sounds cool and would probably be fun but it adds more variables to balance whitch they already struggle with
I absolutely agree with this. It would be an interesting idea though. It will make the game more unexpected and interesting to play. I’d love to see some modifiers like you see in paladins.