Just as topic says: This thread is not about the usual skill comparison between OW and TF2.
This thread is about the " fun part".
Every single time i’m about to exit Overwatch i have this feeling of frustration, disappointment and anger. There is no feeling of joy and excitement for the next time.
When i’m about to exit Team fortress 2 i always have this feeling of joy and i feel excited for the next time, even though i have 8577 hours played already in TF2.
I REALLY want to feel the same way with Overwatch, but i can’t. There is just no way.
There is something about Team Fortress 2 that is simply more enjoyable (in my opinion).
Does anyone else feel the same way? And what could be the reason why Team Fortress 2 feels funnier and less frustrating to play in your opinion?
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I have a extreme no life amount of hours in TF2 so I got a lot of play time in that game
To this day, I still feel Valve has a very underappreciated design philosophy that many other games scrap or don’t appreciate:
Their focus is largely fun. If you read into their patch notes and design commentary they make it abundantly clear multiple times that a class has to be fun to play as, and fun to play against.
Even dying has to feel good in their opinion.
They design their game around that philosophy. When a weapon feels really unfun to play against, they rework it (see: Sandman. They said being stunned was not fun, losing control of your character is not a enjoyable mechanic so they got rid of it)
What we’re left with is a game that is not only balanced, but FUN
In Overwatch you can’t go a single round without being stunned, rooted, or losing some form of control of your movement or character. In TF2 you’ll get stunned, what, once every 30 hours of game play? If at that, even?
And the 24 players too is very nice. In current Overwatch if so much as 1 teammate is dead weight you’re done for. In TF2 you can have multiple awful players on your team but you’re not held back immensely by them since there’s 12 people per team.
Thanks to the 12 people per team, utter steamrolls where they do happen can still be fun. In Overwatch its just depressing.
14 Likes
It’s because the expressed goal of the tf2 developers was to make the game as fun as possible. They realised that meant things like
- Making everything as fun to fight as they are to play
- Rectangular hitboxes, high impact single shot guns
- Including diminishing returns on all aspects of the game that slowed things down (meaning playing a healer in tf2 feels more impactful and you need less people playing team per team)
- Avoiding CC whenever possible, power is VERY rarely taken away from players
- Being more discriminant with their content and putting themselves in a situation where they only have to balance what is good. Literally nobody cares that natascha is a bit on the weak side as there’s no such thing as a natascha main. You make Mei a lil underpowered and people are going to get upset. Having core, viable classes with fun sidegrades is a lot easier to handle than 26 heroes, some terribly designed, some awfully designed, all with a large following of passionate people.
5 Likes
I remember having too many snipers and no heavies on my team all the time. At least in Overwatch, you can only have two people trying to be dps snipers.
I find in TF2 when there’s too many snipers or a bad ‘team comp’ its fine since there’s 12 people per team. You’re still fully capable of winning and having fun more importantly
In Overwatch if you had a bad team comp you’re screwed, or at a MASSIVE disadvantage.
Also TF2 is so much more chill. People go there for fun, not just to solely win and nothing else. If you go into TF2 expecting people to tryhard their brains out you should find a new game to play
3 Likes
It was a fun game, but it was too casual for me to put too much time in to. I only played it with friends and everybody just kind of plays whatever they want. It never felt like a real competition because of how chill it was. Sometimes I want to really coordinate and test myself.
Bless tf2
I really love both games: the competitive, serious environment of overwatch, and the fun environment of tf2
I would find overwatch even better if they focused more on fun.
I find TF2 just boring. Idk what it is but OW just does it better.
However, I can say that OW is way more frustrating and exhausting than any other game that I have ever played. It can be a fun game but losing just feels so damn bad while in other games I don’t even care that much. In OW you just don’t have that much control over what is happening.
1 Like
What a great post. I agree completely.
I think Blizzard’s biggest mistakes with Overwatch are:
Abilities and ultimates instead of different weapons. By adding abilities they removed much of the classic fps concept.
It’s also 10 times harder to balance. Valve was a lot smarter by following the classic fps concept. It’s fun and it’s more importantly a lot easier to balance.
Blizzard also added too many characters to the game, which is not exactly making it any easier to balance because more characters in this case means more abilities.
Since Blizzard and Valve came to an agreement about Dota 2, i think Valve wouldn’t have cared if Blizzard hardcore copied TF2 instead of just soft-copying it.
With maps, weapons, characters, gameplay etc.
Instead we got a frustrating, unbalanced mess.
3 Likes
Omfg This.
The only heroes i feel satisfaction from hitting them are Soldier 76, Mcree and Zen.
These are the only heroes with somewhat square-sh, rectuangular shapes.
Also, i will add :
Most of the abilities there are miss or hit and makes dodging (not this laughbale “dodging” of A-D spam in OW) satisfying and hitting satisfying aswell.
Edit: ups missread. Miss-or hit or high impact single shots guns…we reffer to the same thing. There was this video on yt that listed or these things.
I used to have over 1,700 hours on tf2. I wadnt even going to switch to overwatch but they added the awful meet your match update. I decided to try it again after not playing for about a year and then I remembered why I stopped playing.
TF2 matches are so chaotic. And alot of maps have choke points.
I even hate to say it but my favorite class engineer is a huge killjoy with a level 3 sentry.
h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuqImZKygvw
This video.
TF2 is not as good as it used to be, no. But i still think it’s more enjoyable than Overwatch simply because it’s ALOT less frustrating to play, and that’s because it’s much closer to a classic fps than Overwatch.
It feels like Overwatch is a mix between many different things and that’s probably the reason why it’s such a frustrating, unbalanced mess. It tries to be so many things.
Something I’ve been wondering is why l4d2 is so fun.
One team is getting constantly instakilled. The other team is getting CCed non-stop.
Yet it’s absolutely barrels of fun. Very little salt, no balance concerns, the maps are all master pieces, the sound design and such is amazing.
One big difference in TF2 vs Overwatch is that TF2 had 9 fully functional classes that all did different things with lots of different loadouts for each to perform different tasks. Overwatch has many more characters that all do the same job thus only the “best” version of that job is allowed, combined with bullsh*t moba and rpg mechanics like shields, stuns, and ultimates that act like get out of jail free cards and turn the game into a slug-fest of who can rotate through their abilities the best and who can layer the most shields and healing. The offensive power and survivability of light vs. heavy characters is also reversed in Overwatch, with light, fast characters offering far better applied damage and escape mechanics, while big characters are stuck with engorged hitboxes and have to fight on a 2-dimensional plane while light classes teleport or go zipping up walls.
It feels very unfulfilling. The meta-game in TF2 was so much more fast-paced and rewarding. It’s a shame the players themselves are what killed competitive.
For me, it’s easy to favorite Overwatch: it has girls, TF2…NOT. 
Hey, we still don’t know what Pyro is!
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Only tho i have only 30 hours in TF2, i can consider it way more fun than Overwatch , i just like hammering the spies with my hammer , but sometimes it gets frustrating
when there are exploits…
It’s because Valve focuses more on weapons and classes being fun to use and play against above all else. Not to mention CC is a rarity in TF2, and when there is, they usually still let the opponent react. Because with stuff like The Sandman or The Degreaser/Axtinguisher combo back then, it’s never fun when an opponent can just stun you from nowhere and then burst you down with little chance to retaliate. Especially when it’s a fast paced fps.
Valve has a bigger focus on fun and general player enjoyment than Overwatch does, and that’s generally the big difference. If players aren’t having fun with something the TF Team is not afraid to completely scrap it or majorly re-work it. As opposed to Blizzard who would let the ego of their design team get in the way and merely tweak something countless times before they give up and re-work.
Looking at the patchnotes for a lot of the recent updates for TF2 really give some insight on how much fun and player feedback are taken into account for the game balance:
Sandman
The feedback on this weapon has been fairly consistent for a while: Players really hate losing the ability to fight back. Compounding this, the ball has to travel really far in order to disarm players. Being hit by a long-range ball (more often than not) ends up feeling random, rather than skilled.
Changes:
Long-range ball impacts no longer remove the victim’s ability to fire their weapon (but the victim is still slowed)
We’ve updated achievements that were looking for disarmed players
Max range balls now do 50% increased damage (from a base of 15)
The flight time required to trigger the “max” effect has been reduced by 20%
Ball regeneration time reduced to 10 seconds (from 15)
1 Like