You ever play a sport, get knocked out for a split second, and try to regain your bearings? You have that dizziness, where you know generally what you’re supposed to do, but you can’t remember which direction you’re going, what team you play for, and what you should be focusing on? That’s what Overwatch is starting to feel like, except all the time.
Between the constant CC, which is allowed to stack infinitely on one person for some reason, the outrageous amount of shields, an insane amount of one-shot abilities, the bugs that never get fixed, the flankers, flyers, and flyers that can flank, even in the best games I’m left feeling like I just got knocked out in the middle of a soccer field and am forced to come to and figure out what’s going on.
Since launch, Blizzard hasn’t done anything substantial to help with the chaos; the game just gets more chaotic as the years go by. And chaos can be fun, but not when you’re trying to focus and climb the ladder in Competitive.
It’s a delicate balance, to have fun, chaotic elements in a game but still make the product as a whole feel polished and under control. With a game as varied as Overwatch, it’ll never be perfect, but Blizzard seems to prefer to throw more chaos into the mix and watch us deal with it rather than give us tools to handle the chaos that’s already there.
NOT BEING ABLE TO TURN OF BLOOM. Please God, PLEASE, let me disable Bloom. OW is literally one of the only games that I require my glasses to play because of all the damn bloom in this game
and
The increase in knockback. A while back the buffed knockback to be more powerful and consistent, but it’s just too much sometimes. If it wasn’t for the buff that Reinhardt got by giving him his passive, he would be booped all over the place. Try playing a game with Hammond, Winston/ D.va, Doomfist, Junkrat/ Ashe, Lucio, and Brig. It’s a nightmare of bouncing all over the place
A: people with aim would be doing echos E on half HP targets on their primary
B: The game not having bloom would require more precise tracking, meaning you would still need your glasses
Not sure why the devs heard people complaining about things like this and then implemented characters with even MORE cc like Doomfist, Brigitte, and Hammond. I like them as characters but would much prefer them without the obnoxious abilities to fling you across the map.
“Outrageous amount of shields”
Nearly every damage denial ability in the game has been substantially nerfed, or has some temporal limiter keeping it from overstaying its welcome. The only exceptions are Mei’s Ice Block, and Reinhardt’s barrier, however, its basically his whole kit, and the gameplay it provides is deep, and interesting, so it should stay where it is.
Of course it’s relatively chaotic because compared to other mainstream FPS games that are chess you’re playing 3D chess when you play OW since each hero is unique, there’s a huge emphasis on map layouts, movement, positioning and all that jazz compared to something like CS in which sure these things are important but they’re not as extreme as they are in OW
Besides you don’t even know what chaos is unless you’ve played high tier games (+4k average games) as everything gets refined and so fast paced that sometimes you just can’t handle all the information coming in so you lose teamfights out of nowhere all the time. That’s because there are 12 players going at it and you have the pov of only yourself. Heck even CC stacking isn’t an issue on the chaotic department since you’re just dead by the time a second CC ends unless you get heavy pocketed or something. It’s just annoying to not have control over your character, but not chaotic
What I do admit is chaotic is Ball/Winston/Lucio because without adequate CC you can fly in 3 different directions in succession and not have any ability to really contest it which makes it really confusing especially when you try to land shots while mid air and also position yourself so that you don’t just die. Boops get really old really fast in OW, but hard CC is not an issue
I definitely understand that it’s the nature of OW to be more chaotic than other games simply due to the variety of its heroes and maps, and the fact that it all gets multiplied by 12.
That said, I’d fully support a reduction in the amount of players per team. Eliminating a player or two on each team would solve a lot of the issues people here seem to complain about. It would definitely make things less chaotic, and I feel it would allow for tighter strategies and more varied team compositions.
Remove chaos, add complexity. I think that’s a fair trade-off.
I don’t hate that idea - especially the whole “turn Mei into a tank” part - but I fear that splitting the Tank roster in half and only allowing one of each type of tank would limit the team comps more than Blizzard would be ok with. Plus it still doesn’t solve the other issues of CC, one-shot abilities, and overall chaos.
I’d rather see a reduction in total players per team, as I mentioned in my previous comment.
The reduction in player count would provide a number of benefits. It would make it easier for Blizzard to balance and test, thus allowing them to make adjustments quicker and more meaningfully. It would reduce some of the CC-stacking issues people have a problem with. It would make strategy more important at the lower tiers, thus helping Blizzard achieve the goal of Overwatch being a team-based game. And it would reduce chaos, making it easier for players to see and react to what is happening during a team fight.
After a player count reduction, I think eliminating role queue would be the next step. I like it in our current 6v6 context, but I feel that it wouldn’t have much of a place in a 5v5 or 4v4 setting. This would enable team to utilize a plethora of strategies, and allow a greater variety of play styles.
