I’m waiting to see what the ping system will be like, but one thing I have always felt needed improvement in OW1 was the lack of a consistent naming scheme for the various areas in each map.
You probably know what I mean:
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Someone says “reaper flanking left”, but they’re on the cap looking out, and you’re running back from spawn. It just so happens that their left is your right. Because of this, the callout is often ambiguous (or might even get you killed).
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Someone says “front door” on Lijang Night Market. Did they mean the spawn door to courtyard? Did they mean the front of the cap? Did the mean the inner door to the cap? This happens on practically every map. Lots of players have a completely different list of names for common areas, and it really hurts communication.
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Similarly, CP maps are mirrored rather than rotated around the origin. This further confuses things, as you can’t say “left side” to always mean coast – it varies depending on which spawn your team gets.
One thing Valorant does really well is have officially named map zones. If someone says “enemy in X area”, you can learn the map zones and the names. Halo Infinite also does this. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing with an entirely new set of players, they know the names and can understand what you mean.
Overwatch has some unofficial names (e.g. on Numbani, most people know that “cash” is the inner area by the cap on C containing the cash machines), but would really benefit from canonical, official names.
I hope something like this is done for Overwatch 2 as it makes a huge deal for clarity of communication. It’s a fairly low tech solution with high impact. I’m not saying it’s zero cost (map designers have to tag areas, then there’s localization) but imo it’s a huge improvement over vague map area names & ambiguous callouts. The tech side of things is simply about getting the names to be known & sticky.