alpha<\/a>, it was not uncommon to go a whole round as a character like Zenyatta and only earn one Transcendence. Because ultimates charge almost entirely off of damage to smaller, squishy targets now (shooting Tanks builds ult slower), it incentivizes everyone on a team to go for quick kills.<\/p>\nThis homogenization of player goals, especially for players of average skill, leads to games where everyone scatters looking for their own targets. In the games I played, the teams that clumped up and stayed together, which is the range at which many support and tank abilities are most effective, were almost always at a disadvantage to those that spaced out and went for risky kills instead. That this was effective in many of the games I played says a lot about the priorities inherent in Overwatch 2’s design.<\/p>\n
Success in Overwatch 2 is finding a way to squeeze the enemy team from all directions, and to only gather up to push or capture the objective. Tanks, in part because so few of them have shields, are much more about causing distractions than carving a path toward the enemy team. And because of the speed increase for damage heroes, you end up doing the same thing, albeit more carefully due to your lower health. Playing Doomfist as a tank wasn’t notably different from playing him as a DPS; I didn’t really have to consider where exactly my team was as long as they were generally nearby.<\/p>\n
A lot of abilities, like D.Va’s bullet-eating Defense Matrix, were best used selfishly rather than to protect and enable my teammates. Instead of incentivizing you to orbit around each other because of the various abilities in the game, like Ana’s healing grenade or Mei’s Ice Wall, Overwatch 2 expects you to hope that everyone is on the same page, attacking the same thing. It happens more often than not with two fewer players in the mix, but framing team fights around a collision of lone wolves doing their own thing rather than a group of people with an unspoken strategy based on team composition robs the game of what makes the team-play in the game so fun.<\/p>\n
Matches in different skill levels—and with much better matchmaking than the alpha I played—in the final game might tighten this up (low-skill players tend to feel safe in numbers), but the lethality Blizzard has granted most of the heroes would require wide-reaching balance changes to keep from being identified as the most efficient form of play. And as we’ve seen with other popular playstyles, like having two shield tanks or an Orisa and a Roadhog, it could easily trickle down into the most casual games.<\/p>\n
The original Overwatch’s DNA isn’t all gone in Overwatch 2, but it’s minimized enough that it starts to make certain non-aim-based heroes and strategies fall behind when they don’t fit into the new rhythm of the game’s team fights. Number tweaks can fix this, and I imagine that’s the bulk of the work that will go into the beta outside of new hero releases. But Overwatch 2 makes me question whether or not squeezing the game into this slimmer form is worth all the trouble.<\/p>\n
Overwatch 2 is already behind its competitors in a lot of ways that don’t concern its particular brand of first-person shooting. It’s finally getting its first black woman hero in Sojourn, it’s finally getting a proper PvE mode, and it will probably have a battle pass too. Back in 2016, Overwatch was the game everyone else copied; it wasn’t like anything in the FPS genre at the time, and still isn’t in a lot of ways. It has things that need updating, but I’m not sure the fundamental ebb and flow of its gameplay was one of them. Now, in trying to chase the speed of its competition by removing one of its most important hero types from each team, it dilutes what made it so compelling in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After a few hours of Overwatch 2’s alpha playtest, it finally clicked. I’m a 3,000-hour Overwatch player—obsessive, really—and it took me several games to get what was going wrong for me in the long-awaited sequel to Blizzard’s hero shooter. By removing two players, one tank per team, Overwatch smashed the fast forward button on its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5326,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1132,1044,1087,1245,1038,1587,1047,1196,1784,1108],"tags":[1135,1055,1092,1248,1048,1588,1058,1202,1790,1114],"class_list":{"0":"post-5326","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-activision-blizzard","8":"category-channel-gaming-software","9":"category-feature","10":"category-fps","11":"category-gaming-software","12":"category-overwatch-2","13":"category-serversidehawk","14":"category-type-opinion","15":"category-van-block-sticky-video","16":"category-videoarticle","17":"tag-activision-blizzard","18":"tag-channel-gaming-software","19":"tag-feature","20":"tag-fps","21":"tag-gaming-software","22":"tag-overwatch-2","23":"tag-serversidehawk","24":"tag-type-opinion","25":"tag-van-block-sticky-video","26":"tag-videoarticle"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hdbka.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hdbka.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hdbka.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hdbka.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hdbka.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hdbka.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hdbka.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hdbka.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hdbka.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hdbka.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}