Farewell (for the next week), Overwatch. Our time with your closed beta has been memorable. You were exuberant fun as often as you were one-sided and rage-enducing. After spending a good few months in the game’s second closed beta, we come before you now to pass friendly judgement on what what we loved and where we think improvements could be made ahead of release.
Likes:
1. Breadth of characters
As everyone knows by now, Overwatch features a staggering 21 characters to choose from, far above the amount commonly found in a team-based FPS. Every character, or “hero,” feels less like they’re designed to stand in for a specific class and more like they were built with a set of moves and specials all their own. This is the only area of the game that feels like it has anything in common with MOBA’s and it works surprisingly well. The size of the roster also means that players are encouraged to change characters mid-game to deal with new situations as they emerge, something that not a lot of games in the genre have in mind. Regardless of your play style, there is a character in Overwatch that will feel instantly familiar to you — you’ll just have to try them all to see which one it is.
2. Pixar-style character designs, it’s all so damned pretty
What will smack you in the jaw the moment you land in your first match is just how gorgeous Overwatch is. Each expressive character model bursts with charm, evoking the look of a Pixar film. Similarly, the art design of every level fleshes out the game’s backstory in clever, sometimes hidden ways. While many matches won’t allow you the time to truly take it in, taking a moment while skirmishing prior to kick off will allow you to explore and appreciate the work of Blizzard’s artists and designers, and their often surprising attention to detail.
3. Great when teams were coordinated
Overwatch has clearly been built with teamwork foremost in its mind. When you have the right heroes on the battlefield and everyone’s pulling their weight, it can lead to some genuinely tense moments and clutch victories. More than once we were able to snatch victory in the Attack/Defense game-type after the opposing team got away to an early lead and capped all the way to 99%. It’s in these moments that Overwatch is at its most satisfying. There’s a flipside to this, however. Check the corresponding entry on the dislikes list below.
4. Great sense of community, very little bile
The community of beta entrants, particularly following the January roll-out, was been amazing. The lack of vitriol in the chat, the lack of rage and bile directed at other players has been a breath of fresh air. In those instances where people did lose their cool and begin complaining, they were swiftly silenced by others who chose to talk sensibly about why things had gone wrong. Further, the official Overwatch forums have been vital in Blizzard’s on-going bughunt and balancing efforts. While its foolish to hope that such a calm, rational community will remain once the world gets its sweaty, aggro hands on the game, I do so anyway.
5. No loadouts = bliss
One of the things that I really like about Overwatch is that none of its heroes can be altered in any way. They aren’t modified by gear or items, there are no loadouts. It reminds me of the glory days of vanilla Team Fortress 2, before all the extra weapons and modifiers created synergies that led directly to balance headaches. Overwatch‘s 21-hero roster is diverse enough that it doesn’t need any such tinkering and, with so many heroes, modifying the stats like that would prove to be a nightmare.
6. The current XP progression system is perfect
I sincerely hope that Blizzard leaves the XP progression system present in the Overwatch beta just as it is for the release version. It couldn’t be simpler: you are rewarded with experience for good, on-the-ball play. This experience builds and you level up. When you level up, you are provided with a Loot Box. Loot Boxes can be opened from the main menu and contain random goodies and unlockables for the game like sprays, victory poses, character skins and fresh lines of dialogue. If you get a duplicate item from a Loot Box, it is converted into in-game currency which can be spent to manually unlock any items you desire. There were no microtransactions, no paid DLC and no advantage-granting gear. All the cool personalisation content was already in the beta waiting to be unlocked and your level is really only an indicator how much time you’ve spent in the game, the way it should be.
7. Maps are varied, and lend themselves to different heroes throughout. This is one way changing up heroes mid-game is rewarded
One thing you’ll run into in other team-based shooters is people picking one class and sticking with it for the entire match, for good or ill. Overwatch doesn’t want you doing that. Overwatch wants you to change it up mid-battle and they’ve built their maps to reflect this. Placed in locations around the world both familiar and altered entirely by the game’s past events. These broad locales allow the designers to create vibrant, interesting battlegrounds — a stark contrast to Team Fortress 2‘s endless desert levels. Some still have the dreaded death pits (I thought we all agreed they were banned back in the 90’s, guys) but I’m willing to let it slide because they’re so damned versatile and cater to each hero in some pretty surprising ways. They reward experimentation, learning each hero’s strengths and leveraging them just so.
8. Ultimate attacks won’t drop if you pop them as you’re dying which is nice
I keep making comparisons to Team Fortress 2 but I think its the most prominent exemplar of the form. As a Team Fortress 2 veteran, and as a medic main (a point I’ll return to shortly), I’d grown used to working hard to build up Medic’s Uber ability. In that game, even if your Uber meter is at 100% and ready to pop, if you die you have to start filling it all over again. In Overwatch, each character has an ultimate that fills the same way. Good play is rewarded with a rapidly filling ultimate metre. Unlike TF2, if you died in the Overwatch beta, you don’t lose the any ultimate progression already accumulated. This means you didn’t have to play with the same “pop it, don’t drop it” mentality Medic players in TF2 have to maintain. A godsend.
9. It’s always really clear what’s going on, especially when it comes to special and ultimate moves
Team shooters can be an absolute nightmare to parse when looking at them from a distance. Team colours help, but you don’t really have that here. What you do have are clearly highlighted enemy players and obvious ultimate attack effects. The focus on a solid team make up also means you pay close attention to the heroes your team mates are using, which helps to identify the enemy. Not once did I get confused about who was on whose side and that’s to Blizzard’s credit.
10. Special shout out for having medic characters that don’t suck
As mentioned previously, I am a medic main. I have grown used to being the most valuable, but least valued member of a given team. Everyone always wants heals but they never do anything to protect the med. Overwatch allows you both mobility and the ability to fight back with its healing classes. Soldier 76 has a deployable heal dome. Lucio, my personal favourite healer, is highly mobile and switches from an AOE heal to a speed boost when required. Not only that, but he can use his skates to wallride like a Titanfall soldier. If I get into trouble, I can drop a speed boost and get the hell out of there. Amazing. Zeniyata is an android monk that buffs friendlies and debuffs foes before dealing pretty hefty damage of his own. He could use some more HP but he’s hard to deal with in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Finally, Mercy. She plays like TF2‘s Medic, deploying a heal beam from her staff. She can switch this beam to a damage buff on command and she gets a bit of mobility by being zipping between friendly players to get out of dodge. Finally, her ultimate lets her resurrect fallen players, a move that has proven to be a deal closer on a number of occasions. It’s so nice to have healing characters that can hold their own. Thanks, Blizzard.
Dislikes:
1. Australian servers were unpredictable af
My kingdom for some decent ping. A decent chunk of my time with the Overwatch beta was spent playing on Australian servers with 40ms of ping or less, which is lovely. The problem was that the small player count meant the Aussie servers would frequently disappear, or we’d be dropped into a game with Americans, leaving myself and other Australian players dealing with latency of 198ms or above. For those who aren’t sure what I’m talking about, ping is a measurement of your connection speed. The lower the number, the less lag there is between you and other players. When you hit pings of 198ms, the battle is almost three-quarters of a second ahead of what you’re seeing. That means precision characters like Hanzo and Widowmaker are almost impossible to play well. Hopefully, we won’t run into these issues when the full version drops next month. But maybe invest in an NBN connection if you can, just in case.
2. Certain heroes still felt unbalanced
I can’t actually tell you how much I detest McCree, Overwatch‘s revolver-twirling cowboy hero seems to do an improbable amount of damage with both his regular and alt-fire and his room-clearing, auto-target “High Noon” ability charges with breathtaking speed. I hate him like I hate Team Fortress 2‘s Spy class. Blizzard, I know you only nerfed him not that long ago but I’m convinced you need to keep going. Meanwhile, Zarya — the muscular Russian soldier with a lightning gun feels like she does no damage whatsoever, and dies just as quickly. Not really what you want in a hero that’s supposed to be a tank. Her ultimate and her specials are very useful (though situational) but her regular fire feels like it barely tickles her foes. Compare this to Tracer, who is Blizzard’s clear favourite. A harassment and scout-type character, Tracer is not only impossible to hit but does what feels like entirely too much damage. Her twin machine pistols are capable of a higher DPS than Zarya’s energy gun and that feels wrong to me. There have been examples of Blizzard fixing clear hero imbalances — Bastion received a mighty, much-needed nerf back in February — but there’s a lot of work still to be done.
3. Teams were rarely coordinated
As I said earlier, the game sings when everyone is doing their jobs … but that so rarely happened for me. At the beginning of every match, all the other beta participants beyond my one or two friends would choose heroes that were useless for the task at hand and either disappear for the rest of the match or simply hurl themselves at the entrenched enemy, dying over and over. Nine of out of every ten games I entered without friends would result in me giving up in dismay as my team mates bounced pointlessly around the map like juggling balls in a clothes dryer.
4. Because of this, endless defeat loops were common
Getting matched with gronks is one thing. It’s quite another when the game leaves you stranded in a server with these clowns for ten games in a row. Overwatch would regularly jump me from server to server as I went, keeping the players I met churning and varied in their playstyles. Every now and again, however, you’d get stuck with the shallow-end of the gene pool for what felt like an eternity, racking up loss after loss. You can’t just leave either — the game docks you valuable XP for bailing on a game early, and there’s no guarantee the game won’t just drop you back in with the same grubs if you do bail.
5. Some clipping issues in different maps
The bane of every FPS player — getting stuck on a piece of invisible flyshit and dying unnecessarily — is something that plagued a lot of my time with Overwatch. Frantically backpedaling away from a fight as Lucio while trying to stay close enough to heal my team-mates, I would attempt to steer around obstacles I knew were behind me but would still get caught on a piece of geometry. These moments will take even the most agile character and make them a buffoon just long enough to get you mauled. That’s something I expect from Team Fortress 2, where Valve lost the desire to fix its clipping problems years ago.
6. Certain characters like Symmetra are almost too technical to use without support
Symmetra is an incredibly powerful hero, a builder like Torbjorn, able to create teleporters to cut travel from spawn to the front down to nothing. She can build small laser turrets to tuck into corners for sneak attacks. The thing is, she’s next to impossible to use if you don’t have a team willing to back you up and, as mentioned, that has rarely been the case in the beta. Hopefully when the player pool opens up on release, she’ll become a bit more viable but in the beta, I only saw her pop up a handful of times and swiftly disappear when the player realised they wouldn’t get anywhere without help.
7. Some players I know with high-end PC’s have experienced significant frame drops, even on a brand new $1800 rig.
While I was able to smoothly run Overwatch on my high-ish-end rig with the visuals cranked and never encounter a problem, at least three other people I know who also ended up the beta reported significant performance issues and major frame drops of as low as 15 fps. All three of these people are running better, more expensive rigs than mine. One of them recently dropped $1800 on a new rig and he is still running into this issue. Obviously, this is the sort of thing that you expect to encounter in a beta but this close to launch, it does have these PC Master Race stalwarts a bit concerned.
8. No access to loot boxes or character customisation while waiting for games to begin is a bit naff
I just finished a match and I’ve sat through the post-game carnage reports. My little XP bar fills and hits the end of the line. I’ve leveled up again. “You got a new loot box!” the game tells me. Great, I say, before realising I have to leave the server to open my loot. This seems like something I should be able to do from an internal menu. The same goes for changing my character skins and sprays. Team Fortress 2 and CS:GO both allow me to open crates and change cosmetics from the menu while in a game, I don’t see why Overwatch can’t let me do the same. I’d rather be able to riffle through my loot boxes and toying with my look while I wait for a game.
9. When you unlock duplicate items, you are compensated but in a fairly minuscule way.
The beta’s in-game currency, simple gold, can be accumulated slowly by getting drops from Loot Boxes. As you begin to unlock more and more goodies, the likelihood of unlocking stuff you’ve already got gets higher and higher. When this happens, you are given a small amount of gold as compensation. And I mean a small amount, maybe 25g. Considering that the higher tier skins in the beta would run you 2500g, collecting that much currency could take you a while. Personally, I don’t feel like the game should give you dupes at all but I guess it helps keeps that unlock train rolling a little longer.
10. Game was frequently and significantly patched during the beta but rarely were patch notes provided on time, making it hard to know what had been changed.
While Blizzard’s official forums are pretty great for getting information on the game’s state and where it’s headed, I found that towards the end of the beta, the game was being patched daily — not insignificant ones either, often 700mb to 1GB. The thing was, I struggled to find patch notes for these updates. Often the patch notes would be left without an update for days afterwards and when they were updated, it was hard to know which changes had been made when. Further, none of them contained the change I really wanted which was “McCree has been nerfed within an inch of his stupid, cigar-chomping, High Noon-ing life.”
It won’t be long before we’re back playing Overwatch again, however. The open beta begins this coming Thursday on PC, PS4 and Xbox One and you can try it out for yourself ahead of the game’s May 24 release date. For now, we’re going to have to live with our withdrawals.
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