Overwatch Part 1: Why Casual Is Better

Overwatch is Kind Of A Big Deal right now. Blizzard is breaking into a new IP and new genre with its super-stylized team shooter, and it’s a rather good game. It’s not a game for everyone, but I think it’s a game worth trying, because it does a bunch of things *just* differently enough to be compelling.

Overwatch Part 1: Why Casual Is Better

Let me cut to the chase: Overwatch is Team Fortress 2 as done by Blizzard. Same bright colour palette, same stylized art, same overall sense of winking fun while also being a tight, well-tuned shooter. The main thing it adds to Team Fortress 2 is movement, which is significant. Lots of shooters have been playing with the idea of movement as a significant verb, and Overwatch is no exception– different characters move differently and this is extremely significant. I’ve talked before about how important new verbs are to games, and while certainly a newer game, Overwatch is more fun out the gate than TF2 was, and a huge part of that is that it adds that verb. Indeed, a lot of the gunplay in Overwatch is LESS satisfying than TF2, but it matters a lot less because there are other things going on.

For a while, I’ve lamented that MMO game design has been co-opted by virtually every other genre out there while apparently learning nothing from the advances elsewhere in the industry. It’s not super surprising to me, then, that a game made by the company that basically defined MMOs for the last decade draws heavily on MMO design ethos. Overwatch feels more like a team PvP match in WoW than it does a more ‘traditional’ shooter. Working together is always important, but in Overwatch this is accomplished through abilities that work together in intuitive ways. Overwatch breaks its characters down into MMO-style roles, and even if the abilities and armaments of a given character aren’t immediately apparent, by seeing what role they’re labeled as, you can get a sense of how to play them. It’s very MOBA-esque, although significantly more intuitive than most MOBAs.

What really sets Overwatch apart, though, is the same thing that sets Heroes of the Storm apart: accessibility. Team shooters are hugely inaccessible games for the most part: an exercise in new player frustration as they die and lose repeatedly without a good sense of why or how to improve. This kind of frustrating experience is really bad for a game’s health, however much a certain player mentality really likes to say “oh, you gotta get your lumps in at first”. Trying to sell someone on something “fun” but telling them they’re going to have to suffer before they get to “the good part” is a fairly outdated mentality at this point, and Overwatch does everything it can to eliminate it.

Overwatch pops up helpful player tips constantly. It will give you tips on how to fight the character who just killed you, it will suggest team compositions, and it draws lines through the map at the start of the game so you know where you’re going. Map knowledge is important for playing the game well, but playing competently doesn’t require that you memorize every map before jumping in. Adding to this, the way maps connect together is intuitive– there aren’t a lot of obscure passageways to hunt down in order to reach hidden snipers.

Adding to this, the characters are simple but deep. There’s no ironsights aiming, virtually no weapon switching, very few complex weapon interactions, no difficult comparisons between similar weapons– what you see is what you get, and this helps the game a LOT. The nuance in each character comes naturally as you play them, not in complex pre-planning. Making a character shine often requires good teamwork, and it’s apparent how to make that happen. One character has a gigantic forward-facing shield that blocks incoming fire. It’s great for protecting an advance, since your allies can shoot through it but your enemies can’t. It leaves you open at the sides and back, though, so your team needs to cover your flanks. This is REALLY OBVIOUS the second you see this character in action, and doesn’t require some deep knowledge of the ability to function.

The sense of accessibility permeates through every level of the game’s design. The game is chock-full of positive feedback, and eliminates a LOT of standard first-person shooter tropes, especially in the UI, in order to promote teamwork and prevent the kind of statistical comparisons that create toxicity between players. There’s no kill feed, except in spectator mode, and if you pull up the scoreboard, it will show you your statistics and the current top statistics in the game, but not EVERYONE’s statistics. There’s no distinction between kills and assists. The game operates at the team level, and when it displays the top players, it shows off almost entirely random-seeming stats. If you’re losing, or failing with a given character, you can swap out during a match, in your base, rather than being stuck until the end of the match. All of this promotes as much of a positive upward spiral as possible, and keeps the game fun and intuitive.

Overwatch Part 1: Why Casual Is Better

At the same time, it’s a surprisingly deep game. Very simple characters offer a lot of nuance, especially in a group. One of my favorite characters is D. Va, a mecha pilot tank-type. Her mechanics are really simple: she has rapid-firing shotguns that are strong in close, she’s got a forward conal shield that will block incoming fire, and while her base movement is somewhat slow (slower while shooting), she has a rocket boost that lets her fly around very briefly at pretty high speed. When her mech takes fatal damage, she’s ejected and becomes a much smaller, much faster target with a surprisingly powerful and accurate sidearm– survive long enough in this form and she can resummon a new mech. Her ultimate sets off the self-destruct in her mech, creating an enormous, super-damaging explosion that will kill virtually anyone it hits (including you, if you’re too close). In practice, this creates a really slippery tank class that can absorb a shocking amount of punishment between deaths, and is a really strong flanking tank that can hit an enemy from unexpected angles and (with her ult) is great at cracking dug-in enemies. She’s a lot of fun to play because you can stay in the fight for an incredibly long time, and you’re doing very different things while in the mech vs out of it. Working together with teammates means you can push harder than other tanks, since if you go down you’re still contributing to the team on foot, and then can fairly quickly get back into a new mech at top form. Right as you break through an enemy blockade, you can swap to flanking mode and make sure your team can lock their position. Alternately, you can blow up your mech in a group of enemies as the spearhead to a big push, especially if you have another more standard tank to help out.

My initial question when I started seeing Overwatch stuff was “why would I not just play TF2?”, and over the past few days I’ve gotten a really clear answer. It’s a fun, accessible game that adds movement as a fun new dimension to an otherwise lighthearted, casual experience.

No Internet Blues

Vault of Glass

I am on vacation the next two days, so as a result you are getting a post a bit later than normal.  I had every intent of getting up like normal, but the world was rainy…and the bed was warm, and the room nice and dark so I just kept sleeping.  I got up long enough to make my wife some coffee and then went right back to bed, and while I thought I wasn’t really asleep I apparently missed her departure.  I largely survived the moms day festivities and other than getting choked up due to some backwater yokel burning wet leaves…  thing went pretty smoothly.  So much so that I thought we would be back home at a decent hour last night.  My Destiny clan does a Sunday night Retro raid trip through Vault of Glass, and I am in desperate need of an Aetheon kill so that I can finish my No Time To Explain exotic pulse rifle quest.  Generally speaking Sunday is television night in our household, but given that te rest of the day was kinda messed up I decided to take a pass and instead signed up for the raid.  It was going to be awesome to finally have that quest out of my log.

When we got home from an extended dinner/conversation with my parents, I went upstairs and sat down at my computer.  I brought up a single website…  the one that allows me to sign up for a clan event.  When I then turned around and hit the Bungie website to transfer some items I got a no internet connection error in Chrome.  Sure enough I was setting the caution light symbol on my ethernet, and it was around this point that I noticed the cable modem disconnected.  I fiddled a few times to try and get it reconnected, and then hollered down at my wife to check the cable.  Sure enough the television part of the equation was out too.  The biggest frustration is that there was an error messaging showing up on the television with a phone number, but when we called that number and waded their their annoying menu of options, we finally received an answering message stating that the office was closed.  At this point it is 8:30, and the raid starts at 9 pm…  so a mild bit of panic is setting in but there isn’t much I can actually do about it.

Life Without Internet

Thankfully our mobile phones were working because my wife managed to find a different tech support number, and we called that.  Once again we had to wade through a frustrating sequence of message prompts.  We finally get to someone and sure enough there is a major outage in our area, one that is not planned to be resolved until 10:06 so an hour after the start of the raid.  I manage to fiddle with the mobile app for the clan and de-register from the event, and sit there resigned to my fate.  The problem with our modern connected society is that most of the things that I like to do… simply don’t function without internet.  Thankfully I had managed to log into the PS4 before the internet went out and it seemed that Ratchet and Clank didn’t care about having connectivity.  I ended up playing that for a bit until at some point  looked to the side and the blue lights were back on our cable modem.  My Wife verified that in fact we did have cable television back as well, and things seemed pretty peachy.  It seems like they managed to fix the issue by 9:30 instead of 10 something whcih was awesome, but unfortunately the Vault of Glass raid didn’t actually make.

Instead we ended up watching the rebroadcast of Fear the Walking Dead, and then going to bed a it later than we normally do.  Losing internet is this strange roller coaster of emotions which I guess in some way troubles me that this one thing is that important.  We found out that apparently there was a lightning strike that took out a connection point for both the power and cable, and that a large swath of my town was out of power.  I remember the thought going through my head of “Whats the use in having power if we don’t have internet” which when I thought it kinda jarred me.  I guess it was a weird conclusion to what was ultimately a really strange weekend.  It wasn’t necessarily a bad strange, just way busier than we are used to.  On a positive note my “flower children” seem to still be happy and we have failed to kill them off in the week we have had them.  They require way more water than I had originally thought which has me watering both morning and evening to keep them looking healthy.  The “Sunpatiens” especially seem to need a thorough soaking both times to make them nice and happy, which was not something I was expecting.  I had always been told that over watering was just as bad as not watering at all.  However it seems like whatever we ended up with combined with Oklahoma temperatures really need that water.  Hopefully tomorrow I will be back to normal gaming style posts, but this is all I really had for today.

Back After A Break (Or: When The Game Stops Being Fun)

It’s been a while since I posted last, mostly because there hasn’t been a lot I really feel like saying. It turns out it helps me to take a break from posting every so often to clear my head. I hadn’t really considered this previously, because my breaks from this have coincided with fairly major life events, so it’s seemed reasonable to just stop posting for a while. This time, it was more burnout than anything.

Back After A Break (Or: When The Game Stops Being Fun)

While not posting, especially when I’ve had an unbroken string of posts for a while, there’s this weight of obligation, this feeling like I need to post something, need to write something, just to fill up space. It’s the same sense of feeling obligated to log into an MMO every day, just to “check in”. I hadn’t really connected the two before now.

Something I see a lot, and have talked to a lot of people about over the years, is burnout. It’s a huge issue in game development, and it’s a constant cycle in MMO raiding, two spheres where I’ve spent a lot of time. There’s a pervasive sense that you need to keep going, keep doing the Fun Thing, because if it’s not a Fun Thing, why did you spend so much time in it? It’s often compared to the business semi-equivalent, the concept of sunk costs, but I feel like it’s a poor comparison. Just because I’m not having fun with something *now* doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun *before*. We change, situations change, and it’s not (always) the game’s fault.

I haven’t logged into FFXIV in months now. I haven’t stopped liking that game; it’s still one of my favorite games, I just don’t feel like playing it right now. The most fun I have, the most invested I get in that game, is when there’s a nice big backlog of content to go through and get a bunch of story all at once. Getting the story in drips and drabs just gets me to lose the thread, especially when they come months apart. I’m excited about the next big thing they’re putting together, their procedurally-generated dungeon, and I’ll wait to play until that’s out and I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on.

Starting to post here again is kind of the same thing. I feel like I have things to say and comments to make, and I’ve played enough games in the interim to have more food for thought.

Mothers Day Prep

Searching for Thing

Yesterday was a strange day, in that we got up and ate breakfast like normal… but upon finishing my wife went off to work.  She spent the entire day either working in her room or later proctoring a mock AP exam.  This meant that I was largely left to fend for myself, which is admittedly a happy place for me.  I grew up an only child, and instead of going places I didn’t want to I often begged to stay home alone.  So even today I am pretty happy just chilling by myself for long periods of time.  Yesterday however there was a mission, and that was to acquire a Mothers Day gift for my mother in law.  Now early in the season we had figured out what we were going to get her, but did not honestly have a great place to store it.  So yesterday after eating breakfast and showering I got out and cleaned my vehicle so that I could set down the seats and haul said item.

The only gotcha was that when I got to the store, the huge stack of said item that was there several times during this season…  somehow vanished.  I spent awhile poking around in the store and looking for the item, and even harassed several employees that lead me through a sequence of departments I had already checked.  So I sent the obligatory “We Might be Screwed” text to my wife and as it was getting to be lunch time I figured I would get some take out and call various stores to see if anyone had some.  I am purposefully being vague here, because while I know that my mother in law doesn’t read my blog… it still feels weird to talk about a gift I have yet to deliver.  My brilliant wife suggested that I go onto the stores website to see if it shows any in stock near by, which is great because I hate making phone calls.  The funny thing is…  the store in question shows that they have 20 available and in stock at my local store.  Aka the store I just went to that told me they didn’t even know what I was looking for.

Inventory Black Hole

On a whim I figured it was worth a shot… the worst thing that would happen is that they would have to refund the purchase.  So I added two of the item I was looking for into my shopping cart on the website…  somehow expecting at any moment for the site to come to its senses and realize that the store didn’t have the product.  I added in my credit card information and hit purchase, verifying that it was in fact available for pick up that day before finalizing the order.  I got a confirmation email saying that the store would call me when the item was ready for pickup.  Then I began waiting…  and in my boredom, anxiety and frustration I noticed that Audacity was open in the background.  Maybe this is a bad thing for me to have open in the background because I apparently recorded this.  Firstly I am horribly sorry for the thing you are about to listen to…  but it made me giggle so I decided to share it.

Sure enough about an hour and a half later I get the phone call from the store telling me that they have two ready for pick up, and asking when I will be there.  I hop in the my vehicle and head straight there, where they have two of said item loaded on a flat bed trailer thingy ready to go.  I have to show my ID and sign a piece of paperwork and almost too good to be true I am walking out to the parking lot with said items.  Funny story…  while moving the items on the cart began to jostle and next thing I notice they are sliding off the back end of the cart.  This is the point at which I learn about physics and how if you have an item that naturally moves on its own… you apparently should orient it in such a way as to NOT cause that movement to happen.  Thankfully nothing was damaged and I got them loaded into the back of my vehicle, and even had a nice person who really wanted my flatbed cart so I didn’t have to push that back up to the store.

 

Crusadering

Mothers Day Prep

What was left of the day I spent playing Diablo 3 and pushing my way towards some of the conquest achievements.  I was happy that I didn’t have to end up running all over hells have acre yesterday trying to find the thing on short notice.  I still feel like having my Mothers gift drop shipped more than a week ahead of time was the way to go, but that doesn’t always work out.  Yesterday was honestly oddly stressful because the moment my wife got home from work, we had to get right back on the road and head to dinner.  We do this once a month dinner thing with her siblings, and because reasons… it somehow got shifted from Friday night to Saturday night.  Which meant we had to watch the clock and make sure we were out of the restaurant in time for us to drive the roughly hour home so I could be here for the podcast.

Today we are doing something similar, with the moment my wife gets out of church we are heading to her mothers to deliver the gift, and then that afternoon seeing my mother.  I am actually super glad that I have both Monday and Tuesday off because otherwise this would have been a crazy weekend.  This is also probably one of the strangest posts I have made in awhile, because it is like 99% real life and 1% gaming.  Hopefully you all will take it in stride because it is what happened to come out once my fingers started moving this morning.