But I struggled the whole game with the extremely narrow FOV and motion sickness from that, and during the final boss, the FOV was actually too small to fit the entire boss during its animations or look at it when it rises (I think they later extended the camera max motion upwards in a patch?), and that excaberated the issue massively. And beating that boss while feeling semi-sick constantly was just not a nice experience. :(
Oh the grenade part was so silly. “Hey we are removing the stun, too much CC and let’s be honest, it makes it far too easy to blow up stunned flankers”.
…
“Here, as a replacement that’s a homing grenade that just straight up kills the flanker, no stunning necessary.”
Personally I get why 5v5 was done, but I utterly hate it. It removes all the things that made Overwatch 1 so cool compared to other FPS to me:
Slow TTK as a result of two tanks in front of the team.
High focus on healing, as someone who enjoys playing healers in all games this was heaven to me.
Lower focus on personal damage contribution and aim, as syncing ults, creating trap spots and selectively bursting targets was how you got kills, not just aiming.
In total, this resulted in me and my friends easily having a game we could all enjoy on a few characters each (me on Moira, Mercy, Torbjörn, Symmetra and Bastion, for example) and talk shit while just playing the entire evening.
This whole “social” spirit was lost as they slowly pitched the balance towards faster and faster TTK, and ultimately with 5v5. It’s a “competitive FPS” now, but honestly, I don’t need a competitive FPS. Never did. I did however need a social fun low-stakes FPS, back when OW1 came out. And that spot is no longer filled, sadly.
I mean, cars aren’t essential to existence either, just don’t buy them <-- technically correct, but not at all a helpful statement when discussing car-price-related issues.
Microtransactions don’t have to affect gameplay any more. The video games industry has successfully sold this narrative (“Please ignore cosmetic microtransactions mkay?!”) while also raising a whole new generation of gamers that value ingame cosmetics to a social-interactions-affecting degree.
There’s a reason kids laugh at one another over default skins in Fortnite or lack of cash in Roblox and so on.
Plus just as importantly, they normalize mtx on an industry level, making selling of other types of monetization easier in the future.
It also essentially undermines the whole idea of the game. “More FPS focus” and “more focus on individual gameplay” are not why I enjoyed OW1 in the first place, after all. It was the game to play with real life friends while hanging out on voice chat and relaxing after work. The mix of high-precision, low-precision, no-precision, tanking, healing, everything meant that there was something for everybody and we could all easily play together and just spend an evening talking shit and doing shit.
It’s worth it to read the director’s take that goes with this announcement, it’s quite long but goes into great detail about the motivation and effects.
I hate the change, but I can totally understand why they did it. Much as I personally dislike it.
The biggest issue is that IMO, even nowadays balance isn’t remotely as good as it was before the change, owing to the massive imbalance on all ends the 5v5-switch introduced, and them only working through that at a glacial pace. But even more so, this is annoying because of how it essentially undermines the reason they did this.
Sure, the queue time argument still stands. Yeah. But on a balance level, “Double tanks were problematic for game balance” is a bit of a moot point in hindsight. Yeah, they were, sure. Less so than 5v5 is, it turns out.
This is interesting. I mean of course, I am aware of the reasons they did this massive change, and on paper they all made sense ahead of time.
They also massively degraded the game feel, and IMO were ultimately the wrong solution for the problem(s) they were facing. I understand why they did it, much like I understand why they chased the eSports-hype, but I disagree with all actions taken and their outcomes regardless.
The game had already mostly lost me by the time OW2 rolled around, and between the very intense-feeling 5v5 that was nothing like the chill chat-with-friends-while-playing-some-OW we had before and the rampant monetization, I just dropped off. I don’t think this will at all make me come back to the game, but on a conceptual level I really enjoy them at least experimenting with undoing a lot of the shit they did to the game over the years, this isn’t the only thing they’re reverting after all.
I mean on the plusside, you always know that whenever anybody uses the word “woke” as if it were a real word, you can immediately add them to the blocklist or ban them. Nothing they can add has any value any more.