Heroes Never Die — How Overwatch Revolutionises the Dedicated Healer Role in Class-based FPS
I realise there is no lack of Overwatch related content in the world. Nonetheless I feel an overwhelming desire to cast my thoughts into the void on a specific topic — how Blizzard *nailed* the creation of a dedicated support character with Mercy. I’m going to compare various aspects of gameplay with other games to demonstrate what problems and frustrations have been resolved with this character and why I think it solves a number of issues inherent with support roles in this genre.
For those who’ve never played Overwatch, a quick summary is in order. Of the game’s 21 characters with various abilities, 4 are designated Support characters. Of these, 3 have the ability to heal characters on their team, but Mercy is different — outside of a sidearm-of-last-resort Mercy’s primary interaction with the gameworld is through providing healing and damage boosts to allied players. This is nothing new, and it’s a formula that’s been tried and tested, most notably in the Team Fortress series. And that’s where most of my direct comparisons will be coming from, as TF2’s medic is a bread and butter representative of this playstyle. Point a beam at an injured player, they regain health.
Firstly, the movement system. Oh how I love the movement system! Those with Mercy experience likely anticipated this post as a love letter to the Guardian Angel ability, and they’d be partially correct (many more aspects follow, however!) Every two seconds Mercy can lunge to any friendly player she has line of sight on, or their recently deceased body. This fundamentally changes how a player can interact with the playspace. A TF2 Medic is forced to always be at the back of an engagement. A particular player is rewarded for good placement and punished for bad placement as the skirmish unfolds, but ultimately they remain rooted in place on the battlefield.
In Overwatch, however, a Mercy can be nimble. Rarely are they caught out without any options, and if so it’s usually due to a tactical mistake that can be instantly regretted and learned from. It’s encouraged that a Mercy flit between her team performing triage across the composition as needed. This provides a much more exciting and dynamic healing experience obviously but the main difference is it empowers the player — no longer are injured teammates making their way over to your carved out section of the playspace, becoming a requirement. Instead, you, the player, are dynamically scanning for damaged teammates and even predicting them. This transforms a role that is traditionally more passive into an active, more real time responsive one.
This is compounded by the damage boost — never is there a scenario in which you are passively waiting for action to happen. If you are fortunate enough to have nobody damaged on the team then you still have a vast array of options and decisions available to you. Do I fly over to the Bastion and damage boost in case they come around the corner? Do I damage boost the D.Va as she charges around said corner? Do I preemptively heal the tracer as she goes around the corner, ensuring I heal her as soon as the first point of damage is taken instead of requiring reaction? What makes Mercy a rewarding experience is the ever-changing array of options and decisions that are always available during play. These options are all fairly simple and accessible but I truly believe this second-by-second decision making is what is often lacking in Support roles.
A crucial component of an FPS is the “not dying” part. The Guardian Angel ability adds a huge sense of empowerment and control for the player since their means of avoiding damage? Zoom across the map. Players of support roles in other games will often know the sense of helplessness and inevitability that accompanies having positioned oneself poorly or lost their teammates. You’re behind enemy lines, you’ve nothing to heal and they’re going to shoot you. I happen to believe that the sidearm is a bit of a red herring here — it’s rarely empowering to enter last-resort battle with the deck so stacked against you, and Mercy’s Caduceus Blaster/TF2 Medic’s Syringe Gun etc. perform a similar perfunctory role to give you something. With Guardian Angel, this is 90% rendered moot, with the usual best exit mechanism being escape.
Player positioning is the lifeblood of her own personal survival. A wiped team spells certain doom, but a healthy, dispersed but otherwise objective focused team empowers her to empower them towards victory. The Mercy player’s symbiotic relationship with her team grants all players an emergent feeling of coordination without a single line of text or word of voice communication. The Resurrection ultimate ability is best used for crucial pushes, but is available often enough that it ends up controlling the cadence of the battle — Mercy resurrects not just to keep people in an active combat engagement, but to keep all players “together”, even if that’s far from the front. Her role as a teammate becomes obvious even when playing with a randomly matchmade team. Here, performing the positive actions (facilitating groups of players working together through the use of healing and resurrection) crucially feeds back into the players personal feelings of doing well or doing poorly — done well she feels safe in her mobility options, gliding from danger with ease. Conversely when she is not performing well (say, a newer player that attempts to “pocket” or follow a Tank class too much to the detriment of her team, or when the opposing team is effectively countering her with harassment heroes like Tracer, Reaper, McCree) will find herself without options for escape in hairier situations.
All this is to say that the character of Mercy is designed with player agency and positive player and team feedback at the forefront. A mercy player is fully engaged at every second of the match. She is empowered to make decisions at every step and those decisions feed back positively into her team. To some extent, she orchestrates pushes and engagement distances. She is never sat holding the left mouse button 0n a player with little other options. She is never superfluous to the team. She is rarely resigned to a frustrating death unless she personally made mistakes and over-extended. In short, and if I may be hyperbolic, Blizzard fixed healers in FPS games, and everyone else needs to pay attention to the design decisions herein if making a similar experience to decide what to learn from and what to subvert going forward from here because they’ve changed player expectations and enhanced the genre in this aspect.
