Overwatch vs TF2
Or, who is this game for?
I have been playing an awful lot of Overwatch lately. I was fortunate enough to be invited into the closed beta, which marks the one and only time working in the gaming industry has given me a perk that “mainstream tech” folks are jealous of. At first glance, the game looks and feels a lot like Team Fortress 2, which is one of my favorite games of all time. However, there are meaningful changes to the design which significantly alter the experience, and beneath the super-friendly Blizzard style is actually a pretty difficult and (potentially) competitive underlying game. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far.
Teamplay
Just like in Heroes of the Storm vs League of Legends, teamplay is sneakily upped in importance in Overwatch vs TF2. Because Overwatch is 6v6 instead of your typical 24-person public server match, working together is even more critical, and your actions have disproportionate impact. While competitive TF2 is indeed 6v6 as well, most players never end up playing that way, and the game doesn’t push you to do so.
As part of the hero design in Overwatch, everyone gets an ultimate ability — in other words, everyone has an uber they’re charging. Building these and timing their deployment will be critical to successful offensives and defenses, in a way that traditional FPSes haven’t really asked players to learn to do. While charging your ultimate in Overwatch is more forgiving than TF2 because you don’t lose your charge when you die, coordinating the use of your abilities with your allies (like in a MOBA) is important, and can outweigh individual kills or 1v1 duels. Strangely, Overwatch provides some tools to do this (e.g., you can use a chat command to tell everyone the % charge of your ult, and you can see a simple indicator in the scoreboard), but eschews some really obvious ones like showing a sidebar of every character and their ult status (like League of Legends).
Another key difference is the expectation that players should change characters to respond to the enemy composition in Overwatch. While this happens in public server TF2 matches (often begrudgingly), in competitive 6v6 TF2 it rarely happens. Besides the obvious additional skill/mastery required to play multiple characters well, it’s another way that your team has to work together to successfully win. While there are nice tools for pointing out team deficiencies at the start of a round (e.g., a warning for no supports or tank), these alerts aren’t as noticeable during a round, and even seeing your current team comp is somewhat buried— the only place to see this information is when you hit tab to see the scoreboard. I’ve played many games where I see the end-game lineup of characters on my team, and am surprised to see different characters my teammates are playing that I lost track of through multiple character swaps.
Pacing / Time-to-kill
Overwatch feels much, much faster. Games routinely end in 5–7 minutes (I think the fastest I had was getting utterly stomped in 1:48 or so), and even the longer games don’t seem to last much beyond 10–15 minutes. It’s clearly an intentional decision and mirrors what Blizzard has done with both Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone in reducing the overall time to complete a game.
The result is that the whole game feels more frenetic. Characters (on average) seem to die faster, respawns happen much more quickly, and there are fewer capture points per level. The other contributing factor is the high mobility of many characters, and the number of paths enemies can take to reach you — not only do you die quickly in combat, it’s also very easy to be caught unaware from the side, behind, or above as well. While it’s not at Quake levels of franticness, the short respawn times can cause the gameplay to feel less meaningful. Most popular FPSes (like Call of Duty or TF2) have longer spawn times, and some (namely CS:GO) have none at all. The quick respawn system in Overwatch does make it friendlier, but again reinforces the need for teamplay to be able to win in an evenly matched game.
Different Playstyles
TF2 has nine classes, all of which play quite differently from each other. Overwatch basically takes those same classes (with the exception of the Spy) and explodes them into subclasses that all attempt to fulfill their role in a different way. So while Tracer and Genji are both of the TF2 Scout-archetype (fast-moving, with high-mobility, designed to flank and hit & run), there is a great deal of nuance, map-specific knowledge, and character match-up knowledge required to master each of them.
It’s as if the TF2 archetypes are roles in League of Legends (top, mid, jungler, etc) and the Overwatch characters are each trying to fill one of those roles. Overwatch presents its characters in a high-level breakdown of offense, defense, tank, and support, but the reality is more complicated, and learning each 1v1 matchup on each map presents a long ramp toward mastery.
One of the things they’ve done really well in Overwatch is making each of the characters feel very unique and powerful. Playing Pharah (the flying / rocket-shooting attacker) and Soldier:76 (the mid-range assault-rifle guy who likes visors) require vastly different playstyles, despite both being “offense” heroes. Pharah basically never wants to touch the ground, and uses her height to attack unsuspecting enemies below, while Soldier:76 likes to fight at mid-range where he can back away to use his heal ability and then sprint-back to the front-line to fight. Both feel great to play, and pulling off a great ult with them feels incredibly powerful. Basically every character has the ability to make you feel like a superhero when played properly… a mass revive as Mercy can feel incredibly overpowered; grabbing someone with Roadhog is super satisfying; nailing a huge Death Blossom with Reaper in the middle of a crowd is undeniably awesome.
The Future
I’m curious how more casual players will deal with these changes. The color palette, style, and Blizzard branding all give the appearance of a more casual game, while mechanically being a lot harder than TF2 (both as an individual player and as a team). This juxtaposition hasn’t seemed to hurt Heroes of the Storm though, so it might not be an issue. But on the other end of the spectrum, many competitive players are complaining that Overwatch isn’t competitive enough, citing things like a lack of a true scoreboard, FOV controls, and frustrating netcode (see below). If Overwatch can’t satisfy competitive players, and is unable to fully ramp more casual players to the endgame (which at this point remains to be seen), it begs the question of who the game is for.
Overwatch is also curiously not F2P (unlike Heroes of the Storm). Blizzard has defended this decision as being necessary to let players switch between different characters to counter their opponents, but talking with Drew Harry makes me wonder if it’s due to the desire to launch simultaneously on console without having to risk an unproven F2P business model on those platforms. As mentioned, the game doesn’t provide strong cues for switching your character in response to opponents, and even the tips when you die are focused on how your current character relates to the enemy, not what other options might counter them (e.g., “Try switching to Symmetra to counter Bastion with her alt-fire.” instead of “Don’t engage Bastion head-on.”).
Regardless what the reason is, it does mean that there is more risk that a large, long-term community doesn’t form around the game, which would be a shame. If fewer people play due to the game not being free, casual players churn due to the surprising difficulty, and competitive players don’t feel that the game really supports their level of competition, then 1) I’ll be really sad that a great game has no one around to play it, and 2) Blizzard will make very, very little back from their massive investment in Project Titan.
Just to be clear, I really hope this doesn’t happen — I’m a huge Blizzard fan, and a big fan of Overwatch so far, but I’m very curious to see how the game evolves throughout the rest of beta until launch and beyond.
Miscellaneous
Some other notes that aren’t directly related to the sneaky complexity of Overwatch:
- Feedback when you hit an enemy needs work — the audio cue is surprisingly quiet (not sure why they didn’t go with a Quake or TF2-style “ping”) and actually hard to notice sometimes, particularly if you are trying to splash enemies around a corner. There are times that I feel like the audiovisual payoff for hitting enemies feels sort of floaty or unsatisfying, and I think a large part of this is audio.
- I’m curious if they’ll provide a dedicated server option — it isn’t really Blizzard’s jam, and it’s certainly not the norm for console games. But a lot of TF2/Quake/CS/etc’s longevity came from dedicated servers; both for the community aspect, and the ability to run custom mods and maps. For a multiplayer-focused game on PC, I worry that this will hamper long-term engagement. On the other hand, it’s Blizzard. So who knows. It’s frustrating for me to not be able to choose a specific map to play repeatedly (especially since map knowledge is so crucial).
- The level design is actually quite different from TF2. There are rarely wide-open spaces like the opening section of Badwater Basin or the entire first map of Goldrush in TF2. The levels in Overwatch actually feel like you’re in an urban environment, with tons of verticality, but also narrow corridors, hallways, and rooms. While there are maps with open areas, they’re often surrounded by a warren of passages in and out. Coupled with the extreme mobility of many characters makes combat more dizzying and sudden. In TF2, you are generally aware of where the enemy is coming from and you can largely ignore getting attacked from the rear (except by spies). In Overwatch, with the exception of the initial attack out of the gates, you rarely feel safe.
- Pharah strikes me as a great example of Blizzard’s approach to design. She’s your typical “soldier with a rocket launcher” character, but instead of forcing players to learn to rocket jump by looking down, timing your jump and firing, you hit shift to jump straight up into the air. It’s a classic example of something important that exists in a game or genre that is needlessly complex that Blizzard has identified and stripped out. See also: lands in Magic: the Gathering vs Hearthstone. (side note: I also love Magic despite this fact.)
- Some reload animations feel off in their timing. A good example is Roadhog’s reload animation — it ends up taking longer than it looks like it’s going to, especially when you listen to the associated audio. If you use any ability while it’s still completing the reload animation, you’ll finish using your ability and still have not reloaded. It’s surprising how unpolished this is so far for a Blizzard game, and there are plenty of complaints on the forum discussing it. Part of this is due to the poor animation / audio sequence, but part of it is due to the fact that most weapons in Overwatch reload their entire clip at once vs one round at a time in TF2 (since reload times are shorter when you’re only loading one round).
- The netcode feels bad at times, in a way that TF2 never did. More commentary in this reddit thread. I’m not really sure what to make of it except that I’ve anecdotally noticed it in Overwatch whereas I never notice it in TF2 unless I’m personally having a connection problem with high ping.
- Finally, the biggest problem of all — the state of hats is pretty grim. McCree has a hat, and Pharah sort of does, though she’s always pictured holding it instead of wearing it (I mean, what’s the point!). There are lots of masks though, if that’s your thing.
Thanks to Drew Harry and Zach Brock for reading drafts of this, playing lots of games with me, and generally being neat people.
