Overwatch?

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DefinitlyNotKnoutout
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by DefinitlyNotKnoutout »

IskatuMesk wrote: Cooldowns are a shallow carpetbomb over underdeveloped mechanics that force you to play a certain way and punish creativity both on behalf of the developer and player.
Hey Mesk, you say cooldowns and mana are bad concepts. And I see that a game without restrictions would be a lot more fun. But how would you stop players from just rolling over QWER every second and turning this into a big button mashing session? Would you make the ability animations longer to make players use their skills more tactically, or rework them that they put the player at a risk when wrongfully used? Or would you even abandon the QWER system altogether?
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IskatuMesk
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by IskatuMesk »

I think it's less a QWER system being the problem than it is the base-ultimate systems being the problem. By having a set of abilities with number-based synergy (x does more damage or stuns if you perform y first) you already enter territory where ability rotation is how you maximize your efficiency. At that stage cooldowns become the only means to balance out the numbers of unique abilities that are strong. "If I can always stun this guy, why not just keep stunning him?" Right?

Animation restrictions are a great place to start and they do in fact exist in league and shooters. For example, some spells come out faster than others. But in games like DMC and fighting games, the animation speeds and everything are indeed the balancing factor behind a lot of abilities. The idea is to remove the reliance on utility creep (especially reducing or removing reliable point and click CC kind of shit) so cooldowns no longer feel necessary to offset the power of a button press. As it is, you just push buttons and shit happens and you feel good that you pushed a button. Or not, because counter-based gameplay is reactionary and boring. The fact that moba games in large part get decided in champ select is dumb. The fact you rely on a support-tank-dps trinity is dumb. But the attempts to escape those systems like the disaster that was guild wars 2 are badly performed because they still rely on cooldowns and rotations to allow players to exert power.

In the ideal circumstance no game should ever need a combat system any simpler than DMC. Yet that is what cooldowns exist to do - dumb down decision making by making it all built into a single button press and removing the mechanical skill necessary in performing a variety of actions surrounding it. Even worse is games like league who have enforced latency on everything so 56k can feel good about themselves.

In games with no cooldowns there is tons of punishment for misplays. Fighting games, Brood War, etc. often come down to psychology and reading your opponent, determining his strategy and then counterplaying that. While a lot of league ends up coming into just one individual getting caught, chain CC'd, and then the game ending. I don't know about you, but I find something that forces players to best every element of their playing ability and then best their opponent's every playing ability much more interesting than watching cooldowns tick down after someone pushed a button and missed something and no one wants to fight until they can once again fish for that one connect. That makes Heroes a lot more interesting to me than league - mana is less of a constraint in early game and the cooldowns are typically shorter. Fights are far more skill demanding than those in league.

/e

To elaborate more on Mana -

I don't feel mana in itself is inherently a bad system. But the way mobas handle it is very feast or famine and sets up for some irritating gameplay patterns. In a way I felt Diablo 3 did some interesting exploration with alternative resource implementations, but since they dumbed down the gameplay and abilities so much it's really hard to tell if that exploration had any merit in its design.

A very large portion of league's balancing issues comes from items and the insane bloat of specialized items the game has been steadily swimming in since last season. These compound one-button game deciding issues by ensuring if you are behind your opponent has to make truly colossal fuckups for you to have a chance at winning. Most games are decided 10-15 minutes in.

But if you are trying to balance a team based game for solo queue play you're never ever going to find a happy medium no matter what direction your design aims for.

/e 2

Now that I recall, the URF mode in league was a very interesting experiment that showed what the game was like without cooldowns. As you expect, high utility heroes with sustain were insanely overpowered (hecarim, sona) but if you had a match without those it was actually pretty fun. I'd like to see something like that but a bit tamer ability-wise and with no items and see how it fares. Won't happen, though!
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by Hercanic »

Hercanic wrote:
SteakofStake wrote:the game is only 40 dollars, isnt it? the 60 dollars one came with skins and shit
Lavarinth wrote:Yup, game is $40, not $60
In the Blizzard launcher, it showed USD 59.99 when I last checked. If you go to the Shop and click the big Overwatch [Buy Now] banner, it brings you to Overwatch: Origins Edition for $59.99. You have to use the breadcrumb link to go back to [Overwatch Products] to find the $39.99 basic edition, or scroll down in the shop menu to find it in the middle of all the other game links.

Since I still have beta installed, I can click Play, but upon loading it the game says No License Found. It presents me with a [Buy Now] button that takes me here, which again is defaulted to the Origins Edition for $59.99. Usually, game companies put these different editions side-by-side so you can choose in an informed manner. Blizzard seems to have adopted the "let's trick the less observant" by placing the more expensive version front and center with no mention of the cheaper one unless you really look for it (and you won't if you don't know it exists). The banner in the shop doesn't even mention Origins Edition, just Overwatch, yet still takes you to Origins Edition. That's pretty shitty, Blizzard.
Hercanic wrote:
Lavarinth wrote:Well, yeah, at BlizzCon that said "The Origins edition is the one to get if you want the full experience!"
5 skins definitely qualifies as the full experience! Take another $20, Blizzard! My game would not be complete without moss, two face reveals, a randomly blue outfit, and a randomly brown outfit! That's totally worth 50% of the base price!
So there was a Free Weekend event I didn't notice. Paired with that was an ad:

"Give the gift of Overwatch® (Save 40%)"

I think, oh neat, let's see how much it is now, and click the link. Of course, it brings me to:

Overwatch®: Origins Edition for (USD 59.99 USD 34.99*).

I click over to Overwatch® and... it's USD 39.99. No change. So if I just wanted the base game, the sale is really only $5 off.

Once again, Blizzard doesn't like putting the proper product name in their ads, do they? Intentional or not, this whole bait-and-switch crap is irritating me.

EDIT:
Oh, looks like there are two different ads on rotation for the same sale:

Image Image

Would you look at that, they actually do know how to put the right product name in their ads!
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IskatuMesk
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by IskatuMesk »

Welcome to Capitalism!
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by Lavarinth »

That's arguable, however. It doesn't specify "GIVE THE GIFT OF ANY OVERWATCH EDITION". This is marketing 101, not a unique problem to Blizzard and you shouldn't take it false advertising, nor putting Blizzard as the inventory of these tactics. In the end the base version and game are named the same thing, Overwatch, and that was a marketing move for sales like these. All over Black Friday this same situation arises. Earlier yesterday I could buy a product I wanted discounted "40%", but if I went to check the price of the six pack of that product, it was the regular sale price, at 50% off per item (though purchasing six, of course). But I don't want six, I want two, but there's limit one, and it's still not cheaper than buying the six if we're talking price per product. I don't know, I'm rambling, but I don't find anything wrong with this marketing because it's standard bait marketing. Did you click the ad? Then it did its job. It won.
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IskatuMesk
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by IskatuMesk »

While it's not really misinformation it really treads the line and should be illegal.
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by Revolta »

In an ideal world companies wouldn't need to trick consumers because they would just create good quality products, but I don't really think you can do much in this case since nobody does that anymore. I think as consumers get more educated these kinds of tricks will work less and less, as seen with no man's sky and the ramifications of their bullshots (now trailers must contain more gameplay for longer periods of time).
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by Zilla- »

THREADS NEVER DIE [for a price*]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-nf4nqdZRA

1 year anniversary coming up~ tbh I haven't been playing as much the past few months as I'd like but, how do the rest of you folks feel about the game now that it's been out for a while?

Personally its a lot of fun and very easy to pick up and go, but for some reason I dont really feel rewarded from any given win/loss, the fun is from the shinanigans that teammates/enemies pull off, so I got a bit burnt out. I feel kinda similarly about Super Smash Brothers, a lot of fun and easy to pick up and play, and I put a LOT of time into the title, but ultimately its not something i feel as drawn to. Not that I'll ever turn down a match (yoshi4lyf) but I don't fire it up on a whim either. I also don't like how it's bleeding into hots (and im sure other blizzard titles too [although I havent touched those in a while either])
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by Thalraxal »

I haven't played it yet, but I've heard there's a free weekend coming up this week, and I figure I might actually give it a go if I've got the time.
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by SteakofStake »

The problem I have with the game is how little new content there is, and how boring the content that's there has gotten. So far there have been 3 new heroes (only one that has really "shaken up" the way the game is played), roadhog and reinhardt are both still broken. 5 exclusive events that didn't significantly change the game, and you can't play anymore, and 2 new maps.

eck, They should be working on new maps and heroes that make significant impacts rather than all of the seasonal events that they won't let you play anymore and HATS!!!!!

It's following the path that tf2 did, where it focuses too much on hats in updates rather than any actual balancing and content, but this is blizzard.
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IskatuMesk
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Re: Overwatch?

Post by IskatuMesk »

The showstopper for that game is much more fundamental than maps or imbalanced characters. The netcode is just unplayable. When rockets explode and do no damage, walls appear before rendering by up to a second, and getting shot around walls is a common theme, you aren't really playing an FPS, you're playing a roulette of jerry rigged bullshit from a company notorious for poor networking.
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