T w e n t y S i d e d
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Still no Spoiler Warning this week. Instead, here’s the archive of the Overwatch PTR hangout we did a few weeks back. We played around with the new hero, Sombra, and spent a lot of time losing. And then we stopped playing Sombra and spent a lot of time losing.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Denuvo and the "Death" of Piracy
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
So with all these losses I imagine it was a bit of a gloomy, even sombra affair.
Good work, sir.
Man, I just can’t watch Overwatch. It’s all brightly-coloured weirdly-proportioned people bunny-hopping all over the place while projectiles and particles and light fly everywhere.
Now, I’m sure I’d get to know what’s going on if I got used to it. But to get used to it, I’d have to watch it. And as just established, I can’t watch it, because I don’t know what’s going on.
It is definitely the case that to properly spectate certain games, you almost need to have played it. League of Legends and Overwatch are definitely two big offenders, while I think Counter Strike is one game with clear enough visuals that even without knowing anything about the strategy/economy of the game, you can still easily tell the big picture of what is happening and why.
The pacing is just too fast for me. I used to watch people play TF2 back in the way and this just seems like TF2 on steroids with another dimension, popping up and down on the map, added to it.
Even when I do play such games, the density of particle effects per second sabotages my ability to separate cause from effect. This is why I like turn based games (even pausable realtime doesn’t help me).
Blizzard seems to have this design philosophy in all its games, though, starting back with Starcraft (first blizzard game I played)). For an RTS competing with the likes of Red Alert and Age of Empires, it had a huge amount of activated special abilities in its units (and some units built around them such as templars, science ships, brood queens etc). WC3, WoW and Dota (and from there LoL) all inherited the approach to basing the game around loads of magical powers players would all have to memorise and recognise from their particle effects to effectively counter them. And now Overwatch is that in FPS form.
It is clearly a popular approach, as evidenced by the success of these games, but they are not for me, and I gather some others too.
This is one of the reasons I don’t play Overwatch or League Of Legends. The vast amounts of things I need to memorize, and the crazy amounts of things happening on-screen at once just make the game hard to get into for a newcomer. (The particle effects make it seem like I’m constantly being flash-grenaded.) Of course, I’m only a newcomer to Overwatch – for LoL, I actually played a tonne of the game, but got bored, when I realized that most of the heroes behaved in very archetypical ways, but were all treated like 100% unique characters. I’d rather play a game like Team Fortress 2 or Paladins*, that have a small number of actually unique characters, than a game with a gigantic rainbow of snowflakes I need to memorize, to understand where on the spectrum they lie between healer, tank, DPS, etc etc.
* I’ve not played this yet, but from Total Biscuits video on the game, it seems to be more like TF2, insofar as champs are just broad archetypes, with your loadout slightly changing how they play.
You actually cannot change loadouts on characters in Overwatch. The characters are what they are (simjilar to how TF2 was when it first launched), though instead of adding new weapons/equipment to characters as TF2 did, it just releases new characters from time to time.
With regards to overwatch there aren’t nearly as many characters as a moba, and you don’t have to worry about farm, learning item builds or anything like that. But all the stuff about team building and fighting are still there and to a lesser extend “feeding” is still kinda there, since heroes get their ultimates faster when doing damage/healing ect. Not as big of a deal as a moba, but still relevant.
That being said, occasionally when playing overwatch the whole particle effect explosion can be a serious issue; but most of the time if that’s true you put yourself in a situation you probably shouldn’t have been in to begin with.
Hangover: Watch Out
WATCH OUT: OVERHANG
Overwatch is probably one of my favorite competitive shooters in a very long time. While I liked TF2 and put a fair deal of time into it, the short match length and tight character focus with game changing ultimates all wrap up in a consistently exciting matches..
That being said… when it comes to matchmaking it has the worst of both shooters and MOBAs. It has all the twitch aiming requirements on a fair deal of characters as a snappy shooter, but the tight team building, team strategies and small team size of a MOBA.
In addition, as addition to something from the stream. I haven’t *met* any friends on Overwatch. I have played it with friends that I had preexisting either from real life or online from other games; but since you just get matched up in short matches, getting the same people repeatedly and forming a rapport is unlikely (with exception to high level competitive play where the pool of players is significantly smaller) To be fair, I haven’t gone out of my way to make friends, but the environment isn’t exactly conducive of it; especially since people are way more focused on winning.
Devs have said they’re introducing a “stay grouped with this team” button, so if you find a decent team you work well with, you can stay together long enough to build some rapport.
I think Overwatch is a pretty cool gal, seh moves really fast and doesn’t afraid of anything.
Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
I like the fandom stuff of Overwatch, but this video is the first time I’ve actually wanted to try out the game for myself. Looks fun.
Especially Pharah. Maybe just because her playstyle brings back some good Metroid Prime memories.
There are definitely some really noticeable shout outs to Samus in Pharah’s design.
What, constantly asking what they eat, style o’ fing?
Oh wait, I totally misread that.
If you’re playing Pharah, the answer is “missiles.”
Are we pulling a Shogun 2 again?