Who is playing? The semi-open/closed beta started. It is so much fun. I’m enjoying it despite the fact that I completely suck. It’s going to take me a long time to learn all the various heroes and be able to switch as intended.
I plan on trying it out. But I thought the Beta didnt start until the 5th? Wasn’t very thrilled with the Battleborn Beta. Not sure if I’ll be picking that one up or not.
If you preordered you get to get in a few days earlier.
I played in a few of the free weekends.
I’m a little disappointed, to be perfectly honest. I can’t but feel like I was playing this almost 10 years ago when it was called Team Fortress 2. Yes, it’s polished to that perfect Blizzard shine, but it’s still a very typical class-based shooter.
HotS managed to innovate in enough ways that it is (IMO, anyway) a standout in the MOBA genre. I don’t see Overwatch doing anything new in the class-based shooter genre other than being really shiny, and I think Blizzard is tacitly acknowledging that with the 40 dollar price point.
Having said ALL THAT, it’s still fun with a stack of friends.
I’ll give it a try when the open beta starts. I’d like a new TF2 that wasn’t TF2, a class based, objective based high (by modern standards) TTK shooter, but the little bit of gameplay I watched looked kinda janky and unimpressive. But I’ll give it a try and probably organize some games over the weekend.
I was surprised to learn there were no PvE elements, since the way the game was built made it feel like a natural addition.
May have the best cutscenes evar seen, though.
I didn’t realize they had any free weekends. I’ve been thinking I might want to try it out, because I like most of what Blizzard does. But on the other hand, I wasn’t a big fan of TF2, so there’s a good chance I won’t like Overwatch either, so there’s no way I’m going to spend forty bucks or whatever it is just to try it out.
In any event, though, I’m enjoying soaking up the lore. Do the in-game cutscenes feature anyone other than Tracer, Winston, Widowmaker, and guy-who-looks-like-Doom-whose-name-I-can’t-remember?
I’ll try the free weekend.
Does anybody know if it is going to be a buy-it-once game with ongoing updates included, or a coin-op style money sucker like HOTS? Are new heroes, maps, game types, etc going to be offered as paid DLC or simply added to something you already bought?
If pay-once, I’ll probably buy it at $40 (the first time paying full price for a game in I don’t even know how long). If pay-forever, no thanks. I continue to be puzzled that that is even a successful model for games these days.
I’d be surprised if they make you pay for DLC and the like. They said the reason that they were doing a 40 dollars upfront, not f2p, model is because the game hinges on everyone having access to all the heroes. If they start being gated off then the game wouldn’t work. So it’d be weird to go against that.
Last I read, a few months ago, they were being very cagey about post-launch monetization. Maybe that’s changed this year, but they very well might try to make you pay $20 and then extra for future content.
It’s buy-it-once with cosmetic DLC.
You spent money on HotS? 
Why do people try to shame others who spend money on F2P games? You know those games wouldn’t exist if not for people who were willing to spend, right?
Anyway, the beta is open now through Monday. I’m going to give it a try tonight. Contact me on steam or battle.net (senorbeef#1394) if interested.
I think I mentioned it elsewhere, or maybe to a friend offboard, but Blizzard is doing a great job of making me want to know more about the Overwatch universe even if I’m not super excited about the game itself.
I guess I can see why it came across that way but I was just jokingly trying to suggest that he was wrong to imply you have to pay money to enjoy HotS.
Just played some Overwatch. Seems fun but couldn’t quite understand a couple of things.
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When I searched for a game, it just dropped me right into the middle of a battle already in progress. What up with that?
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What exactly are the win conditions? Something about defending and attacking objectives, I understand that. But I was in a game where we were defending, and the count kept going up in favor of the enemy team even though we were on the objective the whole time–I thought the count is supposed to freeze if both teams are on it. What up with that?
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Voice chat–is there a way to play a game with voice chat not enabled for anyone? I’ll never be able to use it due to how my gaming situation is set up in my house, so I’ll be very annoying to be on a team with if everyone else is expecting voice chat.
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What’s all this about changing heroes mid battle? Do good players do this? Why? Under what circumstances? When you change, do you start back at the beginning or in the middle of things?
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What is a “spray” in the loot box? I couldn’t figure out what it does.
I now know that when someone quits a game, rather than replacing them with an AI, it finds a player looking for a game and drops them in.
Spent a lot of time with the game last night. Really really fun. Also, I am super, super awful at it.
I couldn’t make D.Va last more than a few seconds once engagements began. And she’s supposed to be a tank.
So I’ve played for a few hours today. I don’t think I like it.
What did you not like?
I actually like it a decent bit.
Pros:
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The game engine is fundamentally solid. It processes inputs well (you wouldn’t believe how many games don’t have a consistent mouselook, they all have some sort of bullshit tweak that they think makes things better because they’re all retarded), runs extremely smoothly.
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I like the character design. The MOBA-ish 2 abilities + ultimate setup actually works pretty well. I’ve only played about half the characters, but they all feel like they have personality, play differently, and fulfill a niche so far.
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I like the aesthetics and the maps. All the maps have a significantly different feel to them. The art assets are all pretty good.
Cons:
- The TTK is too low. I’ve been on the lookout for a reasonable-TTK shooter for about a decade now and apparently it will never materialize. I understand that people playing awkwardly on a gamepad with their little flippers can’t aim worth a shit, and if you give players a lot of health, they end up running around each other unable to kill each other firing wildly and it looks retarded. So you have to make the TTK super low so that when they manage to get their little flipper paddles on target for a tenth of a second, someone dies.
But that means when accurate players on PC shoot at each other, they just die instantly. Why do we have to play with the same balance? Why not double or triple the PC version’s effective health so we can actually have some back and forth firefights with movement and abilities and teamwork?
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Not enough game modes. A game like this should really diversify into more novel modes and not just three. It’s well suited for a variety of game modes especially with its style of matchmaking. The weekly brawl format thing may improve on this.
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It made the same fucking obvious retarded mistake that TF2 did with attack/defense maps by treating them as two separate events. Attacking side has, say, 8 minutes to win. Then they win at 6:32. So the map flips over. Do you have 6:32 on the clock to see if you can beat the enemy time? No, you have 8 minutes. So both sides can win and the times are never compared. Which means that neither side wins. Even though it does one team attacking, then roles are flipped, these are essentially two completely separate events that have nothing to do with each other.
In TF2, if the teams were balanced, on most maps, the attacking side would always win. Then the teams would flip, and the attacking side won again. So who won that? No one. You all just went through the motions of attacker always winning.
The most obvious thing to do is to give the side that defended the same amount of time the attackers took to attack. Then you’d have a winner every game. This means that king of the hill style maps are the only ones in which one team will always actually win.