Overwatch Beta Reactions and Overreactions

Written by Tanner Banks, May 12, 2016, at 5:00 p.m.

It’s only been a few days and the withdrawals are already kicking in. I’m picking at my own skin. I keep opening and closing my battle.net browser. Hoping, begging that the little blue rectangle that says “PLAY” will be lit, so I can get back to playing Overwatch.

Overwatch Beta Reaction

Very rarely does a game grab onto my attention so quickly, and hold it for as long as Overwatch has. I’ve been following Overwatch for a while now and covered the Tracer pose “controversy” back in April. Thankfully, the only thing on my mind about Overwatch is just how amazing the open beta was. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but the 20 hours I played across five days proved that Blizzard has something big on their hands.

Before playing Overwatch for the first time, I had very little experience with role based games using vernacular like “tank,” “support,” or “objective.” I’ve been mostly a single-player gamer with marginal experience in shooters and team based games. A friend of mine told me I’d be a fan of Reinhardt, an old German in a mechanical suit with a shield and hammer who thinks he’s a knight.

After absorbing a crap ton of damage, getting killed all the time, receiving no help from teammates, and losing handily, I was hooked. Overwatch sunk its claws into me and by the time my friend and I had finished playing for the day it was close to two in the morning.

Overwatch has a lot going for it that is best summed up in two words: style and substance. Overwatch looks amazing in every way. The characters all have a distinct look to them that ties well with their play style.

The aforementioned Reinhardt looks like he’s a one man army ready to take a shelling. His 500 hitpoints in health+armor and 2000 hitpoint shield prove that to be true. Junkrat looks like he’s built to wreck everyone’s day and cause as much mayhem as possible.

His grenade launcher and rage inducing explosive wheel ultimate ability show just that. All the other character fit the bill of their design and have a great amount of personality in their dialogue.

Before the game starts and players are waiting in their base, characters will start chatting about the old times, or how Lucio, a support player, thinks Reinhardt needs a change in music taste, or how characters comment to Pharah how proud her mother would have been of her. It’s those little touches that make the characters feel alive.

The maps all have a nice distinct look to them that help emphasize the worldwide feel to the game. Blizzard sells the Overwatch team like they’re a group of the world’s best, and all the different locations add to that feeling. Dorado is my personal favorite with its large town square and all the houses furnished to look well lived in.

The amount of detail added to the bases at the beginning of each level make it feel like the team’s didn’t just start the game there, but had been living there for a while. The best thing about the maps is the same thing that make the characters so great. It doesn’t just feel like there’s a story, it feels like the story is alive.

While a game can look great and tell an interesting story, it is first and foremost a game. Developers who put style over substance have been lampooned and mocked as wannabe artists in the wrong medium. Blizzard has made it abundantly clear that an Overwatch burger isn’t just pretty, but meaty and juicy.

Every game is absolute pandemonium that really feels like a battle for every last inch. Escorting the payload is a tense slog through choke points and scoping out for snipers. Control is a bonanza of close-quarters combat with bullets flying and constant barrages from all sides. And Assault is a live action game of chess with Tracers zipping around while Soldier: 76 fires of a volley of helix rockets into the opposing team’s tank with Roadhogg on the front lines to deal some damage.

Taking on an opposing team feels different every time. Attacking and defending require vastly different strategies, and all the characters have strengths and weaknesses that allow for varied choices on a person by person basis. (Well most of the time, but more on that later.)

Whenever I was on the attacking team, I found myself tanking while my buddy played support as Mercy, a Swiss surgeon turned angel-lady. While our teammates went and ran into a hailstorm of bullets, turrets, and explosives we took the payload down King’s Cross, into the station, died, tried again, died again, and lost. Lather, rinse, repeat.

One of the biggest differences with Overwatch when comparing it to other games is that it doesn’t just let you change characters throughout the game, but that it encourages it. Sure, having a Reaper and Genji are great to push the defense back early game. But once you get to the end and have to fit 12 characters into a 15×15 room for the final push, having a few extra tanks can be a godsend. Every map has a different strategy to it meaning a character can be great for one, but not the other. This focus on varied gameplay means that every character should get some play time, and all play styles are more than welcome to join.

Each match doesn’t take up much time. The longest match I remember took about fifteen minutes, while the shortest was about three minutes and change. The time each match takes allows for a quick breather before jumping into the next game that will load very quickly thanks to Blizzards excellent servers. If you’ve only got time for a match or two, you can still get that satisfaction before switching to whatever else you had to do for the day. If you want to lock down and play for hours on end you’ll have a steady stream of matches that can go from hair-ripping rage to glorious victory in minute.

As mentioned previously, some characters are more popular than other. In a survey with over 2500 respondents over on the Overwatch subreddit asking things like who’s your favorite character. (Mei is bae.) It’s pretty even in the offense category, but on others it’s pretty imbalanced, leading to a lot of the same characters always being in game.

Also, some people are dirty, dirty liars because Bastion and Torbjörn are ranked lowest on the survey. Every game I play I have to deal with a stupid Bastion and that dwarf builder’s stupid turrets. Don’t lie people, you know you play them all the time.

You know you love the salt that comes through when you get those cheap kills. It’s no surprise that D.va and Tracer are so popular since they’re both fun to play and their ults do massive damage. Some surprises came from the defense popularity with Junkrat and Mei taking the top spots. With the amount of Hanzo and Widowmaker players I see in every. Single. Game. You’d think there’d be more. My guess is that they’re too ashamed to admit it.

Overwatch Lowlights

When it came to criticisms on Overwatch, one thought seems pretty universal. That thought is best expressed with “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NERF BASTION!” I can’t agree more, because there’s no reason a character should have high health, self healing, a mini-gun that can wipe a whole team, and an ultimate that turns him into a literal tank. He’s not even a tank class.

Other characters do feel broken at times, and Widowmaker makes my man Soldier:76 feel useless when her secondary assault rifle has a bigger clip than his primary. And while I admit that Mei, an ice-based defense character, is my favorite character to use, her secondary ice blast could use a damage nerf. (But you don’t have to Blizzard.)

Meanwhile, other characters haven’t been getting much playtime because they are in need of a buff in a bad way. Zenyatta, a support robot monk-dude, is squishy as hell with almost no health. Zarya, a Russian power-lifter turned tank, is my friend’s favorite to play as, but her shield lasts all of two seconds and takes 10 seconds to charge. That doesn’t make much sense.

And if Blizzard is going to keep putting their simian scientist (Winston) on all the trailers and merchandise, he’ll need a buff as well. 2nd least popular won’t cut the bananas for him.

There are a few other gripes that I have about Overwatch are that there could be a few more game modes added, like a single siege point that needs to be taken, a deathmatch of some sort, and a single player campaign. With all these awesome characters and a really interesting story to go along with it, I want to play the story! (Blizzard has commented that there is no single player in the works.) Most of the cosmetics feel like a simple recoloring, and the amount of currency it takes to buy specific poses, skins, etc. Will take forever. Hello, microtransactions…

Conclusion

Make no mistake however, Overwatch is something special. Whether it becomes the next game on the e-sports scene, or maintains a casual over competitive fan-base there will be plenty to love about Overwatch. This game has already got be begging for more, and once May 24th hits, don’t expect me to leave my room for a long, long time. Until then, I shall wait for the official Overwatch release date.

Have you played the Overwatch beta? Let us know what you think of it in the comments!