Feedback from long-time TF2 player

[stellvia]

Tried out Overwatch tonight after a friend asked me to play with him for the open beta. I do systems design and dabble in game systems as a hobby, and excel at unorthodox strategies and out-maneuvering people in TF2. From that standpoint, I feel that the game is in pretty rough shape. Gameplay and visual recognition needs some heavy reworking in its current state.

Good elements:
-On their own, most of the heroes have a nice design aesthetic and unique personalities.
-Allies having LOS giving you an outline of enemies thru walls is nice.

Not needing "ammo packs" I'm on the fence about. On one hand, chasing around the map for ammo in TF2 can be frustrating at times, OTOH it gives way to indiscriminate spam. Especially when some also have an unlimited clip.

Problematic elements:
-In actual use, lack of a distinctive silhouette makes IDing who you're facing difficult. Outside of advanced movement, most also have similar walking speeds. A number of the maps are dark which further weakens the visual definition of classes, as you cannot even make out their color palette properly. All of these things overlapping at various times can dramatically affect your decision-making when snap-judgment is required.

-Poor feedback on when you are getting hit by damage, and health number should be much larger and together with your ammo amount. Looking down at two different sides of your screen for that info is poor UX design.

-Unlimited clips and the overall nearly instant reload speeds removes an avenue of tactical consideration from the gameplay.

-Lack of meaningful recoil, spread, and damage falloff for most weapons. This is why Bastion is MVP every match: Point-click aiming and no ammo considerations with a weapon that is a steady stream of hitscan damage. D-Va is similar but her ROF is slower, which makes her far less effective.

-The majority of heroes are limited to a single weapon which greatly cripples their available strategies. The few that have more than one therefore lean towards imbalance. (IE: Widowmaker being able to snipe and have an SMG with considerable close-range power)

-Similar to above, projectile attacks aren't visually distinctive enough to determine when and where they are coming from and try to dodge them. It's similar to the problem TF2 has with trying to make out rockets fired from the Airstrike or arrows fired from the Huntsman. Only compounded on darker maps or shadowed rooms... things like shurikens are pretty much completely invisible.

For example, I think its on Volskaya? that has the darkened complex in the center with the mechanical motif, of which the similarly styled sentry turrets blend into the background. Combined with a lack of any audible indicator you're approaching one, means its often too late by the time you locate it.

-Matches are way too fast-paced, which lends a huge advantage to defenders, as respawning sets you a long way from the action and splits up your forces. Unfortunately when each round is only like 3 minutes or so, it doesn't give you the time to properly regroup. Game plays more like Blackops3-style frag churn than actual team strategy.

-Due to the extremely limited weapon and strategic choices for each hero, it basically forces one to blob to avoid hard counters. The downside is of course, that each side blobbing each other is incredibly boring and lacks any sort of real strategy.

-Ultimates are a cludge. No multiplayer game with "I WIN" buttons has ever been received well by players in the past. Everyone hated the asshole that grabbed the BFG9000. Similar to the general dislike of random crits people have in TF2. "I WIN" skills were also one of the big downfalls of Dark Age of Camelot in its heyday, speaking towards pvp-centric multiplayer games. They're a cheap morale boost for bad players, but not a good thing from an overall gameplay perspective.

-Pretty much everyone except Bastion are just way too fragile. Glass cannon battles are boring.

- 6v6 is fine for 'competitive' as seen with TF2 Comp, but is too few for general pubbing. Should really allow 10-12 on a side. Although with how limited each hero is, even 6v6 is more like 3v3 in TF2 terms.

IMHO, the biggest issues they should address are the lack of secondary weaponry options for most classes and the "glass cannon" problems. Both of those tie into the lack of strategy possible in the game and the penchant for constant blob fights. Unless a lot of these issues are addressed, I see this game going the way of Hearthstone and its "tournaments". It's a warm-body exercise currently like the mindless frag-churn of Blackops3.

[Tojara]

Honestly I'd go through point by point, but considering there is a lot of Bastion QQ in your synopsis I can't take a lot of it seriously. It just reeks of "I played for a couple of hours" and here are the cold hard facts about the state of the game. That doesn't really work and would be akin to somebody jumping into any game with depth for a day, only to give details about all the problems with it.

Defense having an advantage is a huge lol honestly. If you ask anybody, or even look at the statistics that Blizzard has even claimed you would know that it's skewed towards attackers normally, and by a hefty margin at some levels of play. It's the COMPLETE reverse of what you stated. On maps like Hanamaru, Temple and Volskaya, having a couple defenders die will make it pretty hard to keep the first point because the run back for defenders is longer than the run back for offense. If you aren't careful that momentum will spill over and they can rush your final point, which is the only point that defenders really have an advantage on.

Ultimates aren't really that overpowered and pretty much all of them can be countered. Off hand almost all of them have audio warnings that tell you they are happening which gives you ample time to counter them. Most of them can be countered by side stepping or using line of sight, while others require quick reactions to stun/interrupt or kill those targets as they are usually put in a pretty vulnerable position. Simple put they really aren't "I win" buttons even when layered with others, and good teams will counter ultimate to prevent a lot of damage being done, or to simply trade.

Certainly problems with the game, but Bastion, ultimates and defenders having an advantage certainly aren't ones.

Lastly, maybe we are playing different games but I have zero problems identifying who I'm facing against. They all have pretty distinctive silhouettes, their footsteps sound different and you can actually HEAR them sometimes. Outside of the first engagement, pressing tab to see what the opponents have helps too.

Your opinion though. My first night playing DoTA was a complete mess too, everything was overpowered and it was hard to identify who I was facing, among other things. But I gave it more than an evening to process, and I ended up playing it a lot.

[Aggrophobic]

Most of what you said is correct OP but:

Bastion is a problem, not because he's overpowered but because he his horrible to handle for new players and completely pointless against good players. Should be removed as he adds nothing but frustration and the defending team is at a disadvantage because the ults are just as OP as you say. All you have to do is build up ults, time them well togather and the game is won.

Overwatch is a game for people that really like Blizzard games no matter what but it adds very little new stuff for the average player and what it does add is ok at best.
Except for the visuals and lore.Thoes are really cool.

Still wish they would have made something else of Titan but this is all we were left with.

[chesder]

Most of what you said is correct OP but:

Bastion is a problem, not because he's overpowered but because he his horrible to handle for new players and completely pointless against good players. Should be removed as he adds nothing but frustration and the defending team is at a disadvantage because the ults are just as OP as you say. All you have to do is build up ults, time them well togather and the game is won.

Overwatch is a game for people that really like Blizzard games no matter what but it adds very little new stuff for the average player and what it does add is ok at best.
Except for the visuals and lore.Thoes are really cool.

Still wish they would have made something else of Titan but this is all we were left with.

Honestly when you break the heroes down, there are like maybe 7 or 8 that stand out as "Good" heroes and the rest are just niche.

Mei is annoying as hell but usually useless to either team. Cant tell you how many times our own Mei saved the enemy by walling while we're taking them all down.

D.Va is cool and all but so squishy, super easy to kill.

The list goes on. I think the issue with this game is that there are some clear ideas that work very well in a competitive teamwork environment, and others that do not. What this game really comes down to is Ultimates.

Competitive Matchmaking will end up having a Widowmaker for no reason except wall hacks, Mercy because of an emergency rez and heroes like Mcree, Reaper or Pharah who can clear crowds when played right.

I'd love a mode that had no ultimates at all and just came down to actual player skill.

[stellvia]

Uhm... I made exactly two mentions of Bastion. Both of which were used in a comparison to a broader issue with the game. Namely, the lack of meaningful spread and falloff to most weapons in the game, and EHP being a huge issue for pretty much every hero in the game save the heaviest hitters like Bastion and to a lesser extent D-Va, but she can also feel really squishy at times with how ineffective her weapon can be due to the slow ROF.

The devs flat-out stated early on that their intention for Overwatch was for players to be more durable and die less often in comparison to TF2, and yet its the complete opposite—the average engagement time between two players in OW is like 2-3 seconds. This isn't supposed to be Red Orchestra.

[Deleted]

As someone who played overwatch since the start of the closed beta and has 10+ years xp in other shooters, thank you for writing that it's been a time since i laughed so much. So concidering your VAST ammount of experience after playing for a couple of hours i'm now gonna deconstruct every single thing you said for why it is bullshit, ok? ok.

needing ammo packs would completely unbalance the whole game, no spam on shields anymore, widow running out of ammo in 10 shots to go hunting for ammo making her and other heroes completely useless while making heroes with shields completely utterly op. Spam is a part of the defense game and the main reason for picking tanks, but also the option to counter it. This is exactly what balanced means.

Silhouettes are completely easily discernible if you actually play for some time and get to know the heroes, also audio is a big part in distinguishing your enemies with audio queues as well as footsteps sounding different for different heroes, this is just a huge l2p issue which really points out your ignorance btw. Go play any other game and try to distinguish 30+ different heroes from eachother after playing for a couple of hours, ridiculous. So no this is not an issue for anyone that actually plays the game.

The feedback on getting hit is pretty much close to a lot of other shooters so i don't even know how to respond to this one, but whatever again visual + audio clues are more then sufficient if you actually know the hero you play you know by audio alone how your health is doing.

yeah about that near instant reload spead, try reloading reaper while a mcree is in your face and see if the reload is fast enough, the reload times are actually pretty good on most heroes if not all, they have downtime enough to counter someone during a reload if you actually have the reaction time and skill for it, with hitscan classes usually having longer reloads than projectile classes.

This is just lol seriously, again if you actually had played the game for a decent amount of time you would know that the hitscan heroes got dmg drop offs after a certain point and there is bulletspread on automatic weapons like soldier and widows secondary fire, with soldiers being actually controllable with 4 bullet sprays instead of spraying the magazine etc.

Yeah and the heroes only having one weapon is because that gives them strengths and weaknesses, the heroes are SUPPOSED to fill certain roles that enable certain strategies, that's why you can swap heroes during the game to adapt to situations, giving everyone secondary weapons would make them A) too strong since that would counter a weakness and B) make every hero less unique. And widow leaning to overpowered because of her secondary fire is a huge lol, it deals nearly no dmg with a huge uncontrolable spray, unless someone is stupid enough to get directly into her face running just straight ahead into her fire (which i assume is what you did that it made you think she is op), she is fucked close range.

Alright and here we are at another l2p issue, the projectiles are very distinctive unless you have some shitty graphic settings, the shurikens have a huge red trail behind them and are actually one of the easiest to see, same for hanzos arrow, it has a red trail behind it so unless it's coming straight in your face dead on from the front you see it, if you don't you can with some logic discern that it indeed did come straight at you.

lul the turret aiming and starting to fire at you actually DOES have an audio clue that you would AGAIN have noticed if you had played more than a couple of hours, and with the laser aiming at you it's really really not hard to see not even on volskaya.

And there it is, to cite blizzards own statistics, the lower the players skill the higher the win rate on defense, which actually turns around lower mid skill with slightly over 50% for attackers and with high skilled players winning around 70% on attack iirc. that in itself says a LOT about how you played the game tbh. And yeah the game is fast paced, good attackers win in around 3-4 minutes on most maps :> which is why capture point maps are considered shit by the competitive community, it's too easy to push in and capture the points with a couple of ults properly exectued together.

Ultimates being an "I WIN" button *facepalm* alright once more LEARN TO ACTUALLY PLAY. nearly everyone can be countered one way or another, which is where some of the skill actually lies in countering enemy ults properly and except for capture point maps as i previously noted ults are literally no problem and are a huge part of high level play by using and countering them properly, and CP maps are not well done atm and will probably be taken out of the rotation for torunaments.

AHAHAHAHA bastion is one of the most fragile heroes since he is completely stationary and gets taken out by pretty much any hero easily in one way or another while being defenseless. Bastion is LITERALLY only concidered good by absolute scrubs who have no idea how to play against him, he has 0% playtime in actually competitive games because of this. With proper teamplay where tanks and heals actually keep dps alive there is nothing of a glass canon battle, no one would die if they increased the health pool of heroes because players that actually know what they are doing can keep heroes alive indefinitely then, this is another huge "i died all the time QQ" point that no one would actually say that played the game for a decent amount of time and got fucked by tracers over and over again while getting healed by double support and retreating when in danger of actually dying. btw double tracer was the meta for a looooong time and is still viable in competitive, and she has 150hp

WOW XD 10v10 chaos bullshit, now that's something they could but into the weekly brawl, but please keep that shit away from people who actually know how to play the game

So yeah that pretty much sums it up, nearly every point you mentioned is 100% wrong in terms of tournament play and actual coordinated teamplay, and seeing what you wrote it's 100% pure noob QQ in the end, you played a couple of hours had no idea what you were doing, you played in the lowest mmr (yes it is there in the background) with other scrubs. Congrats for posting a "review" of a game and "identifying" problems that literally only exist when you play in the shittiest of ratings and are a scrub yourself. Next time maybe actually put in some time before reviewing a game?

PS: loved the massive QQ from every TF2 player over the open beta weekend, either give the game a chance, play it properly for a week, gather other people to play together with or go back to TF2 but the sheer arrogance of saying what is bad after playing a couple of hours is baffling.

[Deleted]

The amount of fanboying in this thread astonishes me
Overwatch is a good game and i will play it for a long time to come, but come on, you gotta be able to critique the game.
lol at everyone thinking that l2p instantly dismisses any arguments.

[chesder]

As someone who played overwatch since the start of the closed beta and has 10+ years xp in other shooters, thank you for writing that it's been a time since i laughed so much. So concidering your VAST ammount of experience after playing for a couple of hours i'm now gonna deconstruct every single thing you said for why it is bullshit, ok? ok.

needing ammo packs would completely unbalance the whole game, no spam on shields anymore, widow running out of ammo in 10 shots to go hunting for ammo making her and other heroes completely useless while making heroes with shields completely utterly op. Spam is a part of the defense game and the main reason for picking tanks, but also the option to counter it. This is exactly what balanced means.

Silhouettes are completely easily discernible if you actually play for some time and get to know the heroes, also audio is a big part in distinguishing your enemies with audio queues as well as footsteps sounding different for different heroes, this is just a huge l2p issue which really points out your ignorance btw. Go play any other game and try to distinguish 30+ different heroes from eachother after playing for a couple of hours, ridiculous. So no this is not an issue for anyone that actually plays the game.

The feedback on getting hit is pretty much close to a lot of other shooters so i don't even know how to respond to this one, but whatever again visual + audio clues are more then sufficient if you actually know the hero you play you know by audio alone how your health is doing.

yeah about that near instant reload spead, try reloading reaper while a mcree is in your face and see if the reload is fast enough, the reload times are actually pretty good on most heroes if not all, they have downtime enough to counter someone during a reload if you actually have the reaction time and skill for it, with hitscan classes usually having longer reloads than projectile classes.

This is just lol seriously, again if you actually had played the game for a decent amount of time you would know that the hitscan heroes got dmg drop offs after a certain point and there is bulletspread on automatic weapons like soldier and widows secondary fire, with soldiers being actually controllable with 4 bullet sprays instead of spraying the magazine etc.

Yeah and the heroes only having one weapon is because that gives them strengths and weaknesses, the heroes are SUPPOSED to fill certain roles that enable certain strategies, that's why you can swap heroes during the game to adapt to situations, giving everyone secondary weapons would make them A) too strong since that would counter a weakness and B) make every hero less unique. And widow leaning to overpowered because of her secondary fire is a huge lol, it deals nearly no dmg with a huge uncontrolable spray, unless someone is stupid enough to get directly into her face running just straight ahead into her fire (which i assume is what you did that it made you think she is op), she is fucked close range.

Alright and here we are at another l2p issue, the projectiles are very distinctive unless you have some shitty graphic settings, the shurikens have a huge red trail behind them and are actually one of the easiest to see, same for hanzos arrow, it has a red trail behind it so unless it's coming straight in your face dead on from the front you see it, if you don't you can with some logic discern that it indeed did come straight at you.

lul the turret aiming and starting to fire at you actually DOES have an audio clue that you would AGAIN have noticed if you had played more than a couple of hours, and with the laser aiming at you it's really really not hard to see not even on volskaya.

And there it is, to cite blizzards own statistics, the lower the players skill the higher the win rate on defense, which actually turns around lower mid skill with slightly over 50% for attackers and with high skilled players winning around 70% on attack iirc. that in itself says a LOT about how you played the game tbh. And yeah the game is fast paced, good attackers win in around 3-4 minutes on most maps :> which is why capture point maps are considered shit by the competitive community, it's too easy to push in and capture the points with a couple of ults properly exectued together.

Ultimates being an "I WIN" button *facepalm* alright once more LEARN TO ACTUALLY PLAY. nearly everyone can be countered one way or another, which is where some of the skill actually lies in countering enemy ults properly and except for capture point maps as i previously noted ults are literally no problem and are a huge part of high level play by using and countering them properly, and CP maps are not well done atm and will probably be taken out of the rotation for torunaments.

AHAHAHAHA bastion is one of the most fragile heroes since he is completely stationary and gets taken out by pretty much any hero easily in one way or another while being defenseless. Bastion is LITERALLY only concidered good by absolute scrubs who have no idea how to play against him, he has 0% playtime in actually competitive games because of this. With proper teamplay where tanks and heals actually keep dps alive there is nothing of a glass canon battle, no one would die if they increased the health pool of heroes because players that actually know what they are doing can keep heroes alive indefinitely then, this is another huge "i died all the time QQ" point that no one would actually say that played the game for a decent amount of time and got fucked by tracers over and over again while getting healed by double support and retreating when in danger of actually dying. btw double tracer was the meta for a looooong time and is still viable in competitive, and she has 150hp

WOW XD 10v10 chaos bullshit, now that's something they could but into the weekly brawl, but please keep that shit away from people who actually know how to play the game

So yeah that pretty much sums it up, nearly every point you mentioned is 100% wrong in terms of tournament play and actual coordinated teamplay, and seeing what you wrote it's 100% pure noob QQ in the end, you played a couple of hours had no idea what you were doing, you played in the lowest mmr (yes it is there in the background) with other scrubs. Congrats for posting a "review" of a game and "identifying" problems that literally only exist when you play in the shittiest of ratings and are a scrub yourself. Next time maybe actually put in some time before reviewing a game?

PS: loved the massive QQ from every TF2 player over the open beta weekend, either give the game a chance, play it properly for a week, gather other people to play together with or go back to TF2 but the sheer arrogance of saying what is bad after playing a couple of hours is baffling.

I didn't read what you wrote. It screams someone who thinks they're amazing at the game and everyone else is garbage. Pure toxic and you should stop posting.

[Anaralah]

game has actual critiqueable points, like netcode thingy which is a big issue and even distinguishable by a mediocre player like me, but what OP wrote was mosly a load of bullshit

[Deleted]

...

Ok first, don't take my jerb.. I'm the designated dick here.
Second as much as I can't agree on everything with OP, your points are not better either. Oh and you have 10years of experience in shooters? You had to start 4 years old then...

[Saverem]

Good elements:
-On their own, most of the heroes have a nice design aesthetic and unique personalities.
-Allies having LOS giving you an outline of enemies thru walls is nice.

Not needing "ammo packs" I'm on the fence about. On one hand, chasing around the map for ammo in TF2 can be frustrating at times, OTOH it gives way to indiscriminate spam. Especially when some also have an unlimited clip.

I actually prefer the ammo packs of TF2. Gave the game play more depth having to look for ammo. I wish they'd add an option to add ammo for matches.

Problematic elements:
-In actual use, lack of a distinctive silhouette makes IDing who you're facing difficult. Outside of advanced movement, most also have similar walking speeds. A number of the maps are dark which further weakens the visual definition of classes, as you cannot even make out their color palette properly. All of these things overlapping at various times can dramatically affect your decision-making when snap-judgment is required.

Disagree here, I think they have distinctive silhouettes. You have have to play the game more to get used to them. The only ones I confused from time to time are Pharah and Mercy while they were flying. I used Hanzo a lot, and with my radar arrows, I can tell which class was which hiding behind a wall just from their silhouettes.

-Poor feedback on when you are getting hit by damage, and health number should be much larger and together with your ammo amount. Looking down at two different sides of your screen for that info is poor UX design.

100% agree there. This was definitely the most annoying thing for me.

-Unlimited clips and the overall nearly instant reload speeds removes an avenue of tactical consideration from the gameplay.

Agreed. Definitely prefer TF2 in that too.

-Lack of meaningful recoil, spread, and damage falloff for most weapons. This is why Bastion is MVP every match: Point-click aiming and no ammo considerations with a weapon that is a steady stream of hitscan damage. D-Va is similar but her ROF is slower, which makes her far less effective.

Agree, this is something easily tunable though. Hopefully they fix it.

-The majority of heroes are limited to a single weapon which greatly cripples their available strategies. The few that have more than one therefore lean towards imbalance. (IE: Widowmaker being able to snipe and have an SMG with considerable close-range power)

That's just how heroes are. Instead of having few classes with more options, they have more classes with fewer options. IE if you want to player a Sniper go Widowmaker, but if you want to play a Huntsman go Hanzo.

-Similar to above, projectile attacks aren't visually distinctive enough to determine when and where they are coming from and try to dodge them. It's similar to the problem TF2 has with trying to make out rockets fired from the Airstrike or arrows fired from the Huntsman. Only compounded on darker maps or shadowed rooms... things like shurikens are pretty much completely invisible.

Didn't notice this.

-Matches are way too fast-paced, which lends a huge advantage to defenders, as respawning sets you a long way from the action and splits up your forces. Unfortunately when each round is only like 3 minutes or so, it doesn't give you the time to properly regroup. Game plays more like Blackops3-style frag churn than actual team strategy.

100% agree. Maps are too small, respawning too quick which helps defense a lot. I found that I lost like 75% of matches playing offense while winning 75% playing defense. Matches definitely catered for D.

-Due to the extremely limited weapon and strategic choices for each hero, it basically forces one to blob to avoid hard counters. The downside is of course, that each side blobbing each other is incredibly boring and lacks any sort of real strategy.

Agree.

-Ultimates are a cludge. No multiplayer game with "I WIN" buttons has ever been received well by players in the past. Everyone hated the asshole that grabbed the BFG9000. Similar to the general dislike of random crits people have in TF2. "I WIN" skills were also one of the big downfalls of Dark Age of Camelot in its heyday, speaking towards pvp-centric multiplayer games. They're a cheap morale boost for bad players, but not a good thing from an overall gameplay perspective.

Ults aren't really an I WIN button. Most can be countered or avoided if you know what you're doing. Although, I have definitely turned tide of matches with my ults. But both sides can do it, so it's even. The more skilled players who know when/how to use them will win.

-Pretty much everyone except Bastion are just way too fragile. Glass cannon battles are boring.

You must not have played enough to say this. Bastion is a lot more fragile than all the tanks and a lot of other characters. They have high DPS but they are rooted to ground and it takes 1 to 3 arrows for me to take one out (depending where I hit them). I found Bastion pretty easy to deal with as a Sniper.

- 6v6 is fine for 'competitive' as seen with TF2 Comp, but is too few for general pubbing. Should really allow 10-12 on a side. Although with how limited each hero is, even 6v6 is more like 3v3 in TF2 terms.

Agree 100% They really need more map variety. They don't even have a CTF, which is a staple of most FPS.

IMHO, the biggest issues they should address are the lack of secondary weaponry options for most classes and the "glass cannon" problems. Both of those tie into the lack of strategy possible in the game and the penchant for constant blob fights. Unless a lot of these issues are addressed, I see this game going the way of Hearthstone and its "tournaments". It's a warm-body exercise currently like the mindless frag-churn of Blackops3.

There secondary weapons are basically just changing heroes...

[Xar226]

Honestly when you break the heroes down, there are like maybe 7 or 8 that stand out as "Good" heroes and the rest are just niche.

That is intentional. When you play a hero-based game, it's really about comps and counter comps. You shouldn't go into any game saying "I'm playing this character." You should be picking a character based around your team's needs, and once the game begins and you can see the other team, around countering what they're doing well or shoring up the ways you are weak.

Some heroes may be "OP" in the sense that they fill too many niches, but the fact that many of them are niche is precisely the goal.

Mei is annoying as hell but usually useless to either team. Cant tell you how many times our own Mei saved the enemy by walling while we're taking them all down.

Sorry your Meis have sucked, but that doesn't mean she is a bad character. Good Meis can stall and advance or neutralize ultimates on a short cooldown. I was playing on Hanamora defense with a couple others, and me as a Reinhardt and one of them as Mei literally locked down the chokepoint in front of the first node 90% of the game. She would ice wall and as soon as it went down, I would put up my Reinhardt shield. When her wall went back up, I dropped my shield to let it recharge. They made a small amount of progress, about 300 points each time, on my shield. But that's still almost seven full rotations where they couldn't even push in successfully, and the entire rest of the team could focus on defending the small ledge one or two of their heroes could get to.

And to my original point: I'm sure there were things they could have done to counter what we were doing, but they didn't adapt and they lost a huge amount of time because of it. They never did take that first node, even though it is biased toward the attackers.

What this game really comes down to is Ultimates.

They're very powerful, but it works on both sides. Both sides can clear a room; both sides can prevent an ult from clearing a room. They are probably a little too important, but definitely still counterable.

Competitive Matchmaking will end up having a Widowmaker for no reason except wall hacks, Mercy because of an emergency rez and heroes like Mcree, Reaper or Pharah who can clear crowds when played right.

I'm not sure I agree on Widowmaker, at least for the offensive side. Mercy may need a slight nerf to Ultimate generation in my opinion (or, perhaps, have it count up so that your first 100% of your ult bar buys you one rez, if you get a second without using that you can rez two at once, etc), but Lucio is a very good alternative and may even be a superior choice especially on maps where his knockback can be put to deadly effect. You're probably right that one of McCree, Reaper or Pharah will be on every team -- but on the other hand you just listed half of the offensive heroes so that's a pretty solid bet either way. Tracer and Genji are good choices as well in skilled hands.

I'd love a mode that had no ultimates at all and just came down to actual player skill.

Wouldn't be surprised if this is a Brawl at some point, but I don't think you can do it in a vacuum. It would make defensive characters even harder to kill.

[vitu]

How do you imagine ctf with classes like Lucio, Tracer, Genji, Wilson, or even Mercy with the rest of the team set up for quick intervenes? While the b4dcrcs' post having a bit hateful sound to it, I have to agree with pretty much all he wrote.
Ammo packs are a mechanic that suits TF however don't see them neccesary in OW - it would make characters like Rein quite OP.
Silhuettes are easly distinguishible with >a little game time<. Feedback on hits is quite phenomenal as long as you took some time to acustom yourself with all the heroes in provided training grounds (audio and visual ques are great - also for ultis).
Reload is well balanced in my opinion. UI could use some improvemets (like moving timers closer to center of the screen) but that can be easly solved by allowing player to move, change opacity and size of any UI element by himself (much as they did in wow after countless unitframes addons were developed).
As for spread and projectile trajectories for each heroes are quite fine, though Mais' main attack could use some tweeking allowing players to actually run out of range or remove her ranged attack because now she gets you alone in a tight corridor and its usually game over. Secondary guns he has pretty much covered.
Again. Projectiles are easy to trace back unless you're getting frantic when shot at or it's a one shot kill from a sniper.
Turrets are in my opinion a bit to OP. Either make them jump targets every shot or give them a bit more of an "activation" time with better cues so you don't just walk into them unaware as otherwise it's a quite sure deathsentence unless you're a tank and there's no enemies around.
Def/attack, CP, escorts etc he covered pretty well too.
Ultis aren't I WIN button and can be easly countered if player doesn't know how to use them.
I agre that bastion in it's tower setup could use some tweeking, say give him VERY slow movement ability (enough to slowly reposition from a pole blocking him view but not enough to avoid inc fire and add some recoil so it's not only point it and LMB until dry and it would suffice IMO.
"WOW XD 10v10 chaos bullshit" pretty much... At least on these small maps.

[Tenjen]

i have no issues identifying stuff when getting hit by attacks. the game not only gives sufficient warning and direction but also gives visual indications on what type of attack it is, single shots are entirely different from shotgun pellets etc.

[Phookah]

No thanks, I like Overwatch for all the things that make it NOT like TF

[Endus]

A few direct counterpoints (and as someone who's clocked something like 500 hours of TF2 myself);

Problematic elements:
-In actual use, lack of a distinctive silhouette makes IDing who you're facing difficult. Outside of advanced movement, most also have similar walking speeds. A number of the maps are dark which further weakens the visual definition of classes, as you cannot even make out their color palette properly. All of these things overlapping at various times can dramatically affect your decision-making when snap-judgment is required.

The silhouettes are distinctive. You're just not used to them, and there's more than twice as many as there were in TF2.

-Unlimited clips and the overall nearly instant reload speeds removes an avenue of tactical consideration from the gameplay.

Reload speed is dependent on character. The pace of Overwatch is somewhat faster than TF2. Lack of ammo means you won't run short mid-push, which means you can focus on the tactics of the push rather than micromanaging resources.

-Lack of meaningful recoil, spread, and damage falloff for most weapons. This is why Bastion is MVP every match: Point-click aiming and no ammo considerations with a weapon that is a steady stream of hitscan damage. D-Va is similar but her ROF is slower, which makes her far less effective.

Depends highly on character, again.

-The majority of heroes are limited to a single weapon which greatly cripples their available strategies. The few that have more than one therefore lean towards imbalance. (IE: Widowmaker being able to snipe and have an SMG with considerable close-range power)

The primary reason for secondary weapons for TF2, at launch, was the possibility of running out of ammo. Which isn't a factor, in Overwatch. The addition of E and Shift abilities goes far in providing new features to offset any such lack; I wouldn't say Junkrat is "worse" than TF2's Demoman, because he doesn't have sticky bombs; he DOES have his satchel bomb and his bear trap.

As for the ability to swap out weapons in TF2; that wasn't in-game at launch, and they only have 9 classes; Overwatch has more than twice that. Instead of swapping weapons, you swap heroes.

-Similar to above, projectile attacks aren't visually distinctive enough to determine when and where they are coming from and try to dodge them. It's similar to the problem TF2 has with trying to make out rockets fired from the Airstrike or arrows fired from the Huntsman. Only compounded on darker maps or shadowed rooms... things like shurikens are pretty much completely invisible.

This is a big reason why it shows you your killer's kill cam after you die. Many characters are MEANT to be stealthy, and you shouldn't necessarily have an easy time figuring out where their fire is coming from.

-Matches are way too fast-paced, which lends a huge advantage to defenders, as respawning sets you a long way from the action and splits up your forces. Unfortunately when each round is only like 3 minutes or so, it doesn't give you the time to properly regroup. Game plays more like Blackops3-style frag churn than actual team strategy.

I haven't seen any data suggesting that defenders are winning more matches than attackers, which suggests that this just isn't really true.

-Ultimates are a cludge. No multiplayer game with "I WIN" buttons has ever been received well by players in the past. Everyone hated the asshole that grabbed the BFG9000. Similar to the general dislike of random crits people have in TF2. "I WIN" skills were also one of the big downfalls of Dark Age of Camelot in its heyday, speaking towards pvp-centric multiplayer games. They're a cheap morale boost for bad players, but not a good thing from an overall gameplay perspective.

Ultimates aren't "I win" buttons. The ones that hit hard, like McCree's, have really obvious audio cues and can readily be avoided. And hell; by your own argument, Medics being able to Uber people in TF2 should, have "killed" TF2, since that was almost precisely an ultimate, in Overwatch terms; hugely powerful, had to be built up over time, etc.

[Baconeggcheese]

I didn't read what you wrote. It screams someone who thinks they're amazing at the game and everyone else is garbage. Pure toxic and you should stop posting.

I don't agree with a lot of his criticisms but I didn't get that at all from his post. Being intentionally ignorant and flaunting it isn't very becoming.

[Flurryfang]

IMHO, the biggest issues they should address are the lack of secondary weaponry options for most classes and the "glass cannon" problems. Both of those tie into the lack of strategy possible in the game and the penchant for constant blob fights. Unless a lot of these issues are addressed, I see this game going the way of Hearthstone and its "tournaments". It's a warm-body exercise currently like the mindless frag-churn of Blackops3.

I really love most of your feedback and i totally back up around the ultimate being too OP, most classes being 1-shot glass cannons and the feedback of dmg. But i will strongly go against one of your feedback points: the lack of weapon choices.

The problem with TF2 atm, and the problem which it has had for a long time, is the extreme overcomplexity of the game. When TF2 started out, every thing was pretty simple. If you saw a soldier or a demoman, you knew exactly what tools that character had to use. It made it so that the skill lvl in game, was to come up with a way to handle all the characters, and if you did that, it all came down to FPS/character skill. You never felt like you were in an unequal fight, because you always knew what to expect. With the addition of new weapens, such as the eyelander and the blackbox, made the game into a complexity clusterfuck. Demomans was now both demolition dudes, but also a melee character. Soldiers now had extremly fast rockets and could 1 shot people. With these additions the game changed a lot, and you had to use a lot of time to know what all these new weapens did. You could never predict what dmg, hp and tactic the enemy team used, because everything changed dependent on weapens.

These additions made me and many others leave TF2. We felt that the game was no longer a simplicity paradise, but a game without rules. You could no longer teach yourself to combat specific characters, because these characters fightstyle and dmg output became completly random. The soldier no longer acted like the soldier, the demoman no longer worked like a demoman and the engineer was no longer a passive engineer. It stopped being a game about characters with specific features and became more like CoD, with premade loadouts.

I really like how Overwatch works with its characters. The skillcap in the game is about finding ways to survive or counter specific characters and to find the weakness in most classes. If they put in customizable weapen loadouts, i think the game would change for the worse and it would lose its identity.

[willtron]

I didn't read what you wrote. It screams someone who thinks they're amazing at the game and everyone else is garbage. Pure toxic and you should stop posting.

You didn't read it, so how do you know?

[Beazy]

Nice, another post of from a "Pro systems designer" showing us all how bad overwatch is with only a day of playtime!