Have you heard? A little-known game company called Blizzard Entertainment have just put out a new game. Apparently it’s a character shooter – their first one ever. They’ve called it Overwatch. Rumor has it the gaming community is quite taken with it.
You must understand, by the way, that when I say ‘quite taken with it’ I mean ‘completely obsessed about it’. The beta was the most played in their history. More than 37 million games were played, in fact. Gametime ran to just a shade over 9,300 years. Yeah. It got played a lot.
More: Based Notch vs Twitter – Feat. Overwatch
It’s no surprise. This is Blizzard, the company behind the stupendously successful World of Warcraft (WoW). They’ve also got Starcraft in their back pocket, undoubtedly the favorite RTS game for tournaments worldwide. A couple of years ago a small team put out a card battling game. They called it Hearthstone, after the magic stones that teleport you back to your inn in WoW. It has rapidly become the most played card battling game online and has been a runaway success. Wow indeed. Everything these guys touch turns to gold.
Perhaps part of the reason for that is that they are not afraid to delay and retool games that aren’t quite working. Blizzard was beavering away on a successor title to World of Warcraft behind closed doors that went by the codename of Titan. With the unparalleled success of WoW, any new game from Blizzard would have been devoured but Titan never saw the light of day. It wasn’t right so they never released it. Apparently some elements of it made it into Overwatch. There are only a handful of developers that are able to afford the luxury of such independent thought. Most game studios are hostages to the whims of the publishing companies. It can be a very cutthroat world.
But while Titan was wrong Overwatch, it seemed, was a successful phoenix from the ashes. Blizzard were happy with it. They announced it and it looked super slick. Wonderful art, full of character, a Blizzard game from top to bottom. Along with the rest of the gaming world, I salivated.
Then over time I began to change my mind. It’s not that the game doesn’t look fun because it does. I think the real kick in the teeth came when it was announced that there would not be any kind of campaign or co-op gameplay in Overwatch. It was all PvP (Player vs Player), all the time. To my mind, it was much like Valve’s classic Team Fortress 2; a game I used to play quite a lot until I got bored with the same arenas over and over. What, then, would differentiate Overwatch? Well, nothing.
Blizzard had a plan in place to counter this concern, though; a plan they’ve used with great success over the years: amazing trailers. With Overwatch, they have drip fed some really terrific animated shorts teasing the world, the characters and the excitement of the Overwatch universe. If I could play one of those cartoons I’d be ecstatic. But of course the game is nothing like the animated shorts. This has been pointed out before to amusing effect with other Blizzard games. All that backstory is pointless fluff. When the game begins it’s you vs them with no breaks for epic cut scenes or exposition. Just frag, man, frag!
And that’s precisely what millions of gamers are doing right now. They are lapping it up. There are some really nice touches that have been so well thought out. Blizzard have put in a feature called ‘Play of the Game’ which highlights a move by one player that really tipped the scales of the encounter. It’s the perfect tool to enable an automated highlights reel to be posted to social media. If you were on the fence about Overwatch, seeing various ‘PofG’ vids pop up is a classic tempter.
But I’ll not be fooled. There’s no depth to Overwatch’s gameplay (though there is plenty of lore behind it and a cast of richly developed characters). By contrast World of Warcraft is positively overflowing with depth. It’s true that there have been some poor decisions taken for short term commercial gain and that these have harmed the social fabric of the game, but it still has an almost bottomless list of activities to consume your time.
What is best about WoW, though, and where it shines head and shoulders above Overwatch are the raids. These are epic encounters that require everyone involved to do their part. You need to play as a team to be successful and it can be hugely rewarding to make progress. Veterans of WoW will note that I am not including the keyboard-mashing, AFK haven of redundancy that is LFR (don’t worry, should you ever play the game you will soon pick up on the lingo). Blizzard tell us that only a small minority of WoW players ever set foot in a proper raid. They are missing out.
I look at Overwatch and see a colossal missed opportunity. Mechanics could have been put into the game that would have made it entirely possible to have a raid-like encounter within the Overwatch world. It would have been awesome. Blizzard could have delivered on such a promise in the way that another mega studio – Bungie – failed to do with the hype machine that was Destiny.
I should know as I backed Destiny to be the real deal. It seemed to have all the elements necessary for a PvE (Player vs Environment) guy like me. I stuck with it through the first two expansions before the scales fell from my eyes. Light on content, heavy on the grinding repetition, heavy on an exploitative loot system.
Overwatch doesn’t even bother to add any form of campaign to the gameplay. In many ways, it’s a very old school title and I can respect and even applaud its purity. But for me, it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes. All flash, no flesh. This is one hype train I’m happy to avoid.
