1/10/2024 0 Comments Overwatch season meta memeAnd Mercy, a hero derided by many high-profile players, underwent the game’s first major hero rework, removing her mass Resurrection ultimate and greatly reducing the frequency that she could undo fight-winning kills. The kill feed, which displayed ally and enemy eliminations, was clarified to show individual abilities and ultimates for increased readability. Everything from the UI, to individual heroes were tweaked for both the highest skilled players and the spectators that watched them. Both of these things would signal the start of Overwatch losing its initial casual character in favor of becoming a more polished competitive game and commodified esports product.Ĭhanges to the game started to reflect this new goal. Paired with its first Overwatch World Cup tournament, Blizzard announced the start of the Overwatch League, its official professional esports apparatus. Later that year, during Blizzard’s annual fan convention BlizzCon, the company made public an intention it had all along. For the first time, Overwatch had authoritative voices commenting on the game's balance and competitive integrity, which would have a future impact on development choices. When the game introduced a competitive mode in June 2016, it created a competitive scene and highlighted its best players, many of whom were former pros and streamers from other games. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2018, former Blizzard Entertainment President and co-founder Mike Morhaime, said, “It was very early on that Jeff Kaplan had even reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, you know, we want to learn about what you've learned about with esports.We think that Overwatch has the potential to be great.’” This era of the game had the most potential and space to be anything it wanted to, but Blizzard had bigger plans in mind. Success and skill, in the early days of Overwatch, felt very much oriented towards fun, with a very low barrier of knowledge to enter. The homages to favorites such as Halo 2, Quake and Team Fortress 2 were obvious in the movement and abilities the initial heroes had, but what made it brand new were the inflections of MOBAs and MMORPGs in how the gameplay was devised.Įverything about it felt like a healthy move away from the overt military aesthetics and K/D ratios of other shooters, preferring to reward people with post-match cards and Plays of the Game sizzle reels for participating skillfully. Playable characters, called heroes, were also broken into three roles, with the “holy trinity” of tanks, DPS and support, a concept that many Blizzard fans were familiar with. It relied heavily on teamwork and fun, easy objectives to work towards in all of the game modes. Despite being a first person shooter, it was clearly made for people who may have never played one before. Overwatch followed Blizzard’s pattern of taking a particular genre and doing their own bubbly, accessible take on it with spit shine polish.
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