Overwatch

I have never been this excited for the launch of a multiplayer game. Overwatch is a class-based team FPS game coming out this month. I’ve been following its development and updates for a very long time now, and I finally got a chance to play the open beta last week. The beta was only playable for a week, but I already logged in 50 hours and have officially screwed up my sleep schedule.

The game is a very stylized take on the old-school shooter genre. The creators of the game grew up playing FPS games and wanted to bring the classic feel of the original Quake and Team Fortress Classic into a modern-day shooter. There is a ton of lore behind the characters and some fantastic origin stories. It’s also Blizzard’s first IP in seventeen years, so the reveal of the game was a really big deal in 2014.

It’s hard to put into words why this game is so amazing. It basically plays like a more sophisticated and strategic version of Team Fortress 2 — my most played game of all time. There are 21 different characters in Overwatch, each with their own special abilities and a unique ultimate ability. That’s a lot of different varieties and combinations of playstyles.

Gameplay can be described as fluid, fast-paced, and insane. There are many moments where there’s so much going on that all you can do is keep moving and shooting and hope for the best. This is why it’s a 6v6 game. There are many characters who have seemingly easy gameplay mechanics but are actually quite difficult to master. The skill ceiling is fairly high, so players who want to improve will keep improving, while the rest of them can choose to play casually.

The interplay of team dynamics and ultimate ability combinations is where this game really shines. One player’s ultimate pulls the enemy team into a gravitron surge, clumping them all together, while another teammate’s ultimate drops a bomb into the vortex, eliminating them all. Another player’s ultimate freezes all enemies in a certain radius, while a teammate unleashes a barrage of rockets supported by the rest of the team’s attacks. There are an endless number of ways to play and innovate here.

The makers of this game clearly poured their hearts out into every little detail of the game. The level design is phenomenal, the environment art is breathtaking, the 21 different heroes are extremely well-balanced, and there’s lot of subtlety and nuance with which character development is handled via voice lines.

Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007, and I’ve logged about 1200 hours in it since then. It’s been almost ten years. I could not find any other multiplayer game that provided the skill-to-fun ratio that TF2 offered. Until now. Overwatch promises to deliver on so many levels. It’s also made by Blizzard, who have an excellent track record for post-launch support of the game.

A part of me is afraid that I’m going to lose the entirety of my available free time to this game, and another part of me is really excited. This just goes to show the kinds of connected digital experiences that can be created by a dedicated team focused on delivering nothing but excellence. It connects humans from all over the world in this wonderful fictional world that people want to spend time in. I couldn’t contain my excitement, so I had to write a blog post about it. The world needs heroes!