Game Review: Overwatch

AAA first person shooters have evolved in recent years to include distinct characters with unique gameplay abilities. While the idea has long existed in other genres such as as third-person shooters, MOBAs and RPGs, FPSs have been somewhat slow to adapt. Instead FPSs have long looked to weapon choice and equipment to create the diversity, often to mixed results. As an example, Call of Duty often gets blasted for how a majority of its weapons don’t get used because a handful are much better than the rest. Counterstrike has mainly revolved around two guns: the AK47 and the M4 (three if you count the AWP, maybe 4 if you break the M4 into its two variants, but I digress). Overwatch strives to create playstyle diversity by supplying a wide array of characters with not just different weapons, but different abilities and mobility mechanics. In doing so, Overwatch provides more agency to players by allowing a wider range of possibilities to be executed.

Let’s start with what Overwatch is. Overwatch is a (primarily) a team based 6v6 class-based FPS. While the game has other game types, Overwatch’s bread and butter is a 6v6 objective gametype where you’re either capturing “control points,” escorting a payload, or a mix of both (hybrid). The attacking team’s objective is to win by capturing all points or escorting the payload to the end of its path. The defending team’s job is to limit the attacking team’s progress as much as possible. The teams then switch places, play the same scenario out and the team that made more progress is declared the winner.

Overwatch’s own description of what it does.

Obviously, the teams have competing objectives and the scenario is designed to be zero-sum. To actually win, players attack each other to access or defend the objectives. This is where the notion of Overwatch as a game about individual agency begins to arise. Before and during the match, players can choose from 28 characters (as of the time of writing). The 28 characters all have distinct individual abilities and are grouped together by three classes: damage, tank and support. The categories are familiar to anyone who has ever played a game with different class types: damage refers to relatively higher mobility characters who are the most efficient at dealing damage, tanks are characters equipped to absorb more damage while sacrificing mobility and support refers to characters that either heal or buff teammates or debuff the enemy. While these categories suggest certain playstyles, it is within these buckets that individualism really begins to arise. Within the damage category for example, there are 15 different characters with different ways of dealing damage, different mobility options and other unique abilities. Let’s look at a few: Soldier 76 who is a rifle-toting hitscan damage dealer that can run and heal himself. Pharah fires projectile rockets that have splash damage and can hover or fly with her jetpack, Genji throws damage dealing projectile shuriken and can double jump, wall climb and dash. This diversity in damage dealing and mobility leads to a wide variety of playstyles. Players can snipe at faraway targets, dive in and out to harass the enemy utilizing the close quarters oriented weapons and the high mobility options, bombard enemy formations using long-range projectile explosives, etc. This trend continues in the other categories (albeit to a more limited extent) and underscores the first point: players are given relatively more agency in playstyle than in other first person shooters through the different mobility and damage dealing options. I contrast the agency provided in Overwatch with more traditional shooters like Counter-Strike or Call of Duty. Counter-Strike is debatably the more limited of the two: there is no diversity in mobility and everything is hitscan. Admittedly the guns themselves vary but the game has long revolved around a few core guns utilized in what can be considered 5v5 aim duels. Call of Duty has historically been similar, with increasing diversity in gameplay in recent years with the addition of new movement types and character abilities. If anything, I would actually suggest that Call of Duty is moving towards being similar to Overwatch and away from the model of Counter-Strike but I digress.

Bar chart describing the distribution of character choices based on a sample of players. Note that the data is from 2017 and that characters may have been added, nerfed, or buffed since then which would affect the data. Also that the categories have changed, with defense and offense being merged into “damage” and some characters being reassigned to new categories.

Another way Overwatch seems to emphasize agency is in its “Ultimate ability” (aka Ults) mechanic. Essentially, over the course of the match, players will perform certain actions that cause the Ultimate ability meter to fill up. When the meter is full, players can initiate the ultimate ability at any time. These abilities often entail enhancing the character in some way through increased damage dealing, increased damage resistance, or increased healing. When these abilities are used in the right circumstances, they have the potential to swing the course of a battle and help a team make significant progress. While all players have ultimate abilities and can certainly use ults against each other, I consider the ult to be a mechanic to enable individual agency. The ult is essentially the game designer’s way of saying that if the player is cunning enough, or is in the right place at the right time, the player can greatly affect the match. It doesn’t even have to be in the pursuit of victory, the player could “waste” the ult for whatever purpose the player desires. Whether it’s as a gesture of overwhelming force against an individual enemy player (ulting just to destroy one enemy character) or as a way to annoy other teammates (who may have preferred the ult to be used to advance the team’s objectives), the player is allowed to decide what to do with this relatively rare ability.

Through the choices created by the ultimate abilities and the mobility/damage dealing combinations, players in Overwatch have more ways to express themselves and influence the game than in other AAA first person shooters. A game that provides an interesting alternative take on the pursuit of playstyle diversity is Rainbow Six: Siege. The game seeks to create playstyle diversity and player agency through the provision of a wide variety of special equipment and weapons. Additionally the idea of altering the environment by shooting through walls, ceilings, floors, etc. introduces another way for the player to influence the environment and game. Unlike comparisons between Overwatch and Counter-Strike, Call of Duty or other more conservative FPSs, comparing Overwatch to Rainbow Six: Siege does not yield a clear answer to me on which game offers more playstyle diversity or agency. Debatably, the two games are much more similar than alike as both place a heavy emphasis on different characters with different abilities in contrast to the rest of the FPS genre, which has been mainly about a few guns.

Sources:

https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/

https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/340988_ebfd01a2d72b45eb95126feddd084499.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/6wdrdc/weapon_usage_distribution_in_csgo_majors_by_year/