The Causes of Overwatch’s Fall
Around the summer of 2016, Overwatch was considered the FPS that you had to get your hands on. It featured very satisfying mechanics, a wide range of different characters to choose from, a large selection of maps to play from, and a lot more. It was a game I grabbed day one and fell in love with almost immediately. I had only been gaming on PCs for a year at that point so I was a little rusty when it came to playing games, but it immediately felt like something I’d enjoy and that I’d want to get better at.
This month will be the three year anniversary of the game and if you want me to be honest, I feel like we’ve been in an age now of the game being in the worst state it’s been in for its lifecycle. In fact, I read today that Overwatch’s current player count has dropped due to stagnation over the first quarter of 2019 which is depressing to hear. When thought about though, it actually makes a lot of sense. I want to go over just what has caused such a downfall for Overwatch over the years, and how exactly we can go about fixing these issues.
Loss of Variety in Events
If you’ve had the chance to play some of the Overwatch events over the years, you’ve likely come to notice that after the first year events began to lose their charm. This is due to an almost complete loss in a variety of events (excluding one in particular). For example, the Summer Games event offered a variation of soccer known as Lucioball in its first year which was a ton of fun and brought something fresh and new to the game. The second year that event was on, all that mainly came for it was a new map for the mode. This was obviously an annoyance but was put up with because the mode only came around for three weeks in a year. When it came to Year 3 of the Overwatch events though, that mode remained the exact same with yet another new map and people began getting fed up.
This isn’t the only event that’s had this problem either. Every other event excluding the Archives Event (an event providing a PvE story mission for four players each year) has been the same excluding minor differences like the Winter event getting one new mode in Year 2. Even the Archives event has been stagnating with this year’s mode feeling very much the same as last year’s excluding the map itself. If Blizzard can maybe breathe a little more life into these events to give them more variety and enjoyment for players outside of just skins, it might entice them to return more often to see the new content.
Lack of Balance Updates
As it stands right now, Overwatch generally has a meta hero composition that generally will outperform other compositions in most scenarios (at least as far as Masters+ goes) and that system is fine. The issue that comes with it though is how often that takes to change. In the early days of Overwatch, it generally would change about once a season and that was honestly perfect. It made the game feel continuously fresh and new to get back into and even if a meta comp wasn’t very fun to play with or against, you knew it wouldn’t last that long enough to kill substantial interest in the game.
For reasons that don’t quite make sense, that system changed after the first year and metas began to last closer to eight or nine months. This inevitably caused players to lose interest in the comp scene much more than usual. I’ve watched many videos of high ranked players getting very mad with annoying metas being left around for much longer than they truly need to be and I feel like this is entirely Blizzard being at fault. After the first year they began to put out balance patches with a lot more of a restrictive mindset (which I have to assume is to cater to the casual playerbase) and its become unhealthy for the game. More frequent balance patches would definitely help to give players more variety and maybe cause them to stick around longer.
Unfortunately though, I don’t entirely see the Overwatch dev team taking a difference stance on that. As Jeff Kaplan said in regards to people wanting metas being switched up more, “we have a mode for you people. It’s called Mystery Heroes” which completely ignores the point of player’s frustrations.
Removal of Counterplay and Issues with Certain Heroes
While the way Overwatch’s heroes are structured allows for certain heroes to counter others well, there was always a way that the countered hero could outplay the other hero. For example, Widowmaker is naturally countered by Winston but can outplay him by positioning herself right and using her grapple to gain distance. This counterplay does still exist in the game though there’s a lot that was removed for a time or is removed entirely. For a game where players generally have a main character they want to play, this makes the game incredibly unenjoyable for them.
For example, Doomfist could use his Meteor Strike on a Zenyatta and without the Zen having Transcendence, there was essentially nothing he could do to prevent his death and this was a huge problem for quite a long time. Its been fixed since but the damage done is still there. Blizzard really need to get on top of that kind of thing much faster than they did prior, and it’d be nice to see it fixed in a few weeks rather than months down the line.
The same goes for the issue of giving too many players the ability to stun other heroes (or any sort of debuff ability for that matter). This makes characters like Reinhardt who are heavily affected by stuns the inability to enjoy the game because they spend at least half of it being unable to do anything but watch their health go down. Once again this issue has been fixed, but it took much too long to fix it. This issue needs to be improved drastically.
You see this in Sombra too who currently reigns as my least favorite character to go against in Overwatch. Trying to fight a character who decides in half a second that you can’t use any abilities for a few seconds can be incredibly frustrating to go against and often results in death. That to me just feels unenjoyable to go against and I think a lot of players would agree with me on that point.
Issues with Ranked Play
Last but certainly not least comes the issues with ranked play. A lot of the issues I’ve already talked about obviously factor into the issues with ranked but it does have its own glaring issue as of recent. Whenever you lose a ranked game, it feels very frustrating as a lot of the time teammates are the big issues with many throwers, trolls, etc. and the majority of that problem is due to the players themselves and not to Blizzard’s end. Even when you win a game, it doesn’t feel all that satisfying and it makes competitive feel like a huge waste of time. I haven’t even played it in nearly a year myself (at least seriously) because it just feels very unenjoyable. I’m not entirely sure how to fix this one as I’m not a Game Designer at heart but this definitely should be looked into just a little more.
And that about wraps up some of the biggest issues. Of course there are more, but those are the large ones that I feel need be given more attention by Blizzard. This article is of course, not to say that Overwatch isn’t fun to play. I wouldn’t be still playing it if it weren’t fun at times and I do enjoy playing it casually with friends, but it has its fair share of flaws that I feel I’m getting quite fed up with. Maybe one day we’ll be able to get somewhat close to the glory days of this game but that remains to be seen.
