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Comment by milkytron | Hacker News Reader

Haven't played Overwatch myself, but isn't it very similar to the other games that came before it?

From a layman's perspective, it seems like a copy of Paladins, TF2, etc.

Upon it's release, it didn't seem like something original (at least not to me), but rather something to compete with the unique games other studios had already created.

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As a 500hr+ Overwatch player and 1000hr+ TF2 plater, I also thought this at first. While Overwatch was certainly heavily inspired by TF2, it plays considerably differently. Overwatch has six players per team each playing one of 32 different unique heroes. TF2 has 12 players playing one of 9 classes. The abilities feel much more impactful in Overwatch. TF2 was all about supporting your engineer and racing for Uber, while Overwatch is much more about positioning and mechanics (though ult economy matters too). Removing the ammo mechanic entirely was brilliant IMO as well. Anyway, just a few cents from someone who has played a lot of both of those games.

That's what Blizzard's always done - they didn't invent RTS games, or MMOs, or collectible card games, or roguelikes, they just refined and productized them. I think it's fair to call Overwatch a huge success if you're counting e.g. Diablo and World of Warcraft in there.

It's a bit like Paladins. It has elements of TF2. Regardless, compared to games in genres like battle royale or real time strategy, or more traditional first person shooter, Overwatch is pretty lonely. I don't want to sound like I'm frothing at the mouth over their product, but I feel that it's well beyond any other first person game in terms of the variety of heroes to play and the huge scope of the balancing act that entails. The 30-some pickable heroes all play like their own game to some extent.

2D top-down MOBA games have huge numbers of heroes and a lot of variety, but I think that's an easier lift to balance in that type of game and with that type of control scheme. Other 3D "hero shooters" opt for less variety between heroes or a smaller number of them, or rely on other gameplay elements to help balance things.

I think that the design effort that it took to produce Overwatch is tremendous, and it isn't easily replaced or replicated, though it will be eventually as long as game design keeps on marching forward.

I'd say that the hero variety wasn't a good thing honestly, they never did a great job of balancing it. They shut down duplicate heros, then the game lurched from one overpowered unpopular meta to another until it got stuck on goats meta and they gave up and forced 222 team comps, which is when I stopped playing. There's a good reason other hero shooters kept the scope low, noone knows how to balance a high scope game for all levels of competitive play, and it's likely that you can't.

Fair criticism, I guess. I think the state of balance is very good right now, it's just a highly cooperative game with specialized roles.

They perfected and introduced a lot of concepts that are now part of the genre of competitive FPSs. As much as I thought it was just a me-too kind of game before playing it, once I did manage to play it, I had to admit they went beyond what would be expected. They tried a lot of novel things.

I do think Activision-Blizzard is a shell of what it once was, but that game was definitely a positive, not something they just phoned in.

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