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<Mia Kris> Scrow’s hopes and dreams afaik are that he’ll be able to play Overwatch soon and it’ll take at least a couple years before the game devolves into an unfocused, microtransaction-bloated mess
<Mia Kris> (Overwatch looks great btw and I will make a POS thread about it as soon as they put a release date on it.)
<scrowfunk> P much

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Hi, welcome. Welcome to Overwatch.

Overwatch is a new team-focused, class-based multiplayer FPS from Blizzard Entertainment. A few of us have been looking forward to it, and with its release date announced as May 24 (with a free open beta on May 5-9!), I’m hoping all of you will give it a try.

It’d be disingenuous to say this game wasn’t inspired by TF2, to a point. Most notably, the game modes are identical - attack/defend control points, payload, king of the hill. The way the characters play - and work with each other - is where the differences become apparent. Rather than muddy character roles with per-character weapon unlocks, Overwatch instead has a broad base roster of 21 characters each with distinct abilities and playstyles.

The matches being 6v6 rather than 12v12 (or, god forbid, 16v16) mean the game is fast, focused, and very heavily impacted by which character you choose to play (though you can switch while respawning). Having a diverse team composition with characters who synergize well is essential, especially with long-cooldown “ultimates” as a core mechanic. Fret not, the ultimates are not dota-style “look at the sick instafrags I got all by myself” buttons; they rarely work well in a vacuum, and instead rely on your team following up.

Sounds ok so far, but is this like a free-to-play or…?
Nope! No, god no. Overwatch will be available as a one-time purchase of just $40 (may vary on consoles). There was a lot of, um, theorizing during early beta about what kind of microtransactions the game would inevitably have, but the devs benevolently promised that all future gameplay-related content (i.e. characters and maps) would be added for free. There will be microtransactions, but for cosmetic items only (and even those aren’t microtransaction-gated, you can unlock the cosmetics through grinding too).

Ok, that’s pretty fair, when/how can we play?
As you can see in the thread title, Overwatch will launch on May 24.
There will, however, be a free open beta on May 5 - 9, which will include the full content of the game. I would urge anyone who’s even remotely interested to give it a try at that time! Myself and Rick and even that ol’ curmudgeon Scrowfunk are all excited to play, and are hoping for even more POS pals to make it a “go-to” game in the way TF2 usedta be. See you then!

 

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its like TF2 crossed with the original Monday Night Combat and its so good get it

I preordered Overwatch.

I preordered Overwatch.

I wonder how long it will be before I come back and quote this post with "lol" or maybe just this thecoli emote

Having sung the game's praises, I will also voice a couple concerns.
I'm not a fan of how the new progression system publically displays your player level ("cod level" as Scrow would call it) on the character select screen and scoreboard at all times. I think this is just going to lead to a lot of frustration over matchmaking. That is, we'll see a lot of situations like "the other team is all level 80s and our team is around level 50, gg we lose. fix matchmaking blizz." In that scenario it's probably the case that the one team is level 80s with a low win-loss ratio, thus the matchmaking is "working as intended", but it doesn't look that way to the players. I mean, I am glad they decided to make your "level" truly just a measure of time played and not tie gameplay bonuses to it, but it will still lead to perceived imbalance in matches.

Also, that latest batch of skins had a couple wacky ones, hoo boy. I really hope they don't do too many "goofy" skins. I liked a lot of the goofy stuff in Heroes of the Storm, but, I don't think it fits nearly as well with the theme of this game. They took too much care in getting the aesthetics of Overwatch's setting and character designs just right to start subverting it all with novelty skins this early! I dunno, maybe I'm mostly worried because we have an obvious precedent for goofy cosmetics coinciding with a general lack of direction in our stylized class-based shooters.

Edit: Our boy Jeff K. made this cool post about matchmaking philosophy in general, did I mention this guy is a really chill dev who does so much to communicate with players.

They've been doing some pretty good character backstory cinematics, here are the first two:

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