I never played Overwatch, but logged over 1000 hours in TF2 2007-2012.
Everything about Overwatch seems like a downgrade. It all seems like it is over design in response to the chaos of dedicated servers and custom map/skins. I'd rather have the chaos of TF2 and I'd rather have the games where we won as like 8 scouts vs a balanced team rather than being forced by the algorithm to play a healing spec. Even the aesthetics, there's way too much color and visual stimulation in overwatch. TF2's palate reigned in the visual chaos. Everything has to incentivize sweat cause being sweaty incentivizes higher brand engagement and higher chance to buy skins etc just capitalism over-insisting itself into the baking of the game., too annoying to deal with in my 30s! You cannot finance a pre-polycount-pack TF2 style game anymore and that's not progress to me.
Overwatch when it launched was basically "what if TF2 was a MOBA?" and it did a lot of things right from a design standpoint, while also just completely breaking the formula in other places. Folding class kits into abilities with their own keys and cooldowns was a usability improvement over TF2's solution of just using different weapon slots for everything, for example, while the way teams held and lost map presence always felt off to me relative to TF2.
I haven't kept up with it too much since then but generally disliked a lot of the big changes they did, and everything about Overwatch-but-we-stuck-a-2-on-it-for-marketing-reasons seems objectively worse than even those changes.
Crazy how TF2 fixed the "nobody wants to play healer" in fucking 2007 by simply adding healing kits onto the map, and 15 years later a massive company can't figure it out.
Nah, TF2 still has nobody wants to play the healer. Any team with a halfway-competent medic usually dominates the other one. You fix nobody being healer via healthpacks and having literally no healer available, á la Quake.
Doctor was pretty cool though with the invincibility ray. It was a cool twist on healing characters that would make you feel like a god for like 30s while you and the heavy mowed down everything in front of you.
Overwatch has health packs around the map, the same way TF2 does. And the healers in Overwatch are actually fun to play as and interesting because you don't have to just stand behind some guy with your proton pack thingy. TF2 is the game you make if you're trying to get tryhard players who want to waste their life honing their skills on a game. Overwatch is what you make if you want people to actually have fun lmao. TF2 is insanely boring compared to Overwatch. Standing around in the spawn area in Overwatch is more interesting than playing TF2.
There are a ton of Overwatch players who main playing healers. Like people who are Mercy mains probably enjoyed Overwatch a lot more than any other competitive shooter
TF2 is really a work of art. Each character has a role, they're all fun to play, they all synergize with each other.
There are custom maps and open queue! You can still play a match with 5 tanks if you wish.
And the custom maps have custom game modes. Last night I played one where everyone starts off with one character. When you get a kill you advance to the next character in the roster, when you die twice in a row you go back one. With the first one to complete the roster winning.
dunkey is 100% on the money with the balancing thing. The best balancing philosophy is making everything somewhat broken and letting your players figure stuff out.
Icefrog figured this out like 20 years ago lmao, all the other companies are just scared to go ham
Bazinga brain publishers have decided that everything needs to be an esport now, so that's what the whole game gets balanced for. It'll be horrendously unfun for like 90% of the player base but if the pros and streamers like it Blizzard won't care.
Starcraft is the gold standard of balance and they basically just did this by accident when they abandoned the game and the pros kept on playing it for another 20 years.
Honestly I'm very salty that DE just gave up on any kind of balance. I do appreciate that they significantly nerfed AOE damage, which will help a lot to keep other weapon types from being completely irrelevant.
I actually think the game's been feeling great and fresh lately, the eximus buffs in particular fucking rock. There's still a lot of forgotten individual weapons and I really wish they'd dedicate an update to fleshing out each faction with some heavy units that reward precision damage, but broadly speaking things are headed in a good direction.
There's an interesting contradiction in games you tend to see where competitive players will profess to want "perfect balance" while ultimately gravitating towards game design decisions that are highly counterproductive to that.
Fighting games are what I know and one most recent example is MK11. Competitively it's considered the most balanced game NRS has ever produced...and it's also decried as the most dry and boring by it's competitive fanbase also.
Meanwhile games like marvel versus Capcom are still held up as gold competitive standard even with extremely lopsided matchup charts.
Yoshinori ono has talked about this and has said he actually prefers there to be a few characters that are stronger than others because it makes the game more interesting. I used to scoff at the idea...but by God I've really come around to it.
Without the low tier heroes rising to the occasion, or the tier abusing villains eating shit....where is the hype?
Overwatch? Like the porn, right? Didn't know Dunkey did porn reviews.
I have never played a single minute of Overwatch, I barely know what Overwatch is but I have no clue about Overwatch 2. I'm out of the loop and I dunno man, is it really worth it? Do I really need this knowledge? Haven't I suffered enough?
I disagree with some of the criticisms. It's a good t hing they removed some of the stuns like Mei's freeze. It was very annoying to be frozen for seconds, and even on Mei's team you might stand around waiting for someone to unfreeze to attack. Taking seconds attention away from the battle.
Roadhog's hook does not one shot Moira because she can fade out an escape, but you can still kill a lot of characters! Like Lucio and Zen and whomever. When he said "when you grab someone with Roadhog's hook, you die" he was showing a video of hooking Sigma. Don't hook enemy tanks then!
Bastion's rework is also way more fun! You get to go into turret mode for brief periods of time instead of having to lock yourself onto specific locations. Now Bastion can flank!!
I get that the game requires teamwork, so Quick Play with random people might not be that fun when your team is uncoordinated and you get stomped. But I was playing last night with 3 friends (so 4/5 of the team on Discord) and we had a great time
