Computer game mode
To start the year 2022, we look at the games, genres and major platforms that create computer games to see where they are when we start a new year.
Overwatch, despite what every tired streamer and burnt player might make you believe, is far from dead. Blizzard’s inspired MPSA FPS may have lost its relevance to games like Valorant and Apex Legends, but it remains distinct and solid in its place as the least traditional shooter there is.
For most of 2019, the game’s identity has faltered and Blizzard seems to have forgotten what made the game so extraordinary when it was launched in 2016. His intense emphasis on competitive play and his e-sports league peeled off the parts of the game that made him accessible to a variety of players. The heroes grew in mechanical complexity and the margin of error in a given game was reduced. Overwatch felt like it was designed to be watched casually for fascinating moments, “jumping” and playing only by the most skilled players.
It was so backwards that they finally took a step back in the late 2020s and moved Overwatch towards a game where non-traditional (and also more accessible) heroes with hammers and bows are just as essential as those with guns. Fire battles once ended instantly with some well-positioned head shots, but now battles are erupting into fights and you have time to make tactical decisions. In terms of balance, Overwatch is as close as ever to a chess-like team game, which he always promised to be, and a game that no other shooter has successfully mimicked.
With far-reaching balance changes (and especially, with no new heroes coming out since 2020), the development team was able to recreate the game’s rich and team-based gameplay. But then Blizzard becomes from within. Not long after Overwatch’s game manager – and the face of its iconic developer update videos – Jeff Kaplan, left the company in April 2021, Activision Blizzard’s long history of harassment and workplace discrimination was widely publicized. Since more high-profile Blizzard employees left, the company has been sued by the California Department of Employment and Housing, which is under investigation by the SEC, and will be acquired by Microsoft for $ 68.7 billion in 2023.
2022 was going to be a very important year for Overwatch before anything happened with Activision Blizzard. Now there are more questions as to how the game and its upcoming sequel stood not only in a global epidemic but in a disaster that is still unfolding in society. Little has been said about the sequel, let alone what will happen to the current game after it eventually comes out.
So I Overwatch now?
Overwatch is still really fun. It has problems; Some exaggerated staff heroes have not been relatively touched for years, such as Baptiste’s oppressive grip on the support category and Sigma’s crucial ability list. But for most people out of the high-ranking lobby, the game maintains a satisfying shootout of a superhero and a team-based game that is He always excelled. Almost every hero in the game staff can not only be played but useful in a variety of maps and team compositions. There are plenty of modes to play whether you are looking for silly fun games or competitive resentment games that require an adaptive understanding of the game. Queue times are not bad either. In 2019, Overwatch introduced the role queue (which locks players to selected roles), increasing the time it takes to enter the game, but not long after we got the While You Wait option that allows you to play deathmatch or spend time in training while looking for a match.
There are a number of questions about how all this will work and how some heroes will need to change to fit Overwatch 2.
Beyond repairing equilibrium and cosmetic events, there have been no massive new additions to Overwatch since the 20-year-old Echo damage hero. Blizzard said then that she would be the last heroine before Overwatch 2 came out, but it came back even when we thought Overwatch would be released in 2021. The game is a bit stagnant, but that does not mean that the game has lost what made it special. The complex core of Overwatch, where teams of six collide in a colorful maelstrom of skill, ability and ultimate photography winning games, is still intact, which is what made so many people log in every day.
But everything is temporary. As far as we know, Overwatch 2 will move the game from the standard six-on-six to five-on-five format, leaving one tank for the team (drop from two) and adjusting all the heroes to make up for less armor on the battlefield. It will also remove the unpopular Assault (or 2CP) game mode and replace it with a new mode called Push. There are a number of questions about how all this will work and how some heroes will have to change to adapt to the new game. Blizzard has teased some changes in its presentations regarding the sequel, but almost none of them have reached the current game, so we have no idea if those changes are good yet. Right now, the game balance is like trying to read tarot cards to figure out what the future holds.
What’s been going on lately?
- Annual and limited-time events continue according to schedule. Overwatch’s regular events, such as Halloween Terror and Lunar New Year, continued to run, offering a bunch of new cosmetics and limited time slots. The developer has also released short stories and comics that come with Skin and other rewards for watching Twitch streams.
- Experimental fixes for content creators are a new regular occurrence. As part of an effort to keep the game fresh and take advantage of its most inverted fans to the public, Blizzard has started letting well-known content creators offer Changes in balance For application in a limited, experimental mode of the game.
- Blizzard has met with popular content creators to help plan 2022. In late December 2021, Blizzard held a number of meetings with content creators to brief them on their plans for 2022. Critical players Expressed excitement for what is to come, which led many to believe that more significant updates and maybe a beta version of Overwatch 2 will arrive this year.
- Overwatch League is still on its way to play Overwatch 2, somehow. When the fifth season of Overwatch League kicks off in April, it will use “Early Construction of Overwatch 2,” according to a statement issued to Dot Esports This is the league. We know very little about the sequel, and playing at the highest competitive level in an unfinished game seems dangerous, but we have not heard anything different since last year.
Are players satisfied?
If you search for Overwatch on Reddit or Twitter, you will find tons of unhappy people, but if you go into the game, a lot of people seem happy enough to continue queuing for more games. It’s hard to judge exactly the overall player base of Overwatch, because there are so many disagreements as to which direction the game should go. Professional Overwatch League players want to see the most competitive game, where skill and consistency are rewarded, and casual players (read: most players) want the game to remain as spontaneous and asynchronous as how the game was launched. But even with all the different opinions, there are a lot of people who play.
If there’s one thing that’s true about Overwatch players right now, it’s that everyone really cares about the game – and that reinforces the reviews about it. We’ve had all this time since the game’s debut. Many other games pulled ideas from him, and did it better in some cases, but no game has really managed to grasp the reasons why people return to Overwatch over and over again. And right now, with very few updates, people are continuing to play desperately in a game that largely refuses to push anything forward until Blizzard can sell us another game.
Perennial players are burnt out, frustrated by the same problems or exhausted from Blizzard’s refusal to suppress much of the toxicity in the game’s text and voice chat. And the new players, which the game still gets from frequent sales and free periods to play, enjoy what they have – even though the game can do a much better job of combining them. Each passing day puts more pressure on what Overwatch 2 will be, and it remains to be seen if it will be able to withstand it.
When is the next big update happening?
Recently, Overwatch senior community director Andy Balford said that “the current rate of updates is not something we are happy with,” he said. The official forums. As far as we know, for 2022 there will be more frequent updates to the game. It’s not clear if this is more event skins, content creator patches or an Overwatch 2 beta surprise. With the recent delay of Overwatch 2 for 2023, the current game must make it another final year. The team must plan enough to justify meeting with content creators last year, which is the only promising development of 2022 so far.
Overwatch can not simply repeat everything it did last year without losing tons of players, especially those who play in its e-sports league. This is the year he needs to give concrete information about the sequel and hopefully let people play in it. Expectations for a modern, live service shooter have changed so much since 2016, and Overwatch, in its current format, is unable to meet them. It will be a problem if we get to December and we will not even know if we will have to pay to play the upcoming game or if he will be free to play in any way, and if he continues to use a system loot box.
It’s Blizzard’s job to make Overwatch relevant again, and in order to do so, it needs to recreate what made every other game come up with ideas. The game is in a solid place for players to discover it again and dig deep, all it needs is reasons to stay around when so many other games steal its attention from it.