Gaming
What Overwatch needs to learn from Heroes
How Blizzard can take lessons learned from their MOBA to make Overwatch shine.
Напишано од Chris Higgins
се чита за 4 минPublished on
Blizzard’s team shooter arrives this Spring
Blizzard’s team shooter arrives this Spring© Blizzard
Now that the Overwatch beta has returned, and we’ve had some time to dig into the changes Blizzard have made over the winter break, it’s getting dangerously close to showtime. While some of the balance changes made to heros have been welcome (goodbye permanent rocket-turret Torbjörn!) others have been less so, and others absent entirely.
There’s a month to go until we’re officially into the ever-helpful “Spring” release window Blizzard mentioned at last year’s BlizzCon, and from our personal experiences the game is already in a solid release state. But there are still a few items on our extremely professional game development wishlist that we’d like to see made reality, many of which come from Overwatch’s MOBA cousin, Heroes of the Storm.
One of the more notable absences so far in the beta is that of Blizzard’s plans for ranked play. Jeff Kaplan, game director for Overwatch, has suggested that a more competitive version of matchmaking may need to arrive soon after release, but is one of the things being focused by the team at the moment.
“We know how important it is to our community, how vocal they’ve been about it and it’s something that we’re very excited about,” Kaplan said in a recent interview with PCGamesN. Clearly, with the competitive potential seen in Overwatch during ESL’s weekly 6v6 cups, or one of the other grassroots tournaments set up during the beta, fans are hoping for a way to transition to that scene if they meet the criteria.
In Heroes of the Storm, many players in top organisations today found their way to a team via the ladder. The Hero League, as the mode is referred to in-game, pits those of equal skill against each other to better define their ranking. Offering something similar to Overwatch players will help keep the game’s two conflicting target audiences at peace, as FPS noobs clamber in to see that Blizzard Charm while class-based veterans look for their new challenge. Kaplan’s concern over implementing this in Overwatch becomes a little more understandable when you consider that the gradations and difference between these two groups aren’t the only things causing problems.
Let’s say you’re a world-class medic. As a Mercy you’ve gone more games than you can remember without letting a single one of your allies die, but in one ranked game there’s already a medic and you’re missing a sniper. Does your woeful inability to click on enemies’ heads at long-range put you in the same skill bracket as your invulnerable medic play?
A possible solution to this is to store each player’s ranking data separately on a per-hero basis. While this isn’t something that is practiced in Heroes of the Storm, there were suggestions during Dota 2’s reborn beta client that “Hero MMR” was being prepared for logging. HotS does have a similar framework, however, for progression – another aspect introduced in the latest Overwatch beta update.
The more you play a specific Hero in HotS, the more cosmetic upgrades you unlock for them. Overwatch’s current system randomly, or at least pseudo-randomly, awards cosmetic unlocks based on playtime in the form of Loot Boxes. These boxes contain items for any of the characters, regardless of who you were playing when one dropped. And though Kaplan has suggested that the randomness of this process is governed by something smarter than simple RNG [random number generation], having more items – or at least rarer items – for your main is a way to show off your proficiency to enemies and allies alike.
Another aspect of HotS’s system, as it was originally named Hero Quests, is the goal-oriented way of unlocking further goodies. Kaplan has spoken before about how this is a tentative path to tread, given the nature of Overwatch requires players to swap characters a lot in order to be a credit to their team. Incentivising playtime, or a specific kill count on one hero could jeopardise this key facet of teamplay.
The progression system is still under construction, as is every other part of Overwatch up until – and in all probability continuing long after – release in a few months time. But with the experience of their other games, Blizzard have a strong stable to draw from to make a compelling game for casual friends and prospective pros alike to join in the fun.
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