Tactics – Overwatch's Broken Balance
As I have explained in my previous posts, Overwatch clearly fails when it comes to its technical elements, its design and presentation elements. So now we will be talking about mechanical failings: the atomic and tactical mechanics, if you will.
If the game is meant to be strategic, it should place more emphasis on controlling the map, with gameplay elements such as bases to control, or perhaps a capture point system which would involve both offence and defence on multiple points rather than the glorified king of the hill mode currently in the game. Maybe they could even reward players with towers that attacked enemies on sight or which spawned minions to help the team, or have three central lanes with a bunch of obscured architecture in between to– Wait a minute.
As I mentioned in my earlier posts, Team Fortress 2 had its most powerful weapons use the slowest, most awkward reload methods as a way to provide a drawback and softly discourage spam. Many CoD titles and their imitators make the player need to chamber a round as part of the reload animation if the reload happens when the magazine is completely dry – not revolutionary, but something which encourages you to pick your shots more carefully. Gears of War introduced the active/perfect reload, which sped up reload times and (I believe) increased damage if you timed it right, while punishing you for getting it wrong with a jammed gun. Hell, there was even a Rambo rail shooter released a few years ago which gave you extra ammo in a magazine if you timed the reload correctly.
Overwatch has less reload depth than any of them: not only is there no variety in weapon reload mechanics, every single weapon reloads with a magazine, assuming it needs to reload at all. In addition to being lazy design, this does nothing to discourage spam and thus indirectly encourages it. If a Junkrat player who unloads five grenades has the same reload time as a Junkrat player who unloads two, then barring situations where it would be unwise to do so, a player should always empty the entire magazine.
As a matter of fact, it will. MisterCaption made a comparison video between TF2 and Overwatch (which I have embedded) recently which had some details regarding the overall usage of the different heroes in different game modes. From his commentary and the insight I have read/heard from devoted players, the game's meta is extremely stale because some characters have gamebreaking abilities compared to others. And since every hero is unique, you can't make up for it with other characters.
The most notable example is Reinhardt's shield. For those of you who don't know, a character in Overwatch is considered “tanky” with 400-600 health. Reinhardt has 500 and an ability which lets him put up a shield roughly four times the size of his body which he carries around in front of him. He can't attack while holding the shield, but his teammates can fire through it. The shield has 2000 health and regenerates whenever he isn't using it, which gives Reinhardt effectively upwards of 2500 health, which is roughly four times as much as anyone else. This health extends to his teammates since they can be shielded, so he effectively gives his teammates that much as well.
There are other tanks in the game with other shields, but Winston can only put a weaker, stationary bubble on the ground, Zarya can only shield one teammate at a atime, and D.Va only nullifies projectiles for four seconds. Reinhardt's shield is more flexible and stronger than all of these and has an unlimited duration, which means you're at a severe disadvantage without him.