honestly the last few years have convinced me that there isn’t going to be a good competitive fighting game or fps any time soon
the saas model, some of the current attitudes towards ‘balance’ etc. are just antithetical
i put the obscene amount of time in as a youngun to have some success at a high level but i can’t imagine giving a shit about anything that’s come out lately
This Valorant thing is so beyond depressing
Why’s that?
Counterstrike is a kind of perfect that doesn’t do anything for me and it’s also 20 years old
Overwatch is bad. Straight bad. All bad
Glomming them together is like peak AAA “we don’t fucking know what makes games good here give this shit a try” exhaustion
cubes you really should’ve played titanfall 2 and siege with me
In general I’m not much for competitive fps, but I coulda got into Titanfall/2. Siege just seems… stressful.
still grimming out from that time i played a build of quake champions where a quad railgun shot wasn’t a kill
Valorant just feels like one of many Roulette bets on every possible e-sports genre. Riot will eventually get a payout if it maintains a finger in every pie I guess.
That’s exactly the circle Overwatch is trying to square. Counterstrike is pure but inapproachable. Even if you start with a friend chances are one of you is going to outpace the other and you just won’t be able to play together any more. Overwatch believes that the social space is the more important half of the equation and it’s worth making a bad shooter to accommodate groups of friends with different interest in cursor leading.
Unfortunately the only value its aesthetics convey is the naked desire to please everyone. It’s not beautiful as an object or a space. But I don’t know if it’s right to judge multiplayer games by the same object-message language we use for directed media.
Should we be judging it as a piece of functional architecture? By how well it creates a space for people and the values it promotes between them?
Overwatch is a pretty good casual game but has been a complete joke as a competitive game since around the time Overwatch League launched, and Blizzard’s attempt to make it seem less like a joke have only backfired on them (if I wasn’t rushing to get something done right now I would also rant about how the design space of hero shooters seems incredibly limiting compared to traditional MOBAs)
It’s pretty interesting how Counterstrike is its own subgenre of FPS which consists solely of Counterstrike and today also Valorant. You can’t remix aspects of it apparently, it’s an all or nothing game mechanics package
overwatch is not a bad game lol. it’s actually a great game. player toxicity is the worst thing about it, but i mean, that’s not the game’s fault. so many of its characters feel like nothing else in games (i sometimes want to reinstall it just to get in some time as my favorite wall-riding boop maniac lucio) and i mean if you’re playing it and expecting it to be counterstrike or quake um lol? i’ve had endless hours of fun with overwatch.
The insistence on having ultimate abilities in these games always feels like a concession to guarantee every player has a ‘do cool shit’ button. In reality it just anchors the meta to mass-activation of them. Every character temporarily becomes highly lethal or efficient and it feels cheap. I’d rather see more synergy in basic abilities but my interest in Overwatch died a long time ago (toxicccccccccccccc). At least Valorant seems to be applying the formula to Counter-Strike in a way that seems consistent with that style of game (very line-of-sight and location-focused).
i mean, part of the fun of ults in overwatch is negating them. if pharah is ulting, shoot her down or yank her out of the sky. soldier’s ulting? well, i’ve saved my sound barrier for something like that. etc etc. once you know what a character’s capable of doing you can be prepared to counter or avoid it, therefore i really don’t think it’s overpowered unless you’re just 1v1 w/ someone who ults in your face out of spite or frustration, in which case you’ve really kinda won despite dying…
calling Valorant a hero shooter seems silly when a majority of the skills the individual agents have are just reskinned smoke nades or flashbangs and the game as a whole is still in the CS mode of “check corners/LOS, don’t auto like a moron” (which makes the few abilities about recon and intel actually interesting)
my piece about Overwatch is whoops healers and tanks are too strong right now (well, right now is pushing it, it’s more like “since before OWL when the mighty goats came to be”) and a lot of the reaction by Blizzard has been “what if we made damage characters that can just instantly delete other players”
Overwatch sucks shit and it’s mostly the awful map design at fault, more than anything. It’s like .1 percent better than late-tf2 and way fucking worse than early tf2 because all the maps are undifferentiated gormless shit.
that’s clearly not true
all map design in OW is based around wonderful, wonderful bottlenecks and games are about “can you hold/break the current bottleneck”
witness Paris, where the first bottleneck in the map is an eight foot wide passage where the defenders get high ground and everyone loves the map so much that Blizzard just never includes it in competitive modes or in OWL
yeah, pretty sure my favorite maps are my favorites because of specific differentiated features so ???
It’s not so much that ultimates are overpowered, they just don’t allow for a lot of creative use (at a high level of play). They are extremely dominant in the meta and so a lot of matches tend to play out almost identically, even with different team comps. They also overdefine characters in some cases because the counters are well known and so only a handful of characters manage to be competitively viable.
I like Overwatch but I haven’t played it in like 2 years also the map design does ABSOLUTELY suck it’s easily the worst part.
Every time I enter a new map I continually run into dead ends or get surprised by a path that loops around to somewhere nonsensical. It’s like trying to drive in Boston.
The hero design (in terms of mechanics) is actually pretty good.
I agree that ultimates are too powerful, which reduces a lot of strategy to “let’s all use our ults in the same push”. Look at Apex for a game with better designed ults. Still impactful, but aren’t overwhelmingly powerful in a fight.