Blizzard Talks Overwatch s Balance Progression What Makes Tracer Rad

Obviously there are a million different team compositions and ways to play Overwatch, but what are the core trends you're seeing with the best players. In other words, if someone is looking to get really good at Overwatch, what do they generally have to do?


Yesterday evening (December 1st, at the time of writing this) was the night of the annual Game Awards show, a lavish live-streamed spectacle where the best and brightest of the video games industry gathered in Los Angeles - in order to receive awards voted on by industry peers and journalists, celebrating the year in gaming. It was a good night for big-name hits like Uncharted 4: A Thief's End , the reboot of DOOM and Blizzard's mega-selling team shooter **Overwatch ** , as well as respected independent titles like That Dragon Cancer - and it was a chance for those in attendance to show off all-new trailers for upcoming tit
In terms of visuals, Overwatch is technically fine. It isn’t pushing any graphical boundaries, but it looks good enough and gets the job done. Overwatch features a colorful palette with crisp visuals that is aesthetically appealing and really shines on maps like Hanamura. What is important is that Overwatch maintains a solid 60 frames-per-second, which is good considering it is a fast-paced shooter. The rest of Overwatch’s presentation is solid. The few spoken lines of dialogue are voiced well and many are genuinely funny. Nothing here is as grandiose as Starcraft 2 or Diablo III, but considering Overwatch doesn’t have a huge campaign, it’s perfectly understandable.


If you’ve been on the internet this past week, you’ve probably been inundated with story after story about Overwatch , a team-based shooter from Activision-Blizzard that’s blowing away fans and critics. Based on the overwhelming acclaim and massive sales numbers (it actually sold out on Amazon ), the game is well on its way to becoming a fixture in the multiplayer FPS scene. With that in mind, here are **12 Things You Need To Know About Overwatch
I’ll admit, when I first heard of Overwatch, I didn’t pay much attention, probably because Blizzard games have never really caught my attention in the past (I’m not the biggest fan of RPGs or RTS games). I did, however, take the plunge and tried out the game’s open beta a few weeks ago and walked away pleasantly surprised. Oddly enough, though, it wasn’t the core mechanics or technical polish that caught my immediate attention. Rather, it was Blizzard’s attention to inclusivity that impressed me the most.

Bastion is a good example of that. He's a hero where the original ultimate we had on him, which we actually showed at Overwatch's first BlizzCon, just wasn't really working. We actually had an internal joke: what's the ultimate of the week for Bastion? It felt like we were doing that for half the project.

It's really that feeling of working as part of a team, mastering the characters and controlling the map that makes Overwatch such a joy to play, even without getting the content you want for your favorite character. In one match, my team and I made a last defense on a capture map. Our Bastion entered turret mode to spray one entry point, and Reinhardt held up his shield at another with Zarya close behind, supplying him with a personal shield. Soldier 76 sprinted to the front to deal heavy damage with Mercy flying behind providing a damage boose. All the while, a Widowmaker hid at the very back, ready to snipe enemies that somehow made it past our defenses. In a world filled with so many "go-it-alone" multiplayer shooters, having a game like Overwatch that offers so many unique ways to play as a team is refreshing and fun.

The 21 characters are grouped together in 1 of 4 classes: Offense, Defense, Tank and Support. Though characters may share a class, each plays completely different from one another. For example, Soldier 76 and Tracer are both part of the Offense class, but each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Soldier 76 players like a traditional Assault character from a Battlefield game. He deals good damage at mid-range and can even drop a healing beacon, but he doesn’t have a lot of health. Tracer, on the other hand, has small clip-sizes and low health but is fast and able to rewind time to pull herself to safety. There aren’t two characters that are similar, and there isn’t a single character that is a perfect "all-around" character. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, and learning how to play to those strengths and exploit enemy weaknesses is all part of the game’s meta.


That parenthetical is important--it’s perfectly understandable to feel uncomfortable with a game asking up to $60 up front, and then asking for more in the form of smaller fees. However, linked site Overwatch isn’t a disaster like Dead Space 3 , which integrated its microtransactions into the heart of the gameplay. Instead, it limits its extras to packs of "loot boxes," which contain rewards like skins, victory poses, and spray tags that are all earnable in-game simply by playing. It doesn’t create separate player bases, it doesn’t result in a "pay to play" or "pay to win" situation, and it doesn’t detract from the fun of the game. Everyone is still on the same level, and they’re going to stay that way, becaus