Looking back: Overwatch year in review

As Blizzard’s superstar game Overwatch (that was born from the ashes of the infamous ‘Titan’ project) celebrates its first anniversary, weeks after surpassing $1billion in revenue, now seems like the right time to go over their successes and challenges, both from a player & avid observer standpoint.

Despite skeptics claiming Blizzard couldn’t do an FPS, notably after their failed attempt at a Starcraft-themed FPS (Starcraft: Ghost) that was cancelled during its final stages of development, the team took the challenge head-on with Overwatch, cleverly mixing the FPS & MOBA style clearly inspired by titles such as Team Fortress 2, the first popular ability-based FPS. Overwatch immediately managed to prove itself an excellent game as well as a franchise which lore and characters that have sparked massive adhesion, rallying hordes of fans at every major event thrown.

Relevant figures

• 30 million copies sold as of May 2017, though Blizzard isn’t very vocal on the number of active players. Previous milestones were communicated on January 27th with 25 million copies sold; 20 million in October 2016; 10 million in June, a fortnight after launch.
• 1 billion dollars in sales generated, already ranking 8th most profitable game in history
• 3 new heroes (only) added to the game since its launch: while some regret the lack of possibilities offered by the current meta, blizzard justified their decision to add fewer but better-balanced heroes, with eSports as an end goal
• 4 months: the time it took Overwatch to become more played than League of Legends, the most popular game in history, in Koreas’ cybercafes (PC Bangs)
• $20m (allegedly) for a slot in the ‘Overwatch League’, Blizzard’s official professional eSports league, deemed too expensive by many traditional gaming-houses that regularly release promising rosters from sponsorships, unable to afford the investment

Successes

The Guru

Overwatch’s witty Game Director Jeff Kaplan, through quickly famous, meme generating, vlogs baptized “Overwatch Developer Update”, has made a name for himself in the community as charismatic spokesperson praised for his exemplary behavior regarding the state of the game , humble demeanor, and understanding of the fan base. He time and again successfully defused the major polemics that gathered attention from the loyal player base and most passionate critics. Not only does he admit mistakes from the team, insisting that any criticism is good to take, but his clear, pragmatic explanations on the state of the game and the goals the team has set for it never fails to baffle even the most relentless detractors.

If you are somewhat familiar with the game and crave a good laugh, make sure to check Youtuber “dinoflask”’s montages based on the Developer Updates footage, whose videos are eagerly expected and enjoyed by the very man he makes fun of.

Setting foot into a new world

Given the popularity of their 3 previous franchises, Starcraft, Diablo and Warcraft, each with deeply immersive lore, huge sets of astute characters cosplayed by hordes of fans during each of their annual events, Blizzcon, many thought it unnecessary to design yet another universe with the same set of standards. Yet, we have to commend them on their exceptional performance — again, the most popular topics on dedicated boards are about players begging for more lore-related content. Their series of short videos each presenting a character’s background are so good (as in pixar-level good), that many wish they’d just open up an official separate ‘animated movie’ division to release long-format movies and content on a more regular basis. It is now a certitude that Overwatch won’t be the only game released in this universe.

Seasonal Events

Initiated with the in-game ‘Overwatch world cup event’, featuring custom game modes & olympic inspired character skins, the community was vocal enough for Blizzard to make it a habit of releasing trimestrial themed events. In October, they added the first “PvE” (player versus environment, by opposition to player vs players) event, where players had to vanquish AI commanded bosses rather than players in a clever rework of one of the main characters in the style of a popular fiction character — Dr. Junkenstein. You get the reference. Their most recent event, ‘Overwatch Uprising’ took the scenarios to the next level, with a leaderboard and a highly sophisticated RPG like event, throwing the team back into the past at a critical moment of the Overwatch lore. Needless to say this was a complete success as fans can’t wait to see the next piece of lore unfold before them in an immersive in game scenario coming with its own set of cosmetics & rewards.

World Cup

A few months after release, Blizzard announced they would run a World Cup, just like in classic sports discipline, except that rather than selecting players based on their performance in each country, they would be voted by committees and players sharing their nationality. The event was a huge success and a wise way to promote the game. By allowing the community to choose their players (most countries electing non-professional players), they not only allowed popular figures to establish themselves quickly in the community, thus increasing the overall audience on streaming platforms such as Twitch and Youtube, but also gave room for rising commentators & content creators to display their many skills and consolidate the communities of the different countries around them. Even though some countries had clear advantages over others, creating a balanced tournament wasn’t their goal in a first place, and they mastered the execution & production, delivering a clear message to other AAA titles: we’re coming to be a reference, and we’re coming big.

The Overwatch World Cup will be back this year, but with a much more competitive approach, with players selected by a country-based jury solely on their skill, which emphasizes the competition side of the game at a critical timing — the arrival of the eagerly awaited Overwatch league.

Challenges

The Overwatch League

In the process of trying to surpass titles such as League of Legends and Counter Strike in the global eSports scene, Blizzard announced what would be called the Overwatch League, leading to a tremendous lack of communication and organisation. After several professional teams dropped their roster, the angle they’re aiming to take with it gets clearer: taking eSports to the next level. Big money, big names, no room for smaller teams that got a chance to aim high in other games, an environment that terrifies the community that usually stays away from traditional sports because of the surrounding show-business industry. It looks like they can’t escape it anymore.

By setting a highly ambitious cost of entry, Blizzard forces out the historic gaming teams to replace them with professional sports team, carrying in their wake the stream of unwanted bling that the community sought to never let in.

But Blizzard seemed to forget that now matter how well you wrap it, people always figure out when the present isn’t good.

eSports is a mess

The success of a game as an eSport entirely relies on the quality of the game and how viewers perceive it. Coming from a Product background, there are certain approaches that we take when designing new features or environments from scratch — a good example is the popular “mobile first” approach on web interfaces: because mobile now represents the majority of any webpage’s trafic, any interface should be thought to be displayed first on mobile, then adapted to desktop viewing. It should be part of the DNA of a product. Now, if we attempt following the same logic with a popular, multiplayer, arcade oriented video game released after 2015, ‘eSports first’ has to be the rule of thumb. The incredible amount of passion and attention to detail Blizzard has poured into the game should be driven by this philosophy. Skills, maps, character design, etc. should be thought out from a “viewer first” rather than “player first” point of view , for the franchise to work out on a higher level than just being a few months of fun for players prepared to move on when the next AAA game releases.

Well, it doesn’t seem Blizzard approached the game this way. Competitive is tough to watch for people that play the game (and more so for professional casters), but it is outright indecipherable for anyone that doesn’t play the game. The addition of bright colors, flashy abilities, mobile characters that share the same design in both opposing teams transform calculated actions from a player standpoint into a firework for viewers. Team fights look like brawls and the lack of mini map prevents casters from catching key moments during the game, which doesn’t serve justice to the depth of its gameplay.

Though Blizzard made several announcements stating they were working on making games easier to watch & understand, it seems to be too little too late: the competitive community regrets the huge amount of time spent on events, rewards & additional features that don’t add much to the gameplay or spectating capabilities for the game. It is now urgent for Blizzard to realize that no matter the amount of cash they’ll invest into creating sophisticated leagues & competitions, the result will be a flop if nobody can watch the game. So far, we have very few indications that this state will improve before the Overwatch league is released, which could have dramatic consequences for its success.

Challenging the PC culture

The initiative Blizzard took to run Overwatch on all 3 major platforms-namely Xbox, PSN & PC- was quite a risk to take given their lack of experience on console, although the business success now clearly makes up for the effort. Balancing the game on 3 different platforms never was easy for them, for a company who has a clear PC culture it seemed almost unnatural to transforms as easily console datasets into action. You can’t read everything from stats. The character design for some ‘defensive’ heroes, transforming a welcoming room into a death trap filled with laser towers, made it significantly tougher for controller-based platforms to deal with.

As a matter of fact, using a controller makes it significantly tougher to deal with characters that require visor ‘flickshots’, and automated abilities such as turrets proved to be highly overpowered on consoles, as players struggled to point-out to Blizzard, their wailing barely audible beneath the roar of different concerns emanating from the PC community.

Other issues, such as reporting players for wrongdoings or negative attitude, aren’t possible on console since Sony & Microsoft have full control on the architecture that rules player communication & reporting. As such, Blizzard has attempted countless explanations to their frenzy console communities to demonstrate that this peculiar mechanism isn’t in their hands — they’re tied to the console publishers rules, and players will have to wait.

The cheating problem

Cheating wasn’t born yesterday: it has always existed in video games, the popular choice in RTS being map hacks (allowing you to see the enemy’s buildings & troop movements even through fog of war), while AimBots (robots placing your cursor on the enemy’s head in a fraction of a second) and wall hacks (allowing to see opponents through walls) ruled in FPSs. Overwatch, of course, was no exception to the rule: hacks flourished, as the franchise recently won a $8.5 million lawsuit against a company editing hacks at an industrial scale. Their handling of the whole hacking situation was pretty good in the Western world, issuing huge account ban waves one after another, discouraging the most relentless cheaters to spend yet another $50 on a game license highly likely to quickly being sent into the ‘cheater accounts cemetery’.

In Korea, however, the situation is quite different: because of the peculiar status of ‘pc bangs’ (cybercafes where most of the player base usually meets to pull all nighters on their favorite games), which are allowed to create infinite accounts for their players free of charge, consequence-free, Blizzard hit a wall. The western community was oblivious to this issue until very concerned Korean players brought it up on boards such as reddit ; there they explained that a big chunk of the most competitive players decided to play on the US servers instead of enduring a cheater in most games, playing with a high ping (imagine the game being delayed half a second, just from your standpoint) being a much better tradeoff. Blizzard is still trying to find a suitable solution, which impact could be huge given the place of video games in Korea (to the point where a candidate to the presidency released an Overwatch-themed campaign video- yes, really.)

None of these challenges are insurmontable, and heavy criticism comes from the conjunction of high expectations and deep passion that Blizzard fans have always imposed on the company since their first near-perfect games before the 21st century. Yet, I have great hope that Blizzard will keep meeting the tremendous expectations we set in them, as they’ve been doing for the past 20+ years (yes, already).

I wish them the best of luck in making Overwatch one of the greatest games of all times, in terms of experience and eSports, because Blizzard has constantly managed to put out incredibly good games and Overwatch is undeniably one of them. I’ll check back in a year.