What makes Overwatch so good?

Posted by Ben Hoffman on March 18, 2017 · 2 mins read

Overwatch is an award winning, unbelievably popular Esports title. But why? This is my take on some of the reasons why.

Every game is a different experience

There is a new and interesting challenge posed to the player every game based on the team compositions of both sides. It is a small puzzle of how to beat each character every game.

Beginner Friendly, yet Challenging to Veterans

The game is very easy to learn for beginners, and yet still hard to challenge for veteran players. This allows for a new players to not get frustrated when they first start playing. Blizzard even labels each character based on how hard they are to play to make it easier for newcomers.

Rewarding

There is a constant reward to the player. Even if a player is doing poorly, they are still rewarded by their Ultimate ability charging, or the objective being captured, not to mention experience and loot boxes. This takes down the frustration for players, and gives players a reason to keep coming back.

Meta Game

The meta game. There is a cyclical cycle of which hero is “on top” in the current patch. This is very similar to League of Legends that regard, where with very minor patch tweaks, a lot of the community will shift towards one more powerful character. This then leads to people having to find a way to counter said character in new and interesting ways. The perfect unbalance.

Unique Characters

Every character in the game feels as though they have a unique personality and story. This is brought about by Blizzard comics, the community, and small voice lines hidden in each game. This adds a great aspect of people having to piece all the bits of what exactly the Overwatch story was. This doesn’t look like it will be coming to an end any time soon with the consistent updates and new characters.

Sound Design

Last but not least, the sound design in this game is fantastic. Every weapon, character, and action has a very distinctive and fun sound attached to. I really commend Blizzard in this regard, because there have been a lot of FPS games that just totally dropped the ball with sound.

Conclusion

Blizzard did a fantastic job with Overwatch, and they are doing a fantastic job of keeping up with the community, and I really hope that we can all learn something from Overwatch as game developers, I certainly did.