Hero Shooter Balance

Hero shooters are games where you play as a wacky cast of miscreants doing objectives on a level to win against the enemy team. They’re characterized by having like 90000 different characters to choose from that all basically fall into like 4 different archetypes and have varying levels of usefulness in their specific archetype. Ever since Overwatch got made these games have popped up like mushrooms after a rainstorm and even in spite of the fact that I don’t play them I’m frankly fucking sick of it.

I played Overwatch in 2016. It was alright. A much different game, it didn’t really have its competitive aspects and everyone seemed generally more optimistic about it until Blizzard did what Blizzard does best and ruined it. They ruined it so hard that this game, which won the videogame equivalent of ‘best picture’, doesn’t exist anymore. Ebert’s arguments against videogames being art have never rung more true when something supposedly seen as a high achievement for games can simply be deleted like it’s nothing.

These games have always had trouble balancing themselves. I remember when I first played Overwatch a big issue was that a cowboy character named Mcree could just basically destroy anyone by stun grenading them and immediately fanning his revolver, an issue that seemed to quickly get resolved. A much bigger issue than that was that in spite of there being like 15-30 different heroes, 4 of them had already been solidified as ‘must pick’ characters.

Among these were Reinheart and the Jet Set Radio knockoff. I don’t remember who the other two were. Several hundred updates later and really the overall meta of Overwatch hasn’t changed a tiffy, with each patch still having its own ‘4 best characters’ who basically become must-picks with the 5th runt always ending up as some counterpick character.

This is just kind of how herotrash is in a nutshell. It’s a neverending juggle of trying to balance characters, because the ones that are useful get used too often and the ones that aren’t never get used.

The roster system might seem similar to a fighting game, but it’s inherently different because you’re working on a team. Picking the idiot runt for the laughs is great when you’re the only one who has to deal with the consequences, picking the idiot runt when 4 other people want to win really sucks.

But you know, I’m really talking about this like heroes are this thing that were added in for some great gameplay reason but the truth is that they’re not. Hero systems are done entirely for the marketing angle. They didn’t add Tracer or whoever the fuck because they thought she was just such a great addition and carefully considered her, otherwise they wouldn’t need to do so much micromanaging to edit all the little values of her stats.

No, Tracer was added entirely for her character design and so was everyone else. The specifics of how they work as characters is only ironed out later, because the gameplay doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we have a cast of attractive characters who can look good in advertisements and multimedia.

Overwatch was pretty good at this at first, then they added the hacker chick and I just stopped paying attention afterwards. I will say that there was no other reason Overwatch got so popular, its success can be attributed entirely to the way it looks because most people were completely unaware how the game was even going to play to begin with.

I remember hearing this was supposed to be a TF2 killer. Well, checkmate Overwatch, because you can’t kill TF2 when its busy trying to kill itself.

Hey speaking of which, TF2 is basically the reason Overwatch did this. Overwatch staff openly admitted to taking inspiration from TF2, which is weird because the game plays nothing like TF2, but it makes more sense when you realize they were talking less about that and more about TF2’s god tier marketing.

If you’re a former big TF2 player like me, you probably saw a lot of the promotional stuff that they did for the game. Look back on all that stuff, and you’ll realize something: TF2 has only had one piece of promotional work that showed off actual gameplay and everything else was entirely cinematic. Even then, that one trailer showing off actual gameplay is so comically outdated and inaccurate that it barely counts.

TF2 focused a lot more on meeting the team, announcing big goofy updates and hyping them up as huge events, animated films, comics, you name it. Everything about the game publically is entirely about its big boisterous personality rather than the class-based arena shooter gameplay.

That’s because it’s really hard to sell someone on a game entirely from gameplay alone. Most people aren’t gonna play TF2 over seeing the scout run around with his shotgun or whatever the fuck. The promise of a game with a lots of personality and memorability, on the other hand, is more than enough to get people to try. Especially these days considering TF2 went free2play a long time ago.

Overwatch copied them step for step. All of the cool promotional material focuses on character personalities and the grander story, with very little of it actually involving gameplay. Who’s REALLY going to care that Mercy got a buff or some shit like that?

TF2, despite doing this, had the benefit of being developed before they figured this out and having pretty clear design goals up until it euthanized itself. Overwatch from the start was explicitly designed to be like this, so yes it’s always going to have balancing issues.

Why wouldn’t it? You have like 40 heroes but only 4-5 general archetypes for each. They’re not going to balance eachother out or be played depending on the situation, some of them are just going to be objectively better than the others.

The only proper way to handle this would’ve been to not make a competitive game at all. Make something more like TF2, a casual shooter where the game freely lets you explore your own goals by the virtue of wins and losses not really mattering. People can freely do stupid shit like run around as an Ambassador spy trying to sneak headshots from the furthest distances because TF2 was made so people didn’t feel pigeonholed into playing a specific way for the team!

Overwatch, and all other herotrash really, couldn’t be further from this idea. There’s a specific meta you’re meant to play every time and if you fail to properly act within this meta then you’re simply going to get your shit kicked in and not have any fun. The only thing that changes with balance is that certain heroes switch between being broken and being useless.

Focusing on a tighter roster of characters that actually matter, like TF2 did, would help, but they won’t do that because these characters are made to look good, add to a universe, and make it look like there’s more going on than there actually is. So really, this problem is unsolvable simply because it isn’t a problem to begin with.

Don’t you just love it when it’s not a bug, but it’s a feature?

It’s things like this that turned me off from playing big multiplayer games for good, aside from the communities just generally deteriorating overtime. Multiplayer games aren’t made to be fun anymore, they’re made to suck up your life like a parasite and turn you into a retard.