Wrecking ball is awesome.
It’s a fantastic hero executed beautifully. The character art and designs are cool and original, and the gameplay dramatically mixes up everything that Overwatch is.
Wrecking Ball feels and plays like a character so creative that he could star in his very own Nintendo game. He would be perfectly at home in a 2D 16-bit indie platformer, or would work equally well taking the front page of a First-Person Shooter designed entirely around his mechanics. Already, people are stringing themselves to the bell in the middle of Hanamura point A, flinging themselves around cars and through buildings, and utterly demolishing the competition with this hamster ball of death.
Once again, Wrecking Ball is awesome. It’s also game development suicide.
Overwatch’s vast array of characters is one of the most interesting things to come to gaming in a long time. The fact that Blizzard Entertainment has, until now, kept all these heroes somewhat balanced against one another is a true achievement. It’s an achievement that will only grow more and more impressive as the roster continues to grow. And it’s an achievement that, as the Overwatch Development Team is surely already aware, is impossible to sustain.
In a prior video (That I will add if I find it… If this is still here when you edit this, I didn’t find it), several members of the Overwatch Development Team discussed how difficult it is for them to make maps due to the number of movement options they have to account for. More movement options mean different characters can reach different attack angles, and the team has to go through the very slow and tiresome process of ensuring that none of those angles grant players an unfair advantage over their opponents. As more and more heroes are added with more and more movement mechanics, the process of developing and releasing maps will either be forced to slow down continuously or will fail to account for the abilities of a certain few heroes. Delayed map development will push back the rate at which other content is being released, in addition to the ever-increasing number of hero re-works that are requested by fans as more and more characters are revealed.
It’s snowballing out of control. One might even go so far as to say it’s Wrecking Ball-ing (ha) out of control. If the game makes it another two years at its current model, it will be a true miracle. At this point, it has a roster comparable to many smaller fighting games, and balancing a team shooter like Overwatch is arguably more difficult than balancing a fighting game, a genre famous for its delicate character balance mechanics and absurd skill ceilings.
But this shouldn’t really be a problem. If fans from outside of the Game Development sphere are able to look in and see this, those inside the machine have surely noticed the malfunctions far sooner. And if they’re not worried, then they most likely have a solution up their sleeves. Which might be a sequel.
I’m going to take a personal aside here: The people at Blizzard entertainment are very smart. They’re a lot smarter than I am. They put a hamster ball into a First-Person Shooter. I think this proves how clever they are.
A true sequel to Overwatch is an odd concept. From my loose understanding of how something like this might work, Blizzard would release a revamped version of the original game, perhaps with a slightly different art style and a higher maximum for the graphics, while still allowing potato-quality systems to play to their heart’s content. This revamped “Overwatch 2” would feature a subset of the original roster with a mix of new and old abilities, maybe one or two new integrated mechanics such as a fourth type of health (Armor, HP, Shields, ???) or two ultimate abilities for every character, and a few brand new faces. Moving forward, game development would look similar to that of the original Overwatch, with the addition of new maps and heroes until that game gets too big to sustain, then “Overwatch 3” would release, rinse and repeat.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense. It doesn’t sound like a great idea. Blizzard probably is not going to do this, but I simply can’t comprehend another way that they could keep the game going in its current state. One way or another, the game will get too big for the team to hold together, and a re-release of some kind will be necessary.
How that will happen, I’m not sure. But the Blizzard team isn’t really afraid of it, or too concerned with that day coming. Hence why they put a Hamster Ball in a First-Person Shooter.
Featured Image Via Flickr / Nocha_Productions
