by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

So today is Monday, the 9th of Fall (really the 26th of October) and tomorrow is when the Overwatch beta will begin in earnest. Maybe you’ve played the game at a demo station at a convention like BlizzCon or PAX or gamescom over the course of the last eleven months, or maybe you’ve just been watching the gameplay videos released by the dev team to showcase particular characters. You might also be here because of the beta stream event a few days ago, when a couple of prominent Twitch streamers joined the devs for a couple solid hours of gameplay to build steam for tomorrow’s beta.

The bottom line is that there are some features about Overwatch that appear to be completely fresh in the version we’re going to see played here shortly, and we wanted to run some of them down for you so you know what’s going on.

Post-Match Screens

Anyone who touched the game prior to the recent streams likely remembers what the game looked like when the match ended. Let’s break down what that was before going on to what we’ve got now:

1. The first thing you see after the victory/defeat splash is the team that won, standing in a line-up of hero-specific victory poses. It’s a subtle way of communicating that the victory is made by the team, not by individuals.
2. That being said, after the group shot, you get the play-of-the-game replay, which calls out a particular player’s excellent multi-kill or clutch support play. So yes, the game might have hinged on one player’s exceptional performance at a critical point, but a single player isn’t going to be able to carry the rest of the team on her back; it’s still a team effort, and this is just throwing props for something exceptionally cool that happened during the match.
3. The points breakdown was non-specific about what the points were for or how they were earned, and it didn’t show a straightforward kill/death ratio, as you see in most FPS games. Even at this stage, the devs seemed to be communicating that the goal wasn’t really to get a high point total (even though the players who DID get such totals were rewarded by being at the top of the list) or a good ratio.

The new post-match process, following the winning team line-up shot and the play of the game replay, now goes like this:

1. Instead of a straightforward points comparison, you get the cards screen (pictured above), which shows a player’s performance with a hero they used during the match (which isn’t necessarily the hero they finished the match with). There are also hero-specific performance metrics, too: a Symmetra player got a card for a high number of players teleported during the match, for example, while a Zarya player got a card for kills with her Ultimate, Graviton Surge.
2. Players can then vote on the player performance by throwing Likes. The devs were quick to point out that this is purely for the sake of player interaction and doesn’t have a gameplay component to it at all: it’s really just there so you can show respect for another player’s performance, regardless of what team they’re on.
3. Following the card vote, you’ve got the experience summary, which lets players see their overall match performance in eliminations, final blows, objective points and deaths, compared with career averages. Additionally, there’s a chart breaking down the amount of experience that goes to each hero that player employed.
4. Following the summary, you get a hero stats screen for each hero used, which shows some of those hero-specific metrics and the specific kill/death numbers for that hero, again with career averages.

Check out this gallery for a screen-by-screen look of this process in play.

This is a lot of information that emphasizes the unique qualities of each hero’s performance over the simple kill/death ratio-based ranking. In fact, the general absence of a ranking is a great psychological tool, since you’re not seeing a display of where you compare with other players in the match, but instead are only competing directly with your own career averages. While the card screen has the illusion of being a competition, ultimately it comes down to a player’s personal preference if they’re going to vote for a big kill participation card vs. a great non-kill oriented card like the Symmetra example from earlier. The fact that the vote has no actual bearing on gameplay or reward structures really helps to center the experience on player interaction. Because when it comes down to it, sportsmanship is its own reward.

Leveling System

Something that you can see examples of in that gallery above is the new leveling system.

Completely new as of the stream event, we now know that heroes will gain experience during matches, and that this experience will be assigned to each hero based on how much they were played and their overall effectiveness during the match. The devs were a bit vague on the exact rewards (skins, tints, and sprays were all mentioned but weren’t demonstrated during the stream) but were adamant to point out that experience is only going to gate access to cosmetics, and not character power. They don’t want players grinding on heroes they don’t enjoy just to unlock something required for the meta, so instead it’s just going to be for looks.

Part of what’s great about hero-specific experience is that it helps incentivize changing heroes during the match; there’s really no penalty for picking up a different hero during the match, so even if you’re only hopping on Lucio so folks can rush back to the action faster, it’ll at least help you get some points with that hero. Overall, it helps feed the concept of your hero choice being something that should be fluid during the match, as opposed to something like Heroes of the Storm where your character and role are more rigidly defined at the start of the match.

On-Fire Meter

The on-fire meter works in a couple different ways:

1. As a measure of your own success during the map. Charging up the on-fire meter is a tool that to some extent teaches you about what’s most rewarding for your hero to be doing. Whether that is getting kills or achieving objectives or denying objectives to the other team, the on-fire meter provides immediate feedback that shows your engagement with the match. The subtle takeaway is that if you’re not on fire at all, you’re probably doing something wrong or you just haven’t been close enough to the action.
2. As a measure of your opposition and how threatening they are. The other major effect of the on-fire meter is the fact that it’s on display to the other team. So if you’ve got enemy players who are really on fire, you know to capitalize on them in order to shut them down, and that in turn shapes your minute-to-minute tactics.

To put this into more graphic terms:

Overall, it’s a pretty soft and esoteric system, but given how much it emphasizes player interaction over a strict gameplay component, it’s really a great addition and I hope to see it stay a part of the game. Put another way, it’s a system that informs player interaction through indirectly impacting gameplay: being on fire is a consequence of your gameplay, but you don’t get a damage buff for being on fire, or get anything other than that meter lighting up and a burning portrait on the team status pop-up screen. It’s information presented in an exciting way, but expert players are going to know how to use that information aside from just being wowed by the aesthetic.

The State

Given what we’ve seen from HayliNic and Ellohime’s streams, the game has clearly evolved from what we saw in the previous gameplay demos, and that should come as no surprise. Expect to see the game shift even more throughout the course of the beta, and expect to see these systems, which are all about player-facing information and the game interface itself, to be some of the things most heavily iterated upon.

We’ll keep you up to speed on what shifts in the beta as we get a closer look at it, so keep an eye out.