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An Actual Review of Overwatch & Paladins

Jun 06, 2021
Alright, I know despondent detachment is my thing right now, and this might be a little worrying to hear, but I've

actual

ly been wanting to make this video for a long time. I mean, I probably shouldn't be, considering this is the first time I've been warned about the backlash I'm getting into, but being able to act on my own right and be persecuted because people didn't like my video game. This opinion seems like a completely new experience to me, and with the way things have been going lately, it's probably not the best idea to shoot them down.
an actual review of overwatch paladins
Joking aside, I can't help but notice how quickly discussions about these games tend to devolve into playground slap fights, and since I'm not terribly interested in having my glass filled with a carton of strawberry milk, I don't think so. that can Go further without addressing the "Paladins is an Overwatch clone" message in the room. I'm going to try to be brief, since I've had this discussion at least twice in the last few years, and I already know it's more or less pointless, but I also know it's inevitable, since I regularly see people cry over similarities to such a character. generic that people nicknamed it "Call of Duty", and I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I always felt like that nickname was given to the wrong person.
an actual review of overwatch paladins

More Interesting Facts About,

an actual review of overwatch paladins...

I know I can't speak for everyone here, but dying from random grenade spam, Martyrdom, and RCXD sounds a lot more like my experiences with that franchise than fighting people who

actual

ly have to aim, which... Okay, point taken. . All I'm trying to say is that I find it strange how people are quick to dismiss Paladins as nothing more than a cheap Overwatch clone for its derivative elements, while apparently being aware of the fact that Overwatch isn't a particularly original game itself. most of the time, and working on this video for the last few months knowing that a good portion of people were going to ignore everything I was saying to make that statement, made me feel pretty vaccinated.
an actual review of overwatch paladins
So I did what comes naturally to the immunized and compiled a spreadsheet of every system, mechanic, and mode in Overwatch to pinpoint games where they existed before, so I could include it in the description and make this claim without having to bog down the Video below. with endless examples. From a purely mechanical and systematic point of view, Overwatch is not an original game. A solid 95% of Overwatch's mechanics and abilities are derivative, and no system is unique. What gives Overwatch its identity is the way it COMBINES these derivative elements to create something new and different, which is exactly what Paladins does.
an actual review of overwatch paladins
Now, I may be able to jump into ball pits without having to worry about losing the ability to jump, but I'm not a complete idiot. I'm not going to claim that Paladins has never taken ideas directly from Overwatch. I'm just saying that there are enough differences that I don't think it's fair to completely dismiss it as just an alternative for the poor. Also, for anyone wondering, when I made that spreadsheet I discovered that the most original character in Overwatch is Moira, which in retrospect, makes a lot of sense, since her visual design keeps screaming Don't Steal at me.
Again, my point isn't that Overwatch stole these things or that Paladins isn't a spin-off, I just find the originality argument annoying when Paladins entered development in 2012, and only about one in 20 abilities in Overwatch is original to begin with. . ; and when that fraction consists of things like Hanzo's Scatter Arrow and Symmetra's microwave, I can't help but think they're original, not because no one else thought of them, but because everyone else thought of them. Which actually leads me pretty well into talking about the games themselves, so I guess it's time to move on to the part of the video you all came here for.
Thanks for stopping by, and just a heads up from someone who learned the hard way: You should probably cross your friends off that Christmas list. Now, I'd like to start by talking about something that isn't necessarily part of the way these games are designed, but something that will be much more obvious to anyone who takes the time to play both: namely, the comic limit gap. in production value and polish. To be fair, the term "Blizzard polish" exists for a reason; Obviously, the game will be bug-free and very pretty, probably with an art style that combines cartoony and realistic graphics, with a cast of characters cut from different colored sections of the exact same piece of marble. look bad next to Blizzard in this department.
But while they were designing a theme park, Hi-Rez was running a circus. I mentioned earlier that this is a video I've wanted to make for a while, which might have confused some people, since I haven't exactly found a cure for cancer in the meantime. One of the main reasons it took me so long is that I wanted to wait for Paladins to come out of beta, so I could make a fairer comparison here; and now that I've done it, I've realized that I'm a fucking moron, because Paladins is a high resolution game, and no matter what numbers they decide to put on their patches, they never really will.
Well, that's not entirely fair: the beta version implies that there are still updates to come. I may quite like Paladins and, spoiler alert for the rest of this video, I do, but it would be a bit dishonest of me not to mention that the game is held together with duct tape and saliva. There are the more immediately obvious problems, like the fact that several skins and champions still have no artwork during loading screens, and then there are the completely unforgivable ones, like the bug with Strix's ultimate when you run the game in DirectX11. If you haven't played the game, or have been lucky enough to never have played THIS moron, his ultimate ability is a wide-radius flashbang grenade, which is supposed to turn your screen into pure, blinding white and then slowly turn back. to fade away. the game, with an imprint of the last thing you saw slightly obscuring your vision.
You've played video games. But if you're using DirectX11, it fades from pure white to pure black and then returns to the game once the effect has completely disappeared. That means anyone in the center of the explosion is completely blinded for three full seconds. If something like this had come to Overwatch, it would at least be broken by design. I guess it comes down to personal preference: throw your computer at the window for something that could eventually be changed or something that could eventually be fixed (although I wouldn't hold my breath for either). Stick around, though: doing this

review

has definitely made me realize how much more important game systems and mechanics are than polish when it comes to keeping my interest over a long period of time.
And I'm not the one trying to imply that Overwatch is a less deep game than Paladins, I'm the one trying to say it outright, because it definitely is: and the easiest way to demonstrate it is to talk about the differences in how the two games handle the game. hero. part of the term "hero shooter". In both games, characters can be classified into one of four basic classes: support, DPS, tanks, and flanks. Technically, Overwatch only has three of these classifications, but that's only because they abandoned the Attack and Defense categories when they realized they discouraged creative team compositions in modes with attack and defense phases.
Which is a bit ironic, given how restrictive hero designs tend to be. Each character feels like they're designed to fulfill a single specific job, which is good in the sense that it keeps the heroes from being redundant, and if nothing else, you have to give Blizzard credit for being great businessmen. I think when they saw someone create the most successful competitive game of all time saying, "Hey, what if DOTA was reasonable," they thought to themselves? "What if we did, but if it weren't for video games?" It is certainly difficult to argue against its effectiveness. Assigning each character a specific role makes it much easier to get into the game, because the moment you choose a hero, it's hard not to understand what you're supposed to do, but that's the problem.
It's that what you're supposed to do is the only thing you can do. Overall, the kits given to Overwatch heroes are pretty fun to play with, but by optimizing them to this point, Blizzard has created a different and correct way to play with each of them, and I can't help but see it as a misunderstanding. of what makes hero-based games interesting in the long run. I loved some of the playstyles they've created - perfectly timing Zarya's bubbles and face tank damage to keep your energy up so you can melt enemies is incredibly fun and satisfying to pull off consistently, but when it's all Which you can do by doing it every game, it gets stale pretty quickly.
Overwatch heroes should be played AS, not WITH. I don't have a playstyle with Zarya; Zarya has a style of play. The only major benefits of optimizing to this point is that it theoretically makes balancing easier, because you can directly nerf and buff a hero's only defining strength, rather than dealing with the complexities of an actual kit. So I guess that explains why Overwatch has never struggled with the kind of balance issues other competitive games do. The more I think about these things, the more I realize that a big part of why Zenyatta remains my favorite character is that he's one of the only heroes on the roster who feels like he was designed to fill a role, in instead of having a job.
In fact, when the game came out, Zenyatta's team was criticized, because his ultimate didn't fit with the way players were positioning with him, and the fact that they buffed it by simply adding some movement speed, did viable without marginalizing it in a single specific box. He weakens enemies, heals his teammates, and is capable of dealing sustained and burst damage; but such damage is relatively difficult to achieve consistently, and he has a low health pool with no mobility or self-detachment, so he has distinct strengths and weaknesses and an identity, without being designed entirely around a single job.
If every hero was designed like Zen or Zarya, I wouldn't mind if the game was less deep than Paladins, because I would still find it fun and dynamic to play in other ways, but unfortunately, most of them aren't. The game is littered with characters like Mercy, who is so basic that I don't feel the need to explain what I'm saying here, and McCree, who feels like his entire team was designed to kill Pharmercy, Tracer, and Sombra; So you never pick him because his team is great and brings an interesting dynamic to the team, you pick him because he's a rock and they have scissors. (Or you really want to fuck him, which apparently I can't rule out for anyone.) If the new hero designs are anything to go by, I think they may have realized this was a problem, but the transition from heroes who are designed to do one thing to heroes whose kits have everything you could ever need, is just jump. out of the frying pan and into the shit corridor.
Moira is really fun, but the only real counterplay to her evil orbs is D'va's Defense Matrix, which is countered by Moira's evil ray anyway, and Brigitte is a war crime. Regardless of the joy I get from playing them, I would never call them well designed. Moira's only drawbacks are the lack of hard CC and the fact that her ultimate can be interrupted, but her ultimate can be used effectively at any range, and she has an invisible, untargetable, fully controllable omnidirectional dash, so crowd control is not enough. There's really no need for her to fight herself. Regardless of how balanced they may be, their kits are undeniably bloated, so I'm glad that this seems to have been a second period of learning, and they finally started designing characters to be more general purpose and fun to play, without just putting everything in at once.
The Bakugan Battle Hamster kit is heavily geared around using your mobility in fun and interesting ways, giving you a really distinct playstyle while also allowing you a lot more creativity than most of the others on the list. , since you are abusing the physics engine. instead of using an ability that works exactly the same way every time you cast it. I don't find myself looking at it and thinking, "This is what this character is supposed to do," but rather, "I wonder what you can do with that." Paladins champions exist at exactly the opposite end of this spectrum, with kits that often seem a little confusing and unfocused at first glance, but allow for a lot of experimentation and diversity in playstyles, if you're willing to develop them (assuming you're not). gravitates toward none of the offensively bad ones).
There is always a general idea of ​​what a character shouldcontribute to a team when we look at their skills, but the question of how to do so can vary greatly for a couple of key reasons. The first is the fact that the champions in Paladins are, as I said before, designed to be more general in use, which has certainly resulted in some redundant champions being added to the mix, such as Androxus (Lex) for people who they manage to make even fewer friends at school, and whatever... THIS mess it is, but I'm willing to accept that trade-off if it means the characters themselves are more internally varied.
The second reason, and much more important, is the existence of talent and equipment systems, which allow the player to decide what specific attributes of a character they want to adapt their play style and make modifications to how the character's kit actually works. character. The talents are pretty simple: at the start of each game you can choose one of four that alters your character's basic functions or the way a skill works or interacts with the rest of the kit. The equipment is a little more complicated. For each champion, you can create a series of custom loadouts, each made up of five cards selected from their specific pool of sixteen.
There are four cards for each standard ability, each applying different status effects, bonuses or utilities, and four cards that can alter champions' base stats or grant different passive effects. Some of the changes can be quite significant, like making one ability remove another's cooldown when you hit it, or making an area-of-effect heal apply more healing to you when you only hit your allies and not yourself. Each card can be set to a level from one to five that determines the strength of that specific bonus, as well as the number of points that will be added to the total value of the equipment.
Each loadout must have a total of 15 points, so building it becomes a challenge to balance which changes benefit your playstyle the most and how strong each of those changes should be. These systems allow players to experiment with different ways a character's kit can be used and determine which ones they find the most fun, while also allowing them to narrow down the details of what they want for their playstyle to an incredibly high degree. specific. If I take Inara and run the zone without fun, I'll need to adjust my playstyle from that of someone with Tremors and Plans tonight, but I'll still fill the same basic role as the team's main tank, and that's just scratching the surface of what What this means for the meta of the game.
Where this gets really fun is when you look at things like Flanknando, where the gear and talent systems allow you to play champions as off-play hybrids and develop playstyles that can vary wildly from player to player. Mal'Damba is one of my favorite champions in the entire game, largely because of how varied your playstyle can be with him. The big trick about him is that his weapon is a spitting cobra that he reloads by throwing it forward as an arcing projectile that stuns the first person it hits, which is a really cool trick in itself, but these systems do it. more interesting.
If you're running a combination of standard loadout talents, he plays as a control support, keeping his teammates alive with sustained ranged healing, while he offers some area denial and crowd control. However, if you run Wekono's Curse with a charge of Mal'Damage, your healing can now be used to damage enemies, sacrificing some of your support abilities, but dramatically improving your offensives and recontextualizing the entire kit in a way that still makes it complete. sense. Instead of backing up and throwing your pumpkin to give your allies an advantage in the fight, you sneak up on enemies and throw it at their feet, so they have to fight you where you have the advantage.
Instead of using your recharge to escape a dive, you're using it to trap someone within the damage of your pumpkin. Instead of using your dash to escape, you're using it to chase, or to do immune damage and crowd control. All this and you're still a support, healing still works on your allies, and your ability to point control hasn't gone anywhere. It's just not your main focus anymore. Those are already two extremely different ways to play the character, but in both you can specify your equipment on your board, your pumpkin, your healing, your reload speed, the rest of your base stats, or anything in between. of them and what you choose will result in different methods of approaching each fight.
The loadout system can help define basic playstyles, but things like this are possible thanks to how separating talents allows them to change champions to such an incredible degree, with the best being those that completely alter the way they play, which is why every talent that acts as little more than a damage or tank buff should be shot into the sun. Conditional modifiers like Evie's Over The Moon don't bother me, because they actually change the way she plays, but headshots with precision weapons and direct hits with burst damage weapons already do more damage than hits. normal, causing them to deal more damage.
It's not going to have the same effect. All that and I haven't even mentioned shit like Firefight, which I guess exists so that even Viktor's mains have a reason to look down on Viktor's mains. I could go on, and believe me, I'd love to, but the point I'm trying to get across is that talents are a great concept, in theory giving each character a lot of extra depth, especially in combination with equipment. system, but as long as there are flat upgrade talents in the game, I can't shake the feeling that the system is being wasted. Any issues I have with the implementation aside, these systems add a significant layer of depth and strategy to the game that is completely absent in Overwatch.
The generally accepted measure for determining the depth of discourse about games is the number of unique and meaningful choices a player is capable of making, so why not be empirical about it? To keep things simple, let's say there are at least two viable ways to create a loadout for each talent. That means each Paladins character has eight possible ways he can operate his kit, compared to the singular static roles assigned to each hero in Overwatch. If you want to eliminate the arbitrary "two viable loadouts per talent" question, figuring out the total number of ways you can build a single champion requires a lot of math.
But in the interest of being thorough, I hired virgins to perform the mathematical rituals necessary to find out, and after sacrificing a TI-83, they arrived at the celibate figure of 568 million 353 thousand two hundred and eighty. Thank you virgins, please stop choosing Mei. What I'm trying to say is that Overwatch is really bad at allowing player expression, and looking at me, it's pretty obvious that I was told to be myself too many times growing up, so I'm naturally going to put a lot of it into it. I strive to be able to express myself. Paladins' champions feel like they were designed to provide the player with a series of tools to develop the playstyle that best suits them.
Overwatch's heroes feel like they were designed to DO something. I imagine a lot of people enjoy that kind of simplified, precise approach to kit design; I'm not going to argue that stabbing someone with a rapier isn't a little more elegant than beating them to death with a tactical rail, I just know that I personally find it a little boring. However, I think it's important to clarify that I'm saying Overwatch is simpler, not easier. (This time, for real.) Anyone who's tried Paladins for themselves has probably noticed that the game's difficulty falls somewhere between Spy Fox and any of these that would make you angrier when you start playing it, and there are a few reasons.
For that. The first is that the game secretly tells you about bot matches for the first five levels without telling you, because it seems like Hi-Rez is more interested in guerrilla marketing of its possibly canceled mobile game than in making a good first impression. It wouldn't be so bad if you were explicitly told that you needed to play a bot match to make sure you had a basic idea of ​​how the game works, but to be forced to play several matches where characters crash into walls, and use their ultimate abilities. on cooldown, before you start playing, is fucking stupid.
I understand what you're going for here, but ranking is locked until level 30, so I don't understand the option to start preparing players so early. Another thing that makes Paladins feel easier is the way the hitboxes are designed, because Paladins uses static hitboxes and capsules in the vein of Quake and Unreal Tournament, rather than Overwatch's more precise ones: which is actually a little more complicated. a problem than it initially seems. What people don't seem to realize is that hit boxes weren't made that way by accident; They make a lot of sense because of the way Paladins was originally designed.
Paladins began development as the spiritual successor to PvP in Global Agenda, the definitively canceled Hi-Rez MMO. Because the game was originally more akin to a MOBA, or MMO played from the first-person perspective, than a first-person shooter with MOBA and MMO features, the design didn't actually require accurate hitboxes, due to the focus. on mobility and skill use instead of sickly quick shots. This was also reflected in the way shooting was handled, with DPS champions receiving projectile weapons, while hit-scanning ones were reserved for assassins and close-range duelists, and had aggressive ranged damage reduction. . The challenge arose from predicting movement and leading your shots, or closing the distance and avoiding damage, rather than perfectly lining up your aim point with the enemy's player model: and since the models acted more as a guide on what to predict , which as a perfectly accurate representation of what would count as a success, Hi-Rez decided that the game was more suited to the capsule hitboxes found in most arena shooters than those of a More standard modern FPS.
That said, this is an explanation: not an excuse. There have been fast-paced arcade shooters with precise hit boxes before and the sun didn't fall! And the pods themselves are a few small nations bigger than they should be, even if they're not as bad as they seem from the botched death chambers that must have been outsourced to Korea, despite all the liberties they insist on taking. . . Also, you may have noticed that I said "this is all due to the way Paladins was originally designed", and that's because in recent years the time to kill has been steadily decreasing, and I'm starting to think the only The reason it hasn't crashed to the ground yet is because the mobility is already there to act as a cushion.
Add in the fact that most DPS champions now have hit-scan weapons, two of which are snipers and three are machine guns, and yes, hit zones have become a problem. In my opinion, there are two realistic solutions to this: fix the hitboxes to reflect what the game has become, or balance the console versions of the game separately, bring back hypermobility, change the firing squad machine guns to projectiles. , redesign every champion with auto-aim, and increase the time-to-kill to the point where larger hitboxes like this make some kind of sense. I choose door number two in a heartbeat, because meta mobility has always been the best, and if you don't agree, then I'm really sorry for what happened to you, but I need you to understand that that doesn't excuse the person who I have become.
So, yes, in terms of basic aiming and shooting, Overwatch is a much less forgiving game than Paladins, so it's unfortunate that improved hitboxes are in the service of heroes who don't require aiming to begin with, and others who get wipes. Free equipment wet wipes with the push of a button. I know it's not exactly a new criticism to point out that so many of Overwatch's ultimate features, which are buttons to beat the game, make it frustrating to play, but it's worth repeating since we're two years in and almost nothing has been done about it. regard. he.
I understand that there are people who like to work like this, and if you are one of those people, that's fine, but do me a favor and take a deep breath, because I get the impression that you are one of those who forget. . Blizzard HAS been improving this with newer heroes, as they are generally weaker and/or have a somewhat reasonable payout, but they also went back and broke one of the only ults in the base game which I assume was Not aEnough nonsense for your taste. For anyone who hasn't played Overwatch at launch, let me tell you about the time when Zarya's ultimate was fair;
If you used it at the wrong time and didn't provoke the enemy's mobility before throwing them into a team fight, several characters could escape, meaning it wasn't just a utility, but a utility with counterplay. It took some real thinking, beyond “How many people will this affect?” So naturally, Blizzard crippled it to bring it to the level of not leaving Symmetra-main behind like everyone else's. I mentioned before that Zenyatta is my favorite character in this game, and one of the reasons is that his ultimate is a button to fuck your ultimate, and that reflects my feelings perfectly.
That said, requiring a screw-you button, or specific hero selections, is the least interesting way you could have given counterplay to these abilities. Especially when knowing whether they are active or not depends on guesswork, since they don't operate on standard cooldowns like those in a MOBA. That's not a criticism of the way ults are loaded in these games. In fact, I think it's really clever how this method incentivizes players to be proactive to improve them faster. And I'm not going to pass up the opportunity to sweat nervously at Respawn, so I'm going to go ahead and call him a genius.
It's a criticism of the fact that the Ultimates themselves are too powerful to have ambiguous cooldowns, especially when not telegraphed correctly. In Paladins, Ultimates don't trigger until they've finished and played an audio cue, which you might think is the case in Overwatch since they added voice lines to the queue in Ultimates, but several of the lines voice no Don't start playing until the last few have started shooting. Pharah can solo kill any non-tank before his voice line has started from 5 to 10 meters away, and his jetpack becomes effectively silent about a second after he takes off or uses Jump Jet, so he can easily approach from back without being heard.
The average reaction time to the auditory stimulus is 0.17 seconds and 0.25 for the visual ones, which means that, from this distance and taking into account RNG, projectile speed and dispersion, Pharah's ultimate can reasonably kill most heroes in less time than they can. she is expected to react to it. You could argue that it's the players' fault for leaving it behind them, but Overwatch doesn't exist on a 2D plane like a MOBA; you've added a full third axis of motion here. When almost every character in the game can take you down in less than a second, expecting the player to keep track of each enemy's position at all times, on top of everything else, as the only method of countering the ultimate attack, which only Works If your hero is designed to survive or counter it in the first place, it's not difficult, it's not reasonable.
However, this is a symptom of a larger problem. Ultimates have to kill this quickly, due to how low the total kill time is; if the latter had proper telegraphs and counters, they would become almost useless at the highest level, because the person casting them would be shot down before getting any notable benefit. Paladins have more time to kill, and the final design benefits greatly from that, as it means that most of them can be utilities that helped set up crazy plays through tracking and teamwork, rather than being a button who makes crazy plays. for you. The fact that Pip's Evil Mojo doesn't deal damage, doesn't heal, doesn't keep anyone in place, and can actually SAVE enemies, while still being possibly one of the strongest teamfighting abilities in the entire game, is a testament to of it.
The latter itself is an explosive that turns everyone within a ten meter radius into a chicken with 1500 health, preventing them from using weapons or abilities for up to four seconds - using it on an enemy who is below that health threshold actually will bring them back. up to that base 1500, an amount that was chosen specifically because Pip is not capable of dealing the damage necessary to kill more than a couple of chickens on his own before they change back. Even ults that behave similarly to Overwatch ults don't seem as frustrating to me; The equivalent of Widow's ultimate ability isn't given to a character who can shoot you the second you turn a corner, and it also doesn't last half a damn dynasty, which is great!
And most Ultimates follow this design philosophy, but that doesn't mean they're remotely perfect. Some cannot be blocked by shields, some make the caster invulnerable, and some can be used by lobotomites. Some of them even refund part of their charge when they sniff, because I guess having to target abilities would be too confusing for new players. (Which... would actually explain the direction champion designs have taken recently.) I can't be damned about going into the latest bad cases on a case-by-case basis, but I feel it's my civic duty to say that Khan Ser's ultimate needs a skill shot, because it's hilarious and I'd like to stand tall when I use it, instead of being overwhelmed by embarrassment.
Or, at least... erect, first. The positive side is that there are systems in place to ensure that ultimate attacks can be countered by means other than just being the right person. The reason I set it, instead of a fixed four seconds, is because any character can alter the effectiveness of crowd control, as well as various other things through the in-game item shop, and I promise it's not that scary. sounds. The item shop in Paladins isn't like what you'd find in a MOBA, where there are a few hundred items, each with ten stats, six passives, and names based on wacky mythical artifacts like Frothing Gunther's invisible third eye or the Play Station Vita. #gamechanger The type of things those items would change are covered by loadouts, so the shop is made up of sixteen tiered items, each of which does a specific thing.
Items are divided into four categories: defense, utility, healing and red. The separation is significant because you can only build one item from each category per game, at which point you can only upgrade the item you've selected, or purchase and upgrade items from other categories. You have to weigh whether or not reducing the effectiveness of crowd control is more important in this specific game than direct or explosive damage, as well as understanding that if an enemy with strong crowd control ability sees that you didn't choose that path, it's You may be more focused for the rest of the game.
Upgrades also become increasingly more expensive with each level, meaning you have to consider the diminishing returns you'll get by focusing all your credits on one item you think is important, compared to what you'd get by purchasing cheaper, potentially less. . the crucial ones. You have to think about which items are most important at each point in the match, AND how best to use your abilities based on which items the enemy team has taken, and you might think I have no way to talk about how. Paladins is a lot more in-depth than Overwatch at this point, as I've covered almost every system in both games, but I have one last thing to touch on.
When I talked earlier about how Paladins suffered major mobility nerfs, I was talking about more than just movement skill nerfs. The base movement of each character was also changed; The most significant of these changes was the decrease in the player's jump height, because it made several areas of the old maps frustrating to navigate due to how finicky some of the jumps had become. The solution Hi-Rez implemented for this was to increase the player's jump height when there is an object X units in front of them, because screw it, I guess. That being said, this change actually resulted in something that I think is really cool, and I haven't managed to find a definitive name for it anywhere, so I'm just going to call it Z-bounce, since that makes it sound more. technical, and that helps my case.
Z-bounce is essentially about positioning yourself near a wall and tilting the camera towards it before jumping, so that you can go as far as possible without being forced to use a movement skill. This allows you to significantly increase the height and distance of your jumps, which can be used with regular jumps to make you a harder target to hit in combat, or combined with movement skills to effectively double their value. On one map, with a single champion, I managed to find multiple areas where I could use this to make otherwise impossible jumps without wasting his key damaging ability, and it also makes taking off as Drogoz without using Push a little less miserable.
Using this to take off is more of a general use required, given how much mobility nerfs have screwed it up, but consistently pulling off Maeve-specific jumps depends on good spatial awareness and a bit of finesse, and this is a example. of something found in many games called "technology". Technology is often used as a general term for any type of technique that results from abusing a game's systems and mechanics to do something that the designers didn't know about or intended for players to use. Some examples of this would be waves, bunny hopping, or Tekken sounding vaguely racist without context.
The technology adds an extra layer of depth and raises a game's competitive skill ceiling by rewarding players for experimenting and mastering difficult inputs that allow them to play more efficiently. As far as I can tell, the only universal technology in Overwatch is a very basic animation cancel, which I can't help but find really boring in comparison, especially considering it's something found in almost every other FPS, including Paladins. The frustrating thing is that Overwatch is probably capable of having a lot more depth than Paladins in this regard, with technology specific to individual characters, but almost every time one of them is discovered, it's quickly removed simply because it wasn't intended, but you can do it.
Don't run away from your mistakes forever. I'm FASTER than you, DAD! On the other hand, when they are found in Paladins, they are generally left unmodified, as long as they don't break the game, and I know it sounds like I'm advocating for bugs right now, but I think allowing the technology to exist and evolve. It's crucial to raising the skill cap of almost any game. Mercy's skill cap, for example, is notoriously low, but players once discovered that her Guardian Angel skill could be canceled at a specific time to launch herself beyond the point she was flying to: using this correctly required careful timing. to be able to do I'm sure you were launching at the correct speed and distance past your target, and the fact that something that so drastically increased its ability limit without breaking it was immediately replaced by a hindered version that behaves exactly the same way. the same way, always, regardless of the moment. is so emblematic of the problems with Blizzard's entire design approach. "What, we can't have players learn to do something that wasn't intended to play the character more effectively, that would muddy our incredibly specific and restrictive vision of what this character is meant to do!" The poetic irony is that this change ended up creating a new, much stronger boost technology, which is actually tougher and much cooler, so I'd recommend making the most of it before the story inevitably gets dirty.
Blizzard is very anal about trying to dictate the meta of the game, but the meta is not designed, it is discovered. The problem with Overwatch is that there's very little to discover, because the moment you step out of the neat little box they've set aside for you, Daddy Jeff will be there to smash your head in and reseal it with concrete, all the time. Whispering not to worry because maybe that thing that sticks into your ribs is legendary! With your luck, they're probably a bunch of white guys. (Which can be comforting depending on the region you're queuing in.) That aside, if this restrictive design is in the name of balance, I have bad news, because all the ground Overwatch gained this way is largely negated by the fact that Paladins has a system that allows players to manually balance the compositions in each game, this being a selection/banning phase.
If a champion is deemed stronger than the rest of the cast, players can banish him before the match begins. Additionally, there can only be one of each champion in each game, so if the enemy team selects a broken team composition, it's partly your fault for allowing them to have it. Paladins can also design everything related to Siege, a unique moderound-based which involves capturing a neutral point and then pushing a payload to the enemy team's base. Scoring is simple and makes ties impossible; The first team to four points wins, and you get one point for capturing the middle, one point for successfully pushing the payload, and one point if you manage to defend a payload push.
The only drawback is that you can't win a game with a payload defense, so winning thanks to the spawn advantage is absolutely impossible. The fact that Siege has these three different modes/states, along with all the other systems in the game, means that players have to carefully select their enemy selections, how best to split their elements, and how composition works in each phase of the game. the match. You can't just recruit a team that's good at capturing the point and then switch to one that's good at pushing the payload; You have to think about it and you will be punished if you don't.
The only mode in Overwatch that comes close to this is Lockout Elimination, and although you may not know it, it is a favorite of many people, since it is the only one that forces them to make strategic decisions and does not have fights decided by a single player. skills. It's also not the Arcade Mode they decided to make permanent, and the part of my brain that sorts out the Fred Durst posters every time I pass out tells me it's because it highlights the game's problems by fixing them. For those of you who haven't noticed yet, there's actually a link between almost all of the criticisms I have about Overwatch, and if you're guessing it's a simple lack of depth, then thanks for playing, but I'm afraid you've been outplayed. by the great main brain of Paladins.
Except for the time kill, almost everything I hate about this game was done that way, because this game includes hero switching. Heroes can't be particularly complex, because balancing that would be impossible when both teams can have whatever composition they want at any time. There can't be a pick/ban phase because the only suitable counters for various abilities are specific heroes, so a substantial number of games would be won or lost based on the last pick. Heroes should be designed as direct counters to incentivize using this system, because if one of your teammates picked Genji and is therefore respawning, he'll need a pretty strong push to justify sacrificing 50% of his charge. definitive.
It's been building up for the last five minutes. I understand that it's meant to add a layer of strategy by allowing you to adapt to the enemy team with your choices, but in practice it mostly just results in everyone abusing whichever composition is most dominant on whatever map you're playing on. at the moment. or constantly switching back and forth with minimal strategic thought, due to the rock-paper-paper-again design of the heroes themselves. I don't think hero switching works with how much you rely on counters, skills, and ults, and it can't even be removed, because everything else in the game has been affected by it.
I understand that a lot of people won't take anything I say seriously, since I'm not exactly an esports pro in this game, but the biggest difference I've noticed between my gameplay and that of "real gamers" is how well bad men can click. If the only meaningful ways to get better at this game are to improve your aim or break the Geneva Convention, I can't really think of any reason to play it in any of the numerous games that make it even slightly better. I also understand that many Overwatch players aren't interested in competitive design, and that my reasons for not liking it are their own, quite the opposite, but I tend to play multiplayer games pretty casually most of the time, and I think the lack of player expression and ways to facilitate fun builds and team compositions also makes the game less fun on a casual level, for many of the same reasons.
The most fun I had in Overwatch while working on this video was when I fucked with my friends as a team of six supports, but those are the most fun and wacky moments things have ever had. There's not enough variety in the ways the game can be played for me to enjoy it competitively or casually, and the instant gratification feedback loop that the game is designed around screws me over, no matter how I'm playing, because how wonderful! I feel like when I press Q right it's not enough to make up for how frustrating it is when I press Q right.
So naturally, this is the point where I wholeheartedly recommend everyone play Paladins, right? Fuck you, don't act like you know me. Look, I could talk for a LONG time about how Paladins has been slowly stripped away from a lot of the things that made it fun and different to begin with - what with the constant mobility nerfs and the shift towards spam champions designed for edgy groups - but I think it makes more sense to go to the root of the problem. I'm sure this won't be the most shocking thing you hear today, but I'm a man I have a lot of regrets, and I think one of the biggest ones when it comes to this whole YouTube thing, would be the time I said, " I like Hi-Rez", without clarifying that I meant that I like the developers and the people in the community who work there, and not the company itself: because for some reason, I didn't expect them to still exist for the next year to make me shine repeatedly.
Like an idiot for saying that. From the introduction of Essence, to the existential fever dream of Cards Unbound, there's not much to say about Hi-Rez's management beyond "How the hell hasn't this company burned to the ground yet?" Even the lack of polish is due to them; I'd bet that one of the main reasons developers can't come close to AAA standards is that they're a smaller team, given absolutely ridiculous deadlines to release new content, with the perpetual excuse of "Feature Freezes." it is a myth". designed by gremlins to steal your precious pelts." Regardless of how much I value good systems and mechanics over polish, the number of glitches present in this game is unacceptable; furthermore, all the improvements to Paladins' competitive design are rendered completely useless due to the fact that you can only queue with more than one other person if everyone in the group has finished their qualifiers and is Platinum and below, and if I have any influence over something, I would like to request that whoever made that decision be forced to do so. solo queue for a few weeks before being allowed to re-evaluate.
There's a chance things could improve now that they've split their development teams into separate studios for which they simply act as editors, and I'll acknowledge that the executive producer they brought in to clean up Cards Unbound has been a solid job since taking over, but Hi-Rez has a history of recruiting its management outside of classrooms with letter blocks and backpack hooks, so any recommendations that could give for this game would require a 15-minute asterisk and a waiver. So why the hell did I make this video? Probably because the concept of a hero shooter really appeals to me: playing with some skills and learning the intricacies of a character without the downtime that an MMO requires, or the self-deprecation of a MOBA, is something I'd really like.
I love playing games, but I can't say that any of these games really do it. Luckily, I know a game that does. Gigantic is a hero shooter game developed by Motiga that most people seem to be unaware of; It's also one of my favorite multiplayer games of all time. Now, I know what you're thinking, and it's even more fun and original than you think, but let me point out that Paladins has an owl champion that I hate, Overwatch has an owl skin and nothing, and exercise in production. Overwatch's pro overcompensation is literally called OWL. It's not to owl, it's because I really don't think there's a single aspect of Gigantic that I wouldn't consider a direct improvement on the Overwatch and Paladins formulas, because unlike Paladins, I don't have to apologize for the parents. and unlike Overwatch, I don't have to apologize to my people.
However, it's still a hero shooter, so the most natural place to start explaining why would be the heroes. Each member of Gigantic's cast manages to differentiate themselves from each other without having a unique pre-assigned playstyle, nor kits that feel remotely unfocused or generalized. This is partly because the kits are designed to have skills that go with a certain skill set and combine with each other in different ways, and partly because of the leveling system. Throughout each game, players gain experience by marking objectives and killing enemies. and each time they level up they can choose different upgrades for their skills, as well as a talent at level 5.
Each skill has two branching upgrade paths that split twice, meaning there are seven possible ways for each skill to work. ability. These are essentially Paladins' gear and talent systems, with the implementation of the item shop streamlining them all in a way that makes it more likely for players to play heroes in a more diverse way. The gear system is great for allowing players to experiment and find different playstyles for whatever champion they're playing, but they often settle on one combination of gear and talent because it's the most effective for how they want to play. Because Gigantic allows you to upgrade skills in any order you want, without arbitrary level restrictions, you're not only deciding which upgrades you want for this specific match, but also the exact order you want them in, which extends to several decisions throughout the game. the entire game, instead of condensing millions of choices into ONE choice that you make before it even starts.
Apologies for the estimates on this, but I'm trying not to go broke and those virgins aren't cheap. It also means that players are less likely to have exactly the same skills every game, because their specific needs will vary depending on the match itself. I stand by everything I said about the Paladins shop being a good way to handle counterplay and adaptability, but adapting to the enemy team by altering your equipment is much more fun and interesting than using base stat bonuses. The system itself is technically less complex than those in Paladins, but I still think it's a better implementation of the same basic concepts, and that any divisions you create are closed with the added depth in Gigantic's actual combat.
There are a few things about the combat in Gigantic that separates it from Paladins and Overwatch, namely that it relies much more heavily on the word hero than the word marksman: which is evident when looking at the list and comparing the pure eight. fighting heroes, and two who can be melee or ranged, up to the three collective melee characters in Overwatch and Paladins. This is all in service of the fact that hand-to-hand combat is actually... designed. The most significant changes come from the addition of dodge and attack modifiers, as both attacking after dodging and while in the air will result in special attacks that grant bonuses to damage and mobility and, depending on the hero and the upgrades you have chosen, they can also apply different hit effects.
Cold Kit Combo causes Pakko's first melee hit within three seconds of using a skill to deal 50% additional damage, and then break armor or deal 100 additional damage to frozen enemies, so taking This upgrade makes attack cancellation crucial skills for taking people down. Melee chains also vary from hero to hero: meaning the timing and damage of each hit is different depending on who you're playing as, so the ideal time to perform melee cancels varies wildly. Tripp has a quick seven-hit sequence that ends with a long, slow hit, but if you use his throwing daggers to reset after the sixth hit, you can quickly perform twelve melee attacks with no cooldown period.
These heroes have also been given kits that enhance their melee capabilities, rather than kits that apologise. So fighting is less about knowing when to hold down the left click and more about closing the distance, avoiding damage, and combining skills to gain as many advantages as possible. This is all a result of melee attacks and skills in Gigantic being low-commitment, meaning they can cancel into other skills and dodges, which would probably cause a lot of frustration if it didn't balance so well with the meter. of resistance. Running, dodging, and jumping deplete stamina during combat, whichIt means that fights are high commitment, even if attacks are not.
Canceling a dodge ability to avoid damage and then following up with a dodge attack is fun, because it requires very careful timing and consideration, because doing it more than a couple of times without managing to kill your opponent means losing your ability to dodge. withdrawal. The kill time is high enough that fights are real fights, and you have to take into account the possibility that the person you're hitting is calling for backup, and your stamina won't start regenerating until you've gotten the kill. them. Combat working this way has also resulted in players discovering some unique and rewarding tricks, such as the Beyblade technology in Tyto: which requires precisely canceling a jump dodge attack into a Blade Dance and turns you into a giant projectile. and angry that the sea parts.
It's an attack that can be used to engage enemy players and trigger movement abilities, so you can use Swoop to finish them off, or as a last resort escape if you jump into a fight you've misjudged horribly, which would be cheap. if it didn't require a huge amount of stamina and a lot of skill to achieve consistently. Gigantic wants you to earn your achievements, and that's one of the best things about it. Killing enemies is infinitely more satisfying in Gigantic than in other hero shooters, due to the amount of work involved in burying them. Even the focus abilities, Gigantic's version of the latter, are designed to make the player think as much as possible, but I can't talk about them without first trying to explain how the actual mode of the game works, so let's lose together.
Like Paladins, the core of Gigantic is a single competitive game mode with several internal objectives, but while Siege is a generic point capture for pushing payload, Gigantic is unlike anything I've played. The basic gist is that each team gathers power for their Guardian, which involves controlling circles of power, summoning creatures, and killing enemy creatures and players. The power circles are arranged so that there are a few that heavily favor each team, with between 1 and 3 in neutral positions that the teams vie for control over. Most of the power collected in the game comes from orbs that appear in two of these power circles, every 35 seconds, in a set pattern.
Players can collect them, but most of the time they are collected by the team creature that is currently summoned there, as they do so faster. Once your team generates 100 power, your Guardian will fly around the map and pin the enemy to expose their weak point, dealing damage depending on how much power the enemy team collected before reaching 100. If your Guardian doesn't do this automatically, Your team attacks the weak point to cause a wound, and this is all repeated until one team wounds the enemy Guardian three times. Towards the end of each game, a clash will begin and some rocks will fall or the entire map will change to a new area for final skirmishes.
We're already a little more complex than standing in a circle or pushing a rectangle, and we haven't even talked about the different creatures you can summon in each power circle. The decision of what to summon is based on which environmental effect would be most useful in the surrounding area: a Cyclops generates walls that block enemy players, a Bloomer quickly heals nearby allies, a Cerberus reveals all nearby enemies on the minimap , and a Drake doesn't call back the next morning. You can only have three of these equipped per match, and they all have different subvariants with specific bonuses and upgrade requirements, but I'm trying to keep this within the length of the featurette, so I won't go into all of them. of that.
Upgraded creatures are tankier, deal more damage, and collect power orbs faster than younger ones, but upgrading them requires concentration. The focus is built in the same way as the ultimate charge in Overwatch and Paladins, with the most notable difference being that it can be charged up to three times. Focus is used to buff creatures and cast focus abilities, Gigantic's version of ultimates - the abilities themselves get stronger with each level of charge, which already makes deciding whether or not to use your focus more interesting You have to decide whether or not to use your ultimate. , because even when you know there is a good opportunity to use you still have to think about whether you should do it or not.
The fact that Focus not only has more than one application, but multiple possible levels of effectiveness in more than one application, makes it much more interesting than the normal final load, and what ties it all together is the fact that being objective for a level three focus skill doesn't instantly mean you're going to die, because again, Gigantic expects players to earn their kills (unless they're playing T-MAT, but I'm told it's rude to mock the disabled, so I'll stay away from that one.) So if the game is competitive, varied, fun and beautiful, how come no one talks about it?
I'd bet there are quite a few people watching this who remember Gigantic's announcement back in 2014 and had no idea the game ever came out. Well, that's because halfway through development, Motiga ended up burning through all of its funds as a pre-revenue startup and had to lay off every single one of its employees, which you'd think would be the curtain call for Gigantic. So how was the game released? Well, the day after the layoffs, all the employees returned to the office and continued working as if nothing had happened. They showed up EVERY DAY with no promise of payment, because they believed in the idea and they cared.
Still, they needed money to finish the game, so management began shopping it around to publishers in the hopes that one would take advantage, and the only offer they received was from Perfect World, the Hi-Rez of game companies. . All of this resulted in a turbulent development cycle, which saw the game exit alpha at the same rate as a human child, and to make matters worse, Motiga ended up having to partner with Microsoft to expand its funding; in fact, several months of development time were lost by migrating Gigantic to the Microsoft-mandated Universal Windows Platform, rather than fixing its technical issues, causing the game to have serious crash issues on computers with less than six gigabytes of storage.
RAM. So, until they could find a suitable solution, Motiga decided to have the game check the system and show non-eligible players a pop-up upon startup, preventing them from purchasing items or playing the game, as they knew they would. a waste of time and money. This version of the game was released in beta on the Arc client, Perfect World of game launchers. Surprisingly, launching on Arc without fanfare didn't exactly set the world on fire, Gigantic's last chance to capture an audience came with its launch on Steam when it officially exited beta, at which point it was bombarded with negative Brainlets

review

s. complaining that they did not meet the requirements to execute it.
Now, I know I'm probably not going to make many friends by saying this, but it's shit like this that makes me hate gamers sometimes, and I hate to hit you with a hard R out of nowhere, but I don't mince words on this case. The developers at Motiga put their blood, sweat, and tears into this game, literally working for free for a community of people who considered them disposable. I don't really understand the reasoning behind giving a free game a negative review because you can't run it. None of the microtransactions are available even through the Steam page;
The game won't let people spend money on it unless they can play it. The only thing they might have wasted is a little time, because they couldn't be bothered to read the requirements that were clearly spelled out for them. Just to put a little cherry on top of all this, a few months after Steam launched, Motiga had to downsize, at which point gaming news outlets started reporting that the company was going out of business entirely and didn't bother. in informing. update the headline when the remaining employees tell them they got the story wrong. I guess they were just counting on it to be right eventually, and congratulations, because Motiga is no more.
The January update was the final content patch for Gigantic and the official servers were shut down on July 31. One of the most dedicated and talented development teams I've ever seen, who were working on one of the most original multiplayer games I've ever played, is gone, and so is the product of their passion and talent. So if anyone from Motiga is seeing this, I just want to take this opportunity to thank you. Thank you for giving this game to the people who loved it while they could, and thank you for overcoming all that shit to make it.
The only silver lining is that it's still technically possible to play the game, now that it's all said and done, and as much as I wish there was just a private server browser to keep the game running, I can't help it. Be grateful for anything that means it's not gone forever. I've linked a Discord server in the description, where you can find a modified client that will allow you to host private matches without having to use any of the official servers. Many of the updated characters, animations, maps, and UI improvements that were in the game itself are missing, and as of now the only way to invite people is to directly give them the server IP and have them join. join through the console.
So unless this turns into an Imanna Shrine situation and the community rebuilds the game, this is more to allow people who already love the game to continue playing more than anything else. It's definitely worth installing if you want to give the game a try, just go into it knowing it won't be everything I've been showing here. I've never ended a review before by telling people to do something, but if you're watching this video on a computer with a power supply you don't need to power, do yourself a favor and give this game a try. It's free, it's fantastic and, above all, it deserves to be played.
I'm not just saying that because they closed it either; I play Hi-Rez games, this is not a new experience for me. And while they're not entirely innocent, the work, care, and love that Motiga put in deserves some recognition, even without taking into account all the shit they've been through over the last few years. This game wasn't treated fairly at launch, as people dismissed it as just another cash-grab Overwatch wannabe. You'd think that a game with a completely different outlook, style, objective set, movement, combat, skill system, design philosophy, and deeper leagues, which was also revealed FIRST, wouldn't receive that kind of pushback for simply existing within of the game.
Same subgenre as Super Global Combat Fortress 3. But if spending the last few years reading YouTube comments has taught me anything, it's that there's no shortage of people who probably think the subgenre is the name of that fancy underwear their cousins ​​keep. special occasions.

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