Five reasons why I’m not pre-ordering Overwatch
Everyone’s going on about Overwatch. Me? I’m pissed off. Mostly because I missed the open-to-all Beta weekend, because that was the one weekend I didn’t have stable internet. Typical. Still, I’ve been watching Overwatch and I do really like the look of it, and I think Valve will have to step up their game if they want TF2 to be able to keep up. That being said, I won’t be pre-ordering the game any time soon. Here’s why.
5. I don’t feel as if it’s worth $30 right now. Overwatch being a mostly multiplayer game is good and all, but the majority of games, I only buy if they go on sale. And with Overwatch kind hinting at in-game purchases (skins), that kinda puts me off further. I’m not a fan of DLCs in general. Payday 2 is filled with them and makes it tough for newbies, Borderlands 2 wants you to buy a ton of DLCs and that pisses me off. TESV: Skyrim I can forgive, since both Dawnguard and Dragonborn add a HUGE amount of new content. TF2’s DLCs are just hats, I can live without hats because the default mercs are good-looking on their own. This is more a wait-and-see thing though.
4. Tracer. Or, more to the point, Tracer’s voice. For anyone who’s heard me speak, you’ll know I have a cute accent. It’s also a British accent. A London accent. Tracer though tries way too fucking hard. Alright, you could argue that the voices in TF2 are pretty bad, but all the mercenaries are supposed to be parodies. Tracer’s supposed to be a genuine Londoner. And of course she’ll be a popular hero and a poster child for Overwatch, so I’ll have to hear that all the time.
3. Balancing. Overwatch so far has proved to be somewhat balanced, but not really much more so than TF2. So far so good, but Blizzard don’t have a great balancing history. Their two latest games, Heroes of the Storm and whatever their stupid, pay-to-save-so-much-time card game is called, have some rather unusual and all over the place balancing. I can’t really say this for myself, but I’ve had way too many people rant about their balance at me than you’d expect from someone who’s never played a Blizzard game before. And no, informing people that I’ve never played HotS or HS doesn’t make them stop. It’ll be a bumpy ride.
2. Too many unknowns. There’s something about Blizzard’s secrecy over Overwatch that’s been putting me off the game for ages. Until recently, we didn’t even know how Blizzard wanted to sell the game – was it going to be free to play like Team Fortress 2 and sell cosmetics, or more like League of Legends and sell heroes and skins, or just sell everything. It’s mostly been up to the community to note and push for more knowledge. I like to know what I am getting into.
1. Pre-ordering games is bad. Even if the game is in a beta. Pre-ordering has become the trend over recent years, and it’s not a good practice. You end up blindly purchasing a game with no idea whether it will actually be good or not. Alright, Overwatch has a beta right now, and the beta is getting good reviews. But how much of that will appear when the game is fully released? On top of that, will there be tons of DLCs required later on, or purchases in-game? A lot of this also falls under number 2 on this list, I simply don’t have all the facts. Still, pre-orders are bad, I haven’t pre-ordered a game since Binding of Isaac Rebirth (which was actually worth it in the end) and the only other game I pre-ordered was Worms Reloaded, which gave me Worms Armageddon for free. It’s bad marketing practice, and seriously, it’s not like there’s limited stock.
That all being said, I do want to at least try Overwatch. Not to play Mercy mind you. If I want to play a healer, I’ll play Medic. Or maybe Taric, over in League of Legends. Or, if I ever start to play Dota 2, Winter Wyvern, because she’s a fucking dragon. Nope, my heart is set on playing Reinhardt. Because he looks fucking awesome.
For the record, the beta weekend was not open for all. It was still invite-only. There was a poll on /r/Overwatch and IIRC ~30% of people who responded actually got into it.
To add onto the post, I feel another reason to not pre-order Overwatch is how Blizzard is notoriously anti-competitive with their games – as in, they actively dissuade and prevent you from even simply comparing yourself to others. In OW you see the arbitrarily picked “Play of the Game” at the end of the game, which is almost always just a big killstreak, and then see how you did compared to your average, and some numbers on who did the best at certain things in the match. There’s no specific beyond that. No score numbers to see who was the all-round NPC. Blizzard is like an under 12s sporting competition – everyone can win! It’s not about competition, it’s about fun. But it’s not, and thinking and acting like that is a fantastic way to kill an FPS, especially one trying to challenge other titles who are far more competitive. Even TF2 is competitive and we’re only getting solid stuff on matchmaking now, over eight years after release. For literally all of forever, it’s just been the community organizing it, because we’re capable of doing so. In OW, the scoreboard and player interactions are dumbed down to the extent that you can’t make any kind of meaningful comparison between players. If it stays this way OW will forever be a casual FPS because Blizzard seems to be staunchly anti-competitive.