One of the biggest issues I’ve had since Overwatch first launched 10 years ago has always been just how much coordination the game demands from five or six complete strangers. For better and worse you live and die by your team, a feature that ex-Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan seems to regret.
“One of my hindsight regrets about Overwatch, and I think we did the right thing in the moment, I wouldn’t go back and redo it, but if I was making a hero shooter from scratch today, I would make it less team-focused,” Kaplan says in an interview with Lex Fridman.
“If I was to redo it today or for any aspiring hero-shooter makers out there I would actually downplay the team factor and try to put more focus on individual contribution. Because that’s just how people play, they’re selfish. And I don’t mean that in a bad way it’s just that human nature that they can’t help.”
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The issue with Overwatch and its team-centric fights is that the whole match is decided on each team’s weakest link. Very rarely is an Overwatch match lost because entire teams are mismatched, it’s usually just who has the least worst teammate.
You can’t carry as easily in Overwatch as you can in games like CS2 or Valorant, where all you need is one god who can tear through the enemy pack. Because in Overwatch if your tank player is the weak link you won’t be able to hold the line or capitalise on free space. If your support is the weak link then you won’t be able to stay alive long enough to make meaningful plays against the opposite team, and if your DPS is the weak link then no elims or damage for you.
This often means players need to massively compensate for whoever can’t hold their weight, adding another layer of needless stress to manage. Stress which the other team isn’t worrying about.
“We put all of our eggs in you noticing if the team won or lost and we downplayed your individual contribution as much as possible,” Kaplan continues. “There wasn’t a scoreboard, there was a medal system—but the medal system in my opinion was not good because the losing team got medals and the winning team got medals and the losing team would weaponise it against their teammates.”
Another drawback of having such a huge reliance on teamwork in Overwatch is that a game can also be massively determined by who has the better comms. Once you start queuing with a duo or above you’ll start to encounter better organised teams, ones that coordinate dives, peel, and even, god-forbid, time their ults.
Team 4 has made it easier for solos or split teams to compete with the coordination of voice comms over the years. Features like the ping mechanic can alert teamates to the whereabouts of enemy players, signalling to others when you need someone to peel or hunt a low-health enemy down. But nothing can compare to the real thing.
This isn’t to say teamwork in Overwatch is something that sucks all the time. I’ve certainly had plenty of well-coordinated moments with strangers in my games where we all just enter a flow state and work together seamlessly, but that’s sadly a much rarer occurrence than having a 2-8 Genji who spams need healing from half way across the map.
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