Overwatch

[lupi]

Would rather it be from bestbuy or amazon for the pre-order discount.


If you watch that about Winston film is does look like a nice little figurine of him.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

ugh when will the open beta be?

 

[lupi]

http://funko.com/blogs/news/92901315-coming-soon-overwatch-pop

 

[Aikouka]

Blizzard has made some major announcements that we've been looking forward to...

Overwatch's release date is 5/24.

Overwatch will go into an open beta on all platforms from 5/5 to 5/9.

• "On all platforms" means that unlike the closed beta, it will be on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
• The open beta will support all heroes and maps just like the closed beta and unlike the stress test, which had a limited map pool.
• If you pre-order the game, you will get into the open beta 2 days earlier (5/3), and you will be able to bring one other person with you into that early-access open beta.
• Closed beta is not the same as the open beta, and having closed beta access does not give you early access to the open beta unless you've pre-ordered.

 

[lupi]

That is not quite correct, you only get the early access if you preorder a copy directly through blizzard.


And looks like blizz got busted by their media agency as people noticed ads with release dates on websites so blizz than came out with the release day announcement.


Hmm, looks like any preorder may gett it as it's listed along with the skin bonus. The blizz site just directs you to their store instead of making it clear you can purchase elsewhere.

 

[Aikouka]

That is not quite correct, you only get the early access if you preorder a copy directly through blizzard.


And looks like blizz got busted by their media agency as people noticed ads with release dates on websites so blizz than came out with the release day announcement.


Hmm, looks like any preorder may gett it as it's listed along with the skin bonus. The blizz site just directs you to their store instead of making it clear you can purchase elsewhere.

Amazon lists this on their website:

Beta Access: Pre-order today from Amazon.com to receive early access to the open Beta for you and a friend! You will receive two codes via email within 2 days of purchase. Please note: If you attempt to redeem your codes prior to the start of the Early Access period of the open Beta, you will get an error message and the Beta will not be activated at that time. The codes will continue to return an error message until the start of the Early Access period on 5/3. Please hold onto your codes and wait until 5/3 to redeem them once the Early Access period is active.

 

[Aikouka]

Blizzard has released one of their first animated shorts today. This one is about Winston and is entitled Recall. YouTube Link.

I think it was good. My only criticisms are...

• I wish it would have covered more of Winston's past. Based upon what we've been told, we know that there was a moon monkey uprising, but this short doesn't cover that.
• We still don't know about Reaper. We do know that Reaper used to be in Overwatch and was a major part, but we still don't know why he's evil and why he's this undead, killing force. Essentially, I think we could have had a better chronology with a video that went more into Overwatch's past.

 

[lupi]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3WhdXPaUd8

Indeed an awesome watch.

 

[lupi]

Blizzard has released one of their first animated shorts today. This one is about Winston and is entitled Recall. YouTube Link.

I think it was good. My only criticisms are...

• I wish it would have covered more of Winston's past. Based upon what we've been told, we know that there was a moon monkey uprising, but this short doesn't cover that.
• We still don't know about Reaper. We do know that Reaper used to be in Overwatch and was a major part, but we still don't know why he's evil and why he's this undead, killing force. Essentially, I think we could have had a better chronology with a video that went more into Overwatch's past.

Believe they covered some of reaper background during one of the Q&A.

 

[DigDog]

i watched some streams by Spartie (Q3 pro player) and thought the game to be quite bad; classes have that kind of rock-paper-scissors balancing where if you need to go 1v1 on someone you are not designed to kill, you'll lose 90% of the time regardless of your skill.
the visuals are cartoonish in that everything that you do needs to have a huge KABOOM visual effect that clutters the screen and wold blind me in 10 minutes of playing.

and in the end, you only get to pick one thing to use, be it good movement, a longrange hitscan, a rocket launcher, a spam weapon ..

i'd rather play quake (or Reflex) and get all these things at the same time.
And Dirty Bomb isn't better either.

 

[lupi]

i watched some streams by Spartie (Q3 pro player) and thought the game to be quite bad; classes have that kind of rock-paper-scissors balancing where if you need to go 1v1 on someone you are not designed to kill, you'll lose 90% of the time regardless of your skill.
the visuals are cartoonish in that everything that you do needs to have a huge KABOOM visual effect that clutters the screen and wold blind me in 10 minutes of playing.

and in the end, you only get to pick one thing to use, be it good movement, a longrange hitscan, a rocket launcher, a spam weapon ..

i'd rather play quake (or Reflex) and get all these things at the same time.
And Dirty Bomb isn't better either.

Except that in this game being able to rapidly switch between the different characters is a key game play element. And those big visuals come from use of the ultimate abilities, which wouldn't be very ultimate without the accompanying show.

 

[Aikouka]

i watched some streams by Spartie (Q3 pro player) and thought the game to be quite bad; classes have that kind of rock-paper-scissors balancing where if you need to go 1v1 on someone you are not designed to kill, you'll lose 90% of the time regardless of your skill.

Sort of. If the other player isn't as good, you still may kill them. It just depends. I usually run into two problems when pugging...

1) Nobody communicates... at all. It's rare for people to talk on a mic, but there's pretty much no typing either. The game even has built-in emotes for reporting things like ultimate status, but no one pays attention to them either. I can't tell you how many times I've had Zarya use an ult (draws all enemies together) when I wasn't there for my high AoE damage ult. In other words, it would've been a perfect combination!

2) Nobody understands their role. This is related to what you mention above in that the game has an innate rock-paper-scissors element to it. For example, if you have a Bastion (robot that can turn into a stuck-in-place, rotating high-damage turret), you want someone that can get behind it (Reaper, Tracer, etc.) or can hit it from afar (Pharah, Widowmaker), but people don't understand this while they're playing. The same thing happens for snipers and such. You usually just end up with a frustrating game, because people are just worthless. :\

 

[DigDog]

people are just worthless. :\

i do not disagree. i play Quake with people who have 10+ years experience, and teamplay still totally escapes them.

of the FPS currently being offered, i have played:

dirty bomb
the movement is meh and the shooting is pathetic. dropping turrets and hardcore corner camping wins games.

the-game-based-on ghost in the shell, whatever it's called
decently fun, if very limited in scope. somwhat grindy for levels, because at first your weapons are really ineffective. also has problems with teamwork. movement is very basic and headshots are far too random.

quakelive
engine is way too old, super counter-intuitive, insane competition level, visually unappealing although it's realtively easy to see what's happening, few social features.

reflex
quake mk2, great shooter with complicated movement, even fewer social features.

ut4
complicated movement (that i dont like), weird weapons (you'll only use shock rifle and flak cannon anyway), few social features. decent shooter.

CSGO
reasonably fun, very long matches, archaic engine and ridiculously unintuitive shooting. flooded with russians.

TF2
pretty high skill competition, nice balance, so-so movement, hats, nice weapons but class-based, not a lot of teamplay.

BLR
my personal favorite before the august 2015 patch (which destroyed the game), decent amount of social features, OP guns. used to be great.

Titanfall
for some reason, unbalanced and boring; on foot and on titan gameplay are not balanced, and the two have a hard time coexisting. also, nade spam.

whatever that PvE game is called .. with the exos ..
very grindy, but apparently with a decent amount of teamplay. PvE so lol, too easy.

hawken
decent movement, reasonably fun game with slight balance issues. sometimes hard to tell what's happening with all the smoke and visual clutter. not particularly high-skill.

that's it, i haen't played planetfall or tribes in years so i have no idea whats going on there.

 

[Aikouka]

I can't be too sure as I haven't played nearly as many shooters, but you might like it. I also watch quite a few streamers/pros play the game, and I'll be clear... they don't outright extol the game, but they seem fairly satisfied with it. I think part of that is because they realize that the game is still in beta, so things such as game balance and such will change.

Although, the one thing that you might like is the game length. Games only last for about 10 minutes max + the character select time (30 seconds) + setup time (60 seconds). It makes it very easy to get into this "just one more!" mentality. Although, if overtime goes on for a while, a game can last a bit longer. I had a king of the hill map go on for quite a while because we spent about 5 minutes in overtime in round 2. That may have gone on longer, but it was a good, exhilarating match!

whatever that PvE game is called .. with the exos ..
very grindy, but apparently with a decent amount of teamplay. PvE so lol, too easy.

Warframe?

 

[DigDog]

yep, warframe.

 

[Aikouka]

They added another fairly big patch to the game yesterday. Amusingly enough, the patch didn't register and download until I reopened the Battle.net client. Anyway, the patch added a few legendary skins (vastly changes appearance, usually vocal lines and spell effects/types). Unfortunately, we still don't have a legendary skin for Genji (the cyborg ninja). However, we did get one for D.Va, Torbjorn, Reaper, and Junkrat. There's also a new payload map called Route 66. I played on it a few times yesterday, and I think my only complaint would be that there needs to be a better spawn point. The defenders come out of a cafe, which I only found 3 openings for that all come out the front. Given that it's a cafe, it isn't that big, and it really isn't that hard for a good sniper to spawn camp you.

They also added achievements to the game, which are a bit awkward compared to WoW. The biggest thing that makes them awkward is that you may earn one during a match, and you really can't check it while you're fighting. For example, I got the one yesterday to kill two people with a single Helix Rocket attack on Soldier: 76, and I didn't know what it was until I looked later. Achievements currently just unlock things like sprays, but they may eventually unlock skins or something... who knows!? Anyway, for improvements, I would say maybe hold the achievement announces until the end of the game regardless of when they occur. At worst, you could just give someone an "Achievement Earned!" thing on the screen just in case someone has been gunning for it since some of the achievements have specific combat requirements (like the helix rocket one).

There were also quite a few quality of life changes. One of the small, nice ones was that your in-match portrait now matches your skin. In the past, it was always just the generic portrait regardless of the skin. They also made it easier to cancel a match search. You also don't have to skirmish whenever you're searching for a match. They revamped the Play of the Game system so it will also give credit to fancier plays or great saves, and those include taglines like "Sharpshooter". Although, it tends to look a bit awkward at times. For example, a Reaper got one against me (as Junkrat) because he shot me while I was jumping and moving around and such, which had the Sharpshooter tag.

There wasn't much in the way of balance changes when you consider the number of changes made, but the change that was made was huge for the competitive scene. The competitive scene typically runs a comp that consists of 2x Zenyatta, 1x Symmetra, 2x (Genji or Tracer) and one wild card. This build is popular because Symmetra provides 50 shields to all teammates and Zenyatta could put a healing orb (heals over time) on teammates. So, the two fast damage dealers (Genji and Tracer) would get the orbs and 50 more effective health, which made them far, far harder to deal with. Zenyatta can also apply a Discord Orb to enemies that cause them to take 40% more damage. The big change is that the orbs will now be automatically removed if you are out of line of sight of Zenyatta for 3 seconds.

 

[lupi]

Another less closed beta weekend coming up. Check your bnet launcher for signs of being flagged.

 

[Aikouka]

I've been adding some fun little Play of the Game and Highlights clips onto my YouTube under an Overwatch playlist.

Another less closed beta weekend coming up. Check your bnet launcher for signs of being flagged.

To be clear, this is just a stress test, and it will only be for two days Friday and Saturday. To note, they haven't stated that there will be any map restrictions like the first one. (Edit: The available maps will be Hanamura (capture point), Route 66 (payload), and Nepal (king of the hill).) They will announce if you're in the game tomorrow through e-mail, but you can also check your client.

Although, I hope my last game wasn't an indication of Blizzard's testing. I had some rather ridiculous ping of 300ms where I'm normally 30ms. I wouldn't expect it to be bad, but I could barely shoot anyone and it was impossible to melee someone that was moving around. This is an example of one of the problems with Overwatch's current implementation: no ability to specify server preferences. You do select your region, but that more or less just limits your friends list and stuff like that. It isn't uncommon to play on foreign servers, but Europe isn't that bad, but whatever I played on during that game was pretty bad. :\

 

[lupi]

Heard some talk that people thought those that had been in the previous limited beta would also get in for this weekend as well as some new invites, that may be correct as mine is showing an install button again.

 

[lupi]

And looks like I'm still just flagged for temp beta access as after I've updated I can't connect to servers yet.

 

[CalebRockeT]

I believe you're being allowed to install for the "Beta Test Weekend." It goes from Friday, April 15 at 9 a.m. PT through Saturday, April 16 at 9 p.m. PT... More like "Beta Test Day & a Half," eh?

 

[Worthington]

I'm in, woot!

 

[Cappuccino]

I'm in, woot!

same

 

[lupi]

Had the email notification this morning. Luckily i'll have more than 30 minutes to play this time around.

 

[Aikouka]

I'm expecting to see two things...

1. Way too many people playing Tracer, Genji or Reaper. The latter isn't too big of a deal, but Tracer and Genji are probably two of the hardest characters to play properly. Essentially, those three are some of the flankers in the game, so if you're sitting there behind Reinhardt's shield all game, you're doing it wrong.
2. Way too many people sitting at the first gate of Hanamura and just shooting at the defenders. Hanamura is probably the worst of all control point maps (the others being Volskaya and Temple of Anubis) when it comes to the choke point, and most people are just too passive to push. The have this idea that if someone is shooting at them, they have to try to kill the person first.