What Was Overwatch?

I've been trying to write something about Overwatch for some time now. My first big attempt was going to be a retrospective about my thoughts on the game and how it influenced me, which quickly massively ballooned into a comprehensive history of my Overwatch career with attempts to integrate the interrelations between the game and everything else going on in my life. Given that Overwatch has been in my life for nearly seven years, a third of my life, you can see how this would be an issue. After scouring old Discord logs, screenshots, unlisted YouTube videos, Battlefy history, and reaching out to past teammates, I got burnt out and disheartened at the scope I had set for myself [1].

My next attempt was inspired by watching Overwatch clip dumps and getting excited about all the connections I thought about while watching [2]. The main goal was going to be to give the reader some insight into newtype style thinking, but there were a lot of problems with this too. Firstly, the connections I was making and the ideas I was having weren't particularly deep, and were mostly empty in content. Secondly, trying to express the inherent indeterminacy of impressionistic thinking through the medium of language is very funny for a newtype to attempt. And lastly, if I were to do the topic justice, I would want to read a lot more about a lot of different philosophical areas like hermeneutics and phenomenology [3].

However, this time I think I've got something focused enough that is manageable [4]. I'd like to discuss what I retrospectively identify as several key reasons [5] Overwatch was compelling for me. Specifically, I mean the macro understanding of the game like teamwork, ability usage, and positioning for example. These elements all kind of clustered together, at the very least for me personally, so I'm going to speak generally and not try to disaggregate them.

As implied by the use of 'retrospectively' above, I did not always explicitly recognize these aspects as being compelling to me. I don't think I was ever terribly concerned about what made me love the game, I just knew I enjoyed it. I was always a little confused when other players would groan about getting a certain map and even about having to play certain metas.

My contrasting approach to appreciation of the game from other players is actually what helped me realize I valued this. It's been a growing realization over time, especially having gotten some distance from the game for a while, but what really crystallized it was an interaction I had in an Overwatch friend's discord server.

I posted that I missed 2cp, which is a gamemode that had been removed from ranked and competitive play in Overwatch 2. I didn't have a lot of reasons worked out when I posted it, but after receiving some pushback (because everyone else disliked the game mode) I realized that I valued the fact that it forced people to work together as a team. If a second point push is going to be successful, you're going to have to all push together and make a coordinated play, usually with ultimates. Even in ranked, people were more or less forced to path and plan together, even if it was just typing a few words in text chat.

The final motivational piece that made things click was watching pingeufy's The Rise and Fall of Apex Legends [6], particularly the following quote:

I think that quote does a fantastic job of encapsulating the opinion of not only gamers in general, but Overwatch players and what motivated the design philosophy of Overwatch 2. And it is the polar opposite of how I feel about the game.

I don't care about having individual impact; in fact, I don't want it. I don't want my team to rely on me doing something clutch or standing out. I just want to steadily and silently enable my team, be consistently present and active without much of anything being conditional upon my individual performance. I don't want more personal agency. I want to recognize the complete state of the game and make decisions about where I should be and what I should be doing. I want to out-think my opponent and not just out-aim them. Even that last part is not really true; I don't want to assert dominance over opponents either. I just want to problem solve and attempt to react appropriately.

If something is going wrong in the game I want to be able to assess things critically with more depth than just "I was out-mechanic-ed". And that's not to say that more mechanics-oriented games don't have important things to review or improve. You can't just grind Kovaak's all day and be a great CS;GO player. And it would be entirely irresponsible and frankly foolish to assert that these are two dichotomous and exclusive approaches to game design. All fps games have aspects of both. All I am trying to say is that I much prefer analyzing and refining positioning over movement, ultimate usage over spray patterns, and coordination over fragging.

My opinion is undeniably influenced by my favored role: off-tank. Off-tanks can't do anything by myself most of the time, and my presence itself is one of my most important roles for team-fights going well, so I can't just break away and do my own thing. I think a lot of people would read that as being restrictive and limiting, but I suppose I felt like I could be a lot more creative within those constraints. I constantly had to posture, pressure, and support. This obviously varies greatly depending on the team composition, but the general tendency still stands. It's also worth noting that even among off-tank players I preferred a more passive playstyle, often excessively and to my detriment.

Honestly it makes sense why many dps and support players would be frustrated by the things I found fascinating. Similarly, I can't deny that the changes in Overwatch 2 (and many of the balance changes nearing the end of Overwatch 1) are likely a fantastic quality of life change for many main tanks or many off-tanks with different playstyle preferences than my own. It probably made financial and mass appeal sense for the game to move towards this place.

But for me personally, I think some significant part of the Overwatch experience died and is never coming back. I miss building tank synergy. I miss VOD reviewing with my team. I miss developing acute game sense over the course of a meta developing about the intricacies of macro play.

It would be entirely fair if you said that my perspective is selfish, narrow, and rose-tinted. If you were more soft about it, you might suggest I pick up a MOBA instead. To be clear I'm not suggesting or demanding the game switch for my needs, or denigrating what other people enjoy (though honestly the preferences do strike me as dull and vapid, so maybe a little bit denigrating :P). In fact, I'm pretty glad I've been able to move on, and don't really have an interest in going back. Some part of me will always be nostalgic for goats meta, and I'm not sure if I'll ever get that itch scratched again. Nor am I sure if I have any desire to seek it out again from other sources. Maybe the role Overwatch served for me was important and significant to my interests and development for a time, but is no longer appropriate for who I have become and am becoming. In any case, I can't see myself returning to the obsessive passion I once had for Overwatch any time soon.

I'm not really sure how to end this. Writing this was a little bittersweet, and it was nice to remember all the friends and experiences I had along the way. I'm not sure if I could ever completely capture the ways in which this game has influenced the course of my life, and the depth and intimacy in the ways it has shaped me. I know I've strayed a bit from the supposed thesis, but what's new really (was there even much of a thesis to begin with?). Hopefully this effort was sufficient at something, though I no longer know by what measure.