Why do I feel Solo? - An Overwatch 2 Analysis
As of writing this blog post, Overwatch 2 is in the beginnings of its seventh season. For some background about my time playing the game, I’ve played Overwatch since the beta of Overwatch 1 back in 2015-2016, and since then, I’ve amassed over 1000 hours in the game. I love Overwatch, and I want what is best for the game, so when I see the game trending in a direction that I think is unhealthy, I want to try to quantify what makes it seem unhealthy to me. So I will do my best to outline my thoughts in this blog post.
What is Overwatch?
If you aren’t familiar with Overwatch as a franchise, it’s a team based arcade shooter where two teams of 5 (or 6 in Overwatch 1) battle to secure objectives on various maps around the world. There has always been a push and pull between the design philosophy of the game in its “team-based” nature. Overwatch is about team play and coordinating attacks to outsmart and outplay your opponents, but players feel that because the game is an online multiplayer environment, they have to depend on random teammates and their agency feels lost. This is a very real issue that has affected the game since its first or second year in existence. In Overwatch 2, the developers have shifted the power of many heroes to allow for more solo power and player expression, which gives players a lot more agency in their play. The danger in this approach however, is the fact that the team has been creating heroes that no longer have weaknesses (this will be brought up more later in this blog post).
So What’s the Issue?
I will run under the assumption that you know the basics of Overwatch from here on out. As I mentioned before, the push and pull of team play vs solo carry that players want has created some rifts between the way the game has been balanced and the design philosophy of the game. The main issue this season is most commonly touted as “supports are broken” and while it’s true that supports are very strong this season, the issue is the design philosophy of the “solo carry”. The first new hero of Overwatch 2 to fall into the category of having no weakness to exploit is Kiriko, though she is not the only character to fall into this category of the game’s balance, she is a good example to learn from. She has high healing output, high damage, a teleport that can go through walls and an ability that makes allies it hits invulnerable and cleanses all negative effects. If you read all that and thought “that sounds pretty strong”, you would be right. Now, as a tank player who hates getting my entire gameplan negated by this character, I will try to keep this analysis objective.
Ana vs. Kiriko
Ana is a support character that has been strong since her release in 2016. What makes her strong is her ability to keep her team healed at a distance, the utility of her biotic grenade, which grants extra healing to teammates and negates healing against enemies, and her sleep dart which is a projectile that puts an enemy to sleep for a few seconds allowing her team to capitalize on it. While all of these parts of her kit are very strong, she has no form of mobility, so if she misses her sleep dart and she’s alone, there’s a good chance you will kill her. She has an obvious and exploitable weakness, but she still brings enough utility and effectiveness to stand as one of the stronger supports in the game. If she misuses one of her cooldowns, she can be punished for that mistake. These weaknesses of Ana can be mitigated by effective team play and good positioning (staying in line of sight of teammates, away from immediate danger), she fits snugly into the design vision of Overwatch. Kiriko is an example of a hero that was designed to be completely self sufficient. I don’t think that this design is inherently bad, because I think that support characters should be able to duel and fight, it is a shooter after all, but when the entire character is built around that idea, it can affect how the game is played. When a character doesn’t need to depend on others in a team game, they gain an advantage over all other characters that have to depend on their allies.
As you can see from the flow graphs above, Kiriko’s defensive rotation is fairly linear and lacks counterplay. If Kiriko has one or all of her cooldowns available, there is almost no way to secure a kill on her. Ana’s defense is based on timing and landing a skill shot with sleep dart, this gives both parties a sense of pride for winning the engagement.
Concluding Thoughts
In my opinion, Overwatch 2’s balance issues are more tied to the philosophy behind the designs of heroes rather than the specifics of numbers in terms of healing output or damage. Heroes who were originally designed to play around team members are either being balanced to become self sufficient or are being left behind in terms of effectiveness, and heroes who are designed to play solo are incongruent with the design philosophy of the team-based arcade shooter we all know and love(d), Overwatch.