True, Overwatch is amazing, as is Blizzard. However, I caution against using subreddits as a general sense of popularity. Subreddits are a fraction of a fraction of these games playerbase (LoL and Overwatch included) and tend to largely be North American English speakers. In the case of LoL, there is a huge Chinese and Korean playerbase that is simply absent from that forum.
I'd say the same thing about twitch and esports in general. lol seems to be the premiere esport game, but I feel like other developers do a much better job catering to different types of fans- namely more casual players (Blizzard definitely falling into that category).
Riot feels less like a game developer and more like a sporting league (ala the NFL) Do they even have any other games planned?
I couldn't disagree more - the visuals in Overwatch are in fact the main reason I left it after the open beta.
Overwatch is very pretty (both games are in my opinion), however it is so busy. There are no visual cues in the design - characters and scenery share the same palette, important elements (like payloads, turrets, etc) don't stand out. No way of knowing where the important flow points are other than to play the game a lot (no indication of where the playload will go). Having had such a great example in TF2 that did all this so well it was just sad trying to get to grips with Overwatch.
League of Legends on the other hand had an amazing visual update a year or two ago and they explicitly addressed all these kind of issues. Making sure the map doesn't distract from the important in game information.
Both games have a lot of characters and a lot of knowledge burden for the players, so anything they can pull off the player makes a big difference when first starting.
>There are no visual cues in the design - characters and scenery share the same palette, important elements (like payloads, turrets, etc) don't stand out.
All key characters/items have a unique silhouette which makes it easy to pick out at a glance
>(no indication of where the playload will go).
There's a giant colorful line on the ground that denotes the path the payload will take
Not saying you have to like the game (It seems like it's not for you).
Silhouettes are a good start, but take these two images as an example:
http://gameplaying.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/overwatch...
From this image I have no idea who is on what side in this battle. The sniper blends into her spot as she is a similar colour scheme to the metal work. Where will the car move next if it is being escorted? There is so much going on it takes a lot of knowledge to understand what is happening.
http://i.imgur.com/l3pCIgk.jpg
Here on the other hand it is obvious what team everyone is part of. All character pop out as they are very different to the background (colour and shape wise). The track shows where the payload is going and where it will roll back.
TF2 has great visual clarity, it gives you information clearly without having to explain it to you. Obviously for many the lack of visual clarity in Overwatch is not a problem - which is fine, but Blizzard made a choice which is not without cost.
As for the a payload line, it definitely wasn't there in beta, it's possible they've added one, but this video from a few weeks ago suggests they have not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiAitNchwYM
The outline certainly helps with team identification. I don't play Overwatch so it is certainly possible things have improved a lot, but from the video I linked before I think it still looks very noisy to my eye.
That's funny - I play Overwatch and never have played TF2 and I can tell at a glance what's happening in the first image and have trouble distinguishing much of anything in the second (the path of the pyload is at least clear).
For a more modern game, yeah, but StarCraft 1 is just in a league of its own, specifically vanilla (the Valkyrie and devourer feel a little off-key, along with some of the BW textures). The feel of every unit, texture, and doodad and even the sound design in vanilla is just perfect.
Blizzard = equal part casual and competitive. Works for neither. Hearth Stone, Heroes of the Storm , Overwatch. All extremely boring to watch, but HS takes a bit to understand the RNG > Tactics of that game and grow tired of the unbelievable happening for and against.
Pretty boring imo. I prefer watching TF2 even though it has much fewer viewers. It's not a fair comparison, I know. The TF2 comp community has been active for almost a decade now. I'm hopeful that OW will improve in the future.
Regarding OW, a lot of what made TF2 attractive has been scrapped in the name of making the game "accessible" to casual players. That's fine of course, but it unfortunately makes the game less fun to watch at a high level. For example, there is almost zero skill required for advanced map traversal (save for Lucio). In TF2 on the other hand, rocket jumping and sticky jumping are non-trivial, and are critical for map dominance. Another thing I find weird is character caps. The goal (in theory) was to ensure that there was variety int the meta, but it doesn't look like it's working tbh. It also shows that Blizzard doesn't really trust the comp community to independently minmax strategies for team comp.
Let's not even start talking about the collectible system. TF2 does this masterfully through the trading and crafting systems. I can get every single item in the game without spending a cent, including cosmetics - without relying on RNG of course. Blizzard on the other hand is in it for the $$$. Have you ever heard of a card game where you can't trade cards? An absolute joke!
But Blizzard is doing quite a few things damn well. Most prominently, their approach to openly communicating changes and stuff that's in progress is very refreshing imo. I hope other devs learn from this approach.
I find Starcraft2 fun to watch but it's not like I hang out on twitch to watch each day. Usually if a tourney lines up with a weekend where I can stay up until 3am is where I indulge :)
Dwindling twitch numbers doesn't always mean a game isn't fun to watch.
What? I've watched Hearthstone and Overwatch on Twitch several hours a day since launch and I will probably never be bored. They are by far the best streaming games out there IMO.
In fairness Hearthstone was never meant to be competitive and I wish Blizzard would just have a separate "competitive" bracket where they ban all the RNG cards. Trying to make a game that fills both niches of casual rng-based play and competitive tournaments leads to a less good product.
Overwatch seems like it shipped with servere networking issues that were plastered over by lowering the rate the server ran game simulations at. The nature of the issue and the way the lead was kind of buried until they had a fix months later (they hardly ever mentioned the setting that masked it until then) make me curious if that was nearly a showstopper for them, or more of a stretch goal for them.
AFAIK the server has always run at the same rate, and the update was just to how often the server sent new data to clients — it would receive client updates and run the game very frequently, but only send updates every 47 ms or so. I feel like rather than being some critical issue they were trying to bury, it's more likely they just didn't initially think updating client state for every single frame was necessary, or at least not high-priority.
The details buried at the bottom of patch notes pointed to there being severe bugs with the higher rate from clients going out of sync to abilities not working (it was under the "high bandwidth" option in patch notes)
Just for off the cuff figures, the LoL subreddit has 942k subs, and overwatch has 743k subs. Overwatch is very promising