Free Updates
Season passes have become the norm of gaming, but some studios don’t think you need to pay money for the game after you buy it. Blizzard is one such company, having made the choice to release every future Overwatch character for free by just including them in future updates. Like CD Projekt Red with The Witcher 3, they believe in building trust with the player, and it certainly shows.
By vowing to make all future characters free, the only thing that players have the option to spend real money on are loot boxes. Even then, that’s only if you don’t feel like waiting for them to arrive when you ascend to the next level. Halo 5 has a similar system in play as well, and it’s one that should be adopted going forward. No one can complain about missing content from the disc when you’re giving out cool stuff with zero cost to them.
Balance is Important
In an age of online gaming, everything needs to be fine tuned to near perfection, or at least a stable enough state to be called that. Social media has made it so that if there’s something wrong with a game, it’ll get called out until it’s fixed (or at the very least, addressed). Developers may not be able to catch every single problem before launch, but there’s clearly ones that make the game chaotic and not fun to play.
The worst part of a multiplayer game is when everything is unbalanced and people are exploiting bugs and glitches all willy-nilly. Overwatch has had some issues, to be sure, but Blizzard has been pretty good about stamping them out before they get too unwieldy and break the game. These days, it’s practically a miracle if a game comes out with less than 10 major problems, but this one managed to do it while also nipping its smaller scale problems in the bud with extreme prejudice.
Extra Modes
A lot of multiplayer games share the same slate of modes for players to go through. You’ll get a deathmatch, Capture the Flag (or something like it), maybe a Horde mode, and certainly an objective mode. They’re all fine and good, but aside from those latter two, cooperation isn’t really encouraged. Sure, you’re supposed to be working with your teammates, but you also could theoretically manage to Capture the Flag and make it to your base on your own just by being careful while the rest of the team is shooting people.
When Overwatch first released, all it had to its name were two modes that emphasized teamwork over a kill count. Since its May release, Blizzard has decided to have some fun with the modes by incorporating the characters into play with one another. Games like Halo have done this before with Grifball, but this takes it one step further, thanks to mixing the strengths of different heroes and allowing each player to make up for a teammate’s weakness. They also aren’t afraid to just get weird with it, as the surprisingly addictive Lucio Ball has shown.
Get the Fans Involved
It’s not exactly a stretch to say that Overwatch wouldn’t be what it is without its very devoted fans. Whether they’re fanfic writers, passionate artists, or anything in between, the fanbase has helped the game stay popular and relevant, even when there’s not much going on. They love the game so much that even something as small as a character tease has become a straight up investigation for any Easter egg that’ll link to the eventual announcement of the ever elusive Sombra. (We’re still waiting!)
The thing most developers do to interact with fans for a game after release is a sweepstakes or blog posts. Blizzard goes above and beyond, not only putting out webcomics and a graphic novel due out next year, but also still doing online shorts focused on the characters. The wait between the shorts isn’t too terribly long, but in the meantime, fans have made sure that Overwatch is never low on content thanks to the aforementioned fanfic and art, plus awesome videos.
Character is Everything
So much of Overwatch’s success is thanks to its cast. Through 22 characters, Blizzard managed to catch everyone’s eye by having them all be different from each other, in terms of both visual design and personality. Even if you haven’t played the game, you’ll know when you’re seeing say, Zarya, and when you’re seeing just a regular video game character.
You can see personality in every facet of every character. From the way they interact before the match begins, to the flashy hero highlights before the Play of the Game, the game absolutely shines with personality. Not a lot of games do that, and it’s a shame, because Blizzard has shown that it makes you all the more memorable when you do it the right way. It’s something that Battleborn tried for, but didn’t really nail. The charming visuals and writing in the animated shorts give a Pixar quality, which in turn makes people think: “I wanna know more about these guys. I want this game, and I wanna consume everything about them.”
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