I wait at the door, finger feathering over a trigger. My champion of choice is a grizzled, stereotypical space marine, a flood of tracer fire and solid damage per second. When the assault begins, I charge out with a giant robot at my side, his mechanized hammer broadcasting an energy shield for me to shoot from. We lope toward our target between old-style Japanese buildings and cherry blossom trees.
Suddenly a grim reaper wannabe jumps out of a building, twin sawn-off shotguns blazing. Wait—are there more than one of him now? We both go down in a flurry of buckshot. Watching the instant replay before I respawn, I'm still not entirely sure what happened.
Overwatch, Blizzard's newest game, which has been in closed beta for the past week, is busy. It's dressed up as a first-person multiplayer shooter that pits teams of six against each other in small urban settings, but playing a few matches reveals that isn't all, or even most, of what it's doing. Overwatch takes the structure and gameplay of a shooter (run here, shoot this) and adds the character variety and strategic density of a multi-online battle arena. Imagine Blizzard's own Heroes of the Storm crammed inside Team Fortress 2.
At the beginning of each match, players can choose from a variety of heroes across four different categories:
- Damage dealers, who play largely like traditional shooter avatars,
- Tanks, like my big robot friend,
- Healers, and
- Specialized strategic characters, like a hyper-accurate bow-wielding sniper or a sentry that can turn into a player-sized turret to defend objectives.
The extent of my knowledge about MOBAs was exhausted in the preceding two paragraphs, so my first response to all of this was the sinking-in-quicksand feeling of being far out of my element. All of the characters are so distinct as to feel like they're from different games, and the maps are tiny enough that the abilities of a character you don't even understand can completely control a match if left unchecked. Battles are rainbow-shaded catastrophes, eruptions of guns and lasers and giant, enraged robo-apes whipping some poor fool over your head while a cowboy creeps up behind you and mutters something about high noon before taking potshots at your cranium.
Oh, and did I mention you're trying to attack or defend a central objective while all this is happening?
The fights are fast, though, sometimes lasting mere minutes, and the game is designed to control comfortably on both keyboard and gamepad. Aim assist (more generous than most PC games') quietly nudges your crosshairs closer to their targets.
It's easy to see what Blizzard's going for: A game that is less about technical skill than about strategy, experience, and positioning, the type of game that's fun to learn even when you're getting slaughtered by shotgun-wielding death personified. A game with e-sports ambition that doesn't ruin your life while you're trying to learn it.
I'm impressed with the results so far, even if I need to take a breather now and then. With luck, when Overwatch actually comes out, I'll have figured out what's going on.
