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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ก.ย. 2024
- Surprise bonus video! I wanted to talk about Supervive because the NDA is finally over and this is a topic I've been thinking about for a while. To be clear, I'm not being paid for this video by either Theorycraft or NetEase for this video or for my participation in Theorycraft's creator program, all I got is the opportunity to play a game before release and some codes for Supervive to hand out.
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MOBA roles are defined quite differently from the typical Tank/Damage/Healing setup that many other games do. League is the one I've played the most, so I'll pull all my examples from that.
"Supports" in that game are determined not by the actions that they can perform, but instead, how useful their character is on low gold income. Supports include healers and enchanters, actual tanks, some damage-only mages, tanks with hooks, a DPS with a hook, and more. Healers are fairly rare, and you can definitely succeed in a match without a healer, without a tank, and even without true DPS characters (though you typically want a frontline and a backline in teamfights, regardless of which role wants to go where). Two characters in the same category, such as Fighter can look like two different traditional roles. Some fighters act a lot more like tanks, some act like DPS, some are kind of in the middle, and some can effectively go full tank or full DPS just depending on their item build.
Supervive is being made by veteran MOBA devs, iirc? So they're coming from that flexible perspective on roles. If you're accustomed to Tank/DPS/Healer, and try to socket each character neatly into these 3 roles, it could look like the roster is imbalanced. But I trust they know what they're doing and they aren't making the same mistake as Overwatch.
Went down here to comment just that, look at league's cast of supports and you'll find characters like the hook champions(blitz, tresh, nautilus) who basically can't do anything that would be called supporting in a hero shooter aside from thresh being able to reposition allies
Hell sometimes characters that weren't made with supporting in mind end up dabbling in the role like Sett or Poppy
yes
ow has also a very one demensional/blunt thinking when it comes to roles
besides SV teams are not built like that, there are not real tanks in this game the teams are mostly build of dmg dealer supporter arent that essential either like in ow and they can both heal a lot and controll/deal dmg
That's also why Pladins works without a role lock. Taking inspiration from moba elements, alot of character/team composition strengths and weaknesses can be circumvent by the shop items and flexible talent trees.
Overwatch is a unique problem where they designed characters to have hard counters and fatal flaws, because they were expecting us to swap mid match... instead of just designing flexible kits. Which is why you never hear this complaint about other hero shooters Garden Warfare, Team Fortress, etc.
@@343ishill team fortress actually does do rps, it just doesn't have the same problem because rps character matchups is more manageable with the amount of characters they had. Overwatch broke down as they added characters for a reason. I also think that most of what's wrong with OW is what they took from tf2, it can't support this expanding roster. the original Defense heroes, mid round switching, and the rps idea were all them taking inspiration from tf2. Which has created this debt that OW at some point is going to have to admit is unsustainable. they've tried to cover it up with role lock but it won't work. supports shouldnt be just healers, dps need to have more conditional damage, so standing in the open isnt a given one shot. Tanks are a fake role front lining should be doable by more heroes than just pure tanks
One thing that does get left out of conversations is how much TF2 influenced Overwatch, especially during the development. Its very clear that the original distinction of "offense" and "defense" reflected TF2's own distinction between "offense" and "defense" characters. TF2's offense DPS focused on forward pressure and mobility. Its defense DPS were focused on area denial and stationary damage (at least, as originally designed). If you look at the original roster of Offense and Defense heroes in Overwatch, its clear the developers envisioned the mobile DPS as the offense while the defense includes the snipers, junkrat (trap-focused Demoman) Torb (basically TF2 Engineer) as well as the CC of Mei.
However, both made the same mistake to think players would not use the tools provided to work outside the prescribed role. Problem being is that I believe you're right about the original sin. In the devs mind, offense and defense DPS were inherently different, and thus they got more heroes design to balance a roster among 4 classes. However, they didn’t understand that the difference between offense and defense is not distinct enough, and thus, you lead to a bloated DPS roster with overtuned Support and Tank characters developed to fill gaps in a roster, but not gaps in design. Which is why the worst times of Overwatch are often the fault of these overtuned Tank/Supports. And why so many reworks need to happen to open up those spaces, inadvertently hurting players enjoyment of thosr heroes.
Original Overwatch might have faced two scenarios, either during development they really thought defense and offense were meaningfully different to make it to 2 classes, but as players begun playing they realised it was the same thing, or they realized how much more fun it was to play damage and went all in on them. In either case I think the problem comes from designating the roles you want to separate your characters before finding out what are the different ways to play your game. In addendum it's making the roles a core mechanic of the game instead of a grouping/readability/design tool
From the games shown, Supervive has such an extreme inbalance, with the controllers having 2 characters to the fighters 9, that it really looks like they thought what would be the roles first and then just later realised the game has much more design space for the DPSes
Another game that I really like and suffers IMO from this is Gigantic, it feels absolutely horrible to play as a healer in Gigantic, to a point that it feels like they were made just because "it's a team game, it just HAS to have healers"
Call me a Riot dickrider but I really like the class system of both League of Legends and Valorant. League's role system is for the most part player made, with the game naturally dividing the different champions over time in their roles because of the assymmetry of the map it exists in.
And while Valorant did begin with roles already set, their roles are derived off the core game mechanics and interactions instead of being themselves a core mechanic, as in, while the role of "healers" somewhat add the concept of healing into a game, roles like Valorant's "controller" or "sentinels" play off the already existing mechanics of "the enemy is in disadvantage if they can't see where I am" and "I gain a lot of advantage if I can see where my enemies are before they can see me" that is already a natural parts of a shooter.
The idea was definitely that offense and defense would be seperate roles but they didn’t really function any differently. Players quickly realized that the defense role was ass and no matter what the situation, choosing an offense character would always be more beneficial to the time, aside from niche situations. The snipers were the only viable defense heroes for a while since they were just offense heroes in anything but name and Torb had his use cases (Hanamura B defense), otherwise it would just always be better to run Tracer or Genji or Soldier insted.
Yeah. Overwatch suffers from very strict hero design. This problem doesn't carry over to a lot of other games because their role mentality and design is very flexible e.g. Valorant and League.
Atleast in Gigantic characters have alternate builds, so most healers have a damage build/self sustain/status buffs and debuffs; meanwhile in OW its just healbots, so anytime they try to introduce alternate supportive elements Armor packs, Suzu, Life grip, etc. it becomes meta or just frustrating to play against.
As a Gigantic player, I kinda like how healing isn't super strong like it is in other mobas and hero shooters. Time to Kill is on the higher end and it would feel terrible if you were in a duel with another character for 20 seconds and have it quickly undone in 5 seconds because the enemy support came in and started healing the guy you were about to kill. Healing in Gigantic gives you enough breathing room to maybe win the fight or make an escape succeed, but not turn fights around completely. I just like how Supports in Gigantic are actually more focused on their Utility rather than their healing.
I blame the protag syndrome carry hype culture. Everyone wants to be a star, no one wants to be a factory worker.
So god damn true. I've had talks with an e-sport's coach who said this is more a problem with players in the Americana servers (not sure about EU) but he said players on the Asian severs the mentality is "We first" over "Me first"
I feel this way in regards to Dice and EAs approach to the modern battlefront games. Instead of "wanting to be the star" my name for the phenomenom was "kill streak culture" where everyone wants to run around with an smg and get kills up the wazoo.
This is a game design problem. Why do some players on a functioning team have to be a factory worker to win? In what way is that a fun game? Make other roles equally fun and players will play it equally. Make tanks fun to play mechanically and people will play them. It’s as simple as that.
@@alexkilgoreit's a fun game for lots of people if you want to be a star play fighting games
Too much cheifs not enough indians
I will always defend Sym as a support. She *was* a support at base. Sure she couldn't heal but her shields and zoning made her fit into the role of support in a way that isn't just "heal with different flavours"
There are so many different healing style archetypes that the OW team just outright refuse to entertain. It annoys me.
I mean we were there, we all remember how Sym was basically played as an assassin-bruiser type of character
@@kitnal4143 yeah, it would've also helped with the "healers vs supports" mindset that some players have. Supports aren't just there to heal, they're there to do a lot of things on top of that.
She was a defender at launch. Her lil 25hp shield was dogass "support" and you know it. If you categorize "zoning" as support you may as well call junkrat, mei, hanzo, and pharah supports too 🙃
This is something I've thought about pretty often but I've never realized just how deep it's scarred overwatch, that's pretty interesting
I feel like the answer is simple, but I still think it's interesting to ponder why video games in general seem to like favouring adding an abundant surplus of DPS options compared to the other roles. That feels like a common trend in gaming, and I feel like understanding why that is would help us go a long way towards trying to break out of this cycle of fundamental problems
It's probably for two reasons. It's by far the most popular role in almost every game, so they make sure that the biggest audience is accounted for.
The other is that it's kinda easy? Almost every Overwatch launch DPS is, in some way, a safe spin on pre-established playstyles. A revolver and flasbang isn't new, so neither is Cass. We literally nicknamed one of the heroes 'Call of Duty' for this reason.
But once you get to the tanks and healers, you're out of easy inspiration and have to do some creative thinking yourself.
I believe it cones from the fact that most hero based games have not succeeded in making tanks/defensive roles more fun
They see it as a necessary role because it exists in the RPGs that hero/class systems try to emulate but they've forgotten one thing: they're not making an RPG. Transplanting a system across genres doesn't work because it wasnt designed with that in mind.
Tanks in anything other than an RPG don't really make sense, aggro doesnt work the way it does in MMOs and we dont have the "we need big numbers just to live" situation that turn based rpgs have. Thus, whats the point of tanks in something like a shooter? To slow the game down?
But these are fast paced action games, why would someone want to play this game slowly, in a passive role of "I stand here and get shot".
A more suited approach to tanks in these genres is to make them crowd control, which we see in Overwatch quite a bit, but then the other issue: crowd control is never fun for the victim in a pvp game- the reason why Blizzard really cracked down on removing stuns from Overwatch.
Then we see the issue of "well why CC when I can kill" and... yeah, they have a point. To make CC valuable enemies also need to be tanky enough for that to be necessary- but then you're slowing the game down for everyone.
Tanks just dont make sense in the fun pillar for these styles of games.
@@N0monisyeah, I feel like there's an inherent disconnect from the context in which the trifecta of roles in RPGs had arisen and the contexts in which they're attempted to be transplanted into artificially.
It almost feels sometimes like these classifications and, thus, design principles are utilized purely out of some perceived groundedness. Like somebody, upon the conception of an idea of a shooter with different characters that each have their own roles and abilities that are meant to be combined in a team effort immediately went to the trifecta of MMO parties because that's what they were exposed to, and it never got addressed or questioned beyond that afterwards.
Hell, that's something I believe one can feel in most PvP games with these kinds of delineations. League has had issues with tanks in particular, Overwatch, even TF2, to a lesser extent has had issues with the design of their one "tank" character.
That role in specific seems to be just about impossible to cleanly transplant into a PvP environment without either making it a reskinned damage dealer with some number ratios switched around or a controlling nightmare that completely hijacks the flow of the game.
@@N0monis What if we remove DPS and just have Tanks & Supports, oh wait that was Goats.
@@N0monis Soo... is the solution to make tanks less tanky, supports less supportive and both more like dps? It will leave many players unsatisfied, but it might be the sacrifice we have to make
This is pretty much the root of the tank problem in OW. People don’t pick a role, they pick a character. When there are 20 character in Role A and 10 characters in Role B, about twice as many players will pick role A. This also extends to character design. If you force bad designs like Orisa that players don’t want to play, it further disincentivizes players from picking tank because they might have to pick a character that isn’t fun to play due to lack of options.
This right here!
What makes orrisa a bad design?
Tbf supposedly supervive roles barely matter for comp purposes and just signal the playstyle of the characters, and all characters are fighting characters according to the website and every news site
It's one of those games where every character is a DPS, i think you're too caught up on the holy trinity when talking about it, the different roles really don't mean what "role" means in overwatch, it just means playstyle
I'm very excited about that YTTD video!
What the!? A rare Tuesday video from Viv??? I don't even know what to do with this. Except continue to cross my fingers for getting a beta key for Rivals, I guess.
I think the issue isn't an Overwatch/Overwatch-like games. The Issue is that no one likes tanks at all. In mobas and class based shooters, it is always the least popular role and sits between overpowered/cringe or absolute trash to play. I understand that's not an excuse to have an unbalanced roster, but time and time again we see the same issue in every game over the last decade. Why bother developing heroes that no one wants to play?
Because only giving people what they think they want is a recipe for short term gain and long term loss?
To turn it around though, how do you expect people to want to play a role if you clearly state to your audience that it's considered second-rate citizens? Both in heroes count, balance updates, highlights on the esports scene, skin releases, etc.
Who knows, maybe if DPS had a few less heroes and tanks had a few more, things might've been different. It's not uncommon for unpopular archetypes to get a cool character that gets people playing. Thresh, I'm told, got people trying support in LoL because of how unique, aggressive and cool he is.
tank mains are masochists(i only play tank in every game i play)
I think there is a reason that tanks weren't really a thing in fps games until OW. In an MMO, where you can body block and draw aggro, it makes sense, but in 3d space, you can just shoot the medic standing behind them, unless you give them a boogie board like Rien, but then it becomes a game of stand behind the shield.
I’ve always played tanks, I never knew it was so unpopular tbh. Something about spongeing massive damage and not giving a shit is very appealing to me
Not a lot to say about the point, except that learning about game balance is always fascinating for me, who only plays solo games. Also, please feel free to keep using this game for footage because third-person top down is much easier to watch without getting motion sick =3
Symmetra at release was very much a Support, which is slightly different from being a pure Healer. All Healers are Supports, but not all Supports are Healers.
She could've really stayed as Support if Blizzard leaned harder on her supportive capabilities, like damage mitigation and teleportation. Imagine if her old shitty walking barrier was instead Sigma's barrier, for example. She'd be effective at preventing damage instead of healing it, getting the team around the map with her teleporters, and a small bit of area denial with her sentries
Okey in short fav tank ever is blaze in heroes of the storm. Mostly because of his oil. He can toss around oil that will slow down enemies who walk over them. And with the use of his fire move (his cheap spamable move btw) he can set the oil on fire. Removing the slow but making it deal damage over and healing blaze while on it. You can toss oil and use just as a slow. You can toss oil and quickly make it burn for damage. You can toss oil wait for it to juuuust time out, and then fire it cause when it starts burning the timer of when it gets removed resets. Hell you can even just toss some oil underyourself fire it up and get a full heal. There are so many things you can do and the self healing from it is crazy. I had games where we had a main healer (not a healer that gave some hp ones that gave a lot) and my self healing was nearly that of the main healer. I healed more then there second highest damage dealer dit the entire game. And thats just his oil toss with some fire. Love how creatively you can be with a rather simple ability
I completely agree with everything besides the Symmetra point, people now talk about Sym with an air of historical revisionism, but in beta and in many respects (albeit too heavily nerfed) at launch, Sym really was a support in more than just name.
originally she gave shield health that lasted on any given hero until they died and needed to be reapplied, I believe in beta it was 75hp at one point (which they must have seen data to suggest was insanely powerful), but by launch they had overcorrected and nerfed it too harshly down to 25hp, it can’t be overstated how powerful permanent health was as a support ability.. health that regenerates after not taking damage and changes crucial breakpoints was an incredibly powerful ability that simply got nerfed too hard before it was ever given a chance.. had it been 50 shields on launch and the community had learnt how to utilise cover, Sym wouldn’t have been seen in the bad light she started to be seen as then-and has been crystallised in the minds of players now.
Just because the implementation and balance wasn’t there for Symmetra when she needed it in the support role, doesn’t mean her kit wasn’t specifically designed with support in mind, I do not believe she was ever conceived as anything other than a support in overwatch 1 before launch, her support abilities in photon sheild and teleporter in tandem (rather than as a separate ult choice) would have been more than enough support to her team had she been balanced more fairly.
yes on launch she was anaemic, and yes because of that, comparisons to the “support” torb provided in armour makes it look like Sym had no right to be a support, but it really just shows the terrible way Sym was handled by the balance team at the time and how they needed to do more with her as a support rather than have moved her to the dps slot and effectively replaced her with moira..
Overwatch 1 surely could have used a more balanced roster for the respective roles, even if the idea of role lock and a 2,2,2 balance wasn’t there at that time, I just heavily disagree that Symmetra was a defense/dps hero that was thrown into support to bolster that roles heroes, the design philosophy was just different, supports in the eyes of devs weren’t all about healing back then, and dps like Sombra weren’t all about dps.. was it the best for balance? probably not.. but it also allowed/meant that balance mattered less than creative team composition and coordination, it’s really the pro scene, in finding the most optimum, stable, mechanically-favourable compositions that saw the death of that vision for Overwatch and now makes us look back on Symmetra with a critical misunderstanding of what she was designed as, and could have been.
6:52 While I get your point, Roadhog never particularly felt like a "Tank" in the first place, but more like a DPS character that uses their high health pool and self sustain to pick 1v1s that they know they'd win, which doesn't really fall into a "protector" role
To argue for Supervive a bit here; I think compared to a traditional hero shooter like Overwatch or Marvel, it feels much less necessary to actually have a "balanced" team composition here than in those games. Self healing is fairly prevalent due to being able to carry heals, and damage is fairly avoidable in many circumstances, meaning that supports and tanks are a boon to your comp, but don't really feel like the be all end all of keeping the team alive. Ive had many games in the closed beta where the team goes 3 or even a full team of 4 dps, and there are many times where that can actually work out, although it requires you to take fights slightly differently (usually much more ambush-oriented).
I also think that the item system feels pretty good at allowing you to play characters different ways. Kingpin is a prime example of a character thats classified as a DPS, but I think can totally work as a beefy, disruptive frontline tank if you just build more defensively, due to his good crowd control. Theres a lot more room to flex some characters, unlike something like Overwatch where very few characters have variation in playstyle that goes outside their intended role.
I think about this so much. It boggles my mind that supports take up twice as much of the team's composition yet we still have two less supports than tanks, despite how many new supports we're getting, and it's all because this has been an issue from the get-go. Obviously I don't think it'd be reasonable for them to just stop making tanks or DPSes, but it's still something I find really annoying. I'm primarily a support player, though the larger hero pool for DPSes has made me play that role a lot more than usual lately.
Good observation. It's always taken for granted that DPS gets more and the others gets less, and as a tank main in everything I play, that stinks. I'm somewhat uptimistic about Concord but it's also seemingly stepping in the same trap. Final Fantasy 14, an otherwise amazing game, also usually adds one DPS and either a tank or healer per expansion, except the newest one that launches with two DPS. Like... Come on.
I kinda hope Marvel Rivals' IP can carry the smaller number between roles. It may sting a little less if you want to main tank but at least gets to choose between Magneto, Dr. Strange, Venom and Groot.
I hope this discussion escelates until it is a real concern for developers.
I'd say that the difference for Supervive (I've been playing it for nearly a year & main Elluna, one of the 3 protectors) is that Protectors are not necessary part of a team, many of the top teams do not use any traditional healing support character. There are multiple alternative sources of healing, and the zone control and space that other characters can generate by being damage threats can be just as valuable as the up front healing in the BR format.
I think this is a problem in the sense that there are limited hunters to choose from if you want to play that supportive role, but I don't think it's a problem beyond that unless they feel like must picks. The roles are really not well defined because many characters are hybrids or just don't fit into the standard buckets that other games use.
I just want to thank you for covering Overwatch in a lot of your videos. I've been trying to get into it and your videos about it inspired me to make a rewrite to the story and gameplay
This is partially what killed Atlas Reactor (A 5v5 Xcom MOBA thing) as well. Towards the end of its life, it had 16 Firepower, 9 Frontliner, and 9 Support Freelancers, with it often going 2-3 Firepower Freelancers before either of the other two got a single one.
i fw the new intro music a lot
IMO the reason for this is because of how these games designed their classes. The classic DPS/Tank/Healer divide kind of inherently leads you towards making Tanks/Healers the vast minority. Not just because of player biases, but also because the fantasy of Tank (you're hard to kill) and Healer (you make everyone else hard to kill) ends up having to be limited for good gamefeel. A game defined by DPS is action packed carnage, a game defined by people surviving damage is much slower and harder to sell. This can also lead to many other problems, like the "should tanks also deal good damage" dilemma that lead to Overwatch 2's 1 per team rule.
I personally believe the solution is for characters to be more nuanced and break outside the hard lines of the role trinity.
It was ultimately designed for RPGs where one player often controls the whole party, not PvP games, and I have always felt its insertion into PvP is a bit artificial. MOBA team compositions will very rarely have dedicated healers at all, and even back to older RPGs, it's common nowadays for characters in them to serve much more nuanced, varied roles than damage/tank/healer.
This is such a strange contrast to Super Monday Night Combat, a game that existed before Overwatch until its developers went bankrupted from being outcompeted by Overwatch. The game didn't have a mandatory role list or strongly suggest getting all 4 roles for the match (Healer/Tank/DPS/Assassin) plus 1 wild card pick. Despite this 80% of the game had someone play tank because all of them are fun. It helps that the game revolves more around on having a comp that can either support, PvE, PvP, or a hybrid of the 2-3. Which mean tanks (and to extend assassins) aren’t mandatory and yet they get picked often.
The way you described the controller heros makes me think theyre trying to make the forbidden 4th role, the mezzer, again.
My competitive game of choice is Splatoon, and though it's pretty far removed from a hero shooter it also has a similar issue with the "shooter" weapon class. It has twice as many variations of any other class, and for the longest time it seemed to be almost favored by the developers (nearly all shooter weapons got their second kits within 6 months while many other weapons had to wait 18 months or more, many of the kits they got were objectively stronger, and even though they're already considered the strongest weapon class many of them would get buffs seemingly at random).
It always annoyed me that this one weapon class seemed to get preferential treatment, and I definitely wish the developers would give more attention to the weapons that actually need buffs... but at the same time, I'd never ask for shooters to be treated 100% equally to the other weapon classes in the game. For as much flak as I like to give them, I still think they deserve to be over-represented because they're designed to be the most popular and easy to pick up weapons available. Splatoon is filled to the brim with bizarre weapon designs, enough to fill almost any niche you can imagine: but with that comes the fact that many of these weapons are in-fact niche, and won't appeal to most players. That's completely fine, you don't need to have every option be equally popular nor do they all need to be equally represented: that's why we have variety in the first place.
The real problem with Overwatch isn't that there's way more DPS heros than any other category: it's the fact that the game is built in a way where any imbalance is problematic to begin with. Look at a game like TF2: that game might say there's three classes for each role, but if we went by Overwatch definitions there'd be exactly one support, one tank and everyone else is DPS. And yet that game has stood the test of time because it doesn't really matter if your roles aren't perfectly balanced, there's no one "optimal" team comp you're meant to play. But in Overwatch, role queue means that DPS being the most popular is actively detrimental, because it leads to longer queue times for this majority of players who want to play DPS. I think ideally, the game should be balanced enough to where people can play whatever they want and still make something happen. Or heroes should be flexible enough that they can fill the gaps left by a missing tank or support even if it's not their role. But instead we have this system where potentially niche playstyles are being forced on players who have no interest in actually playing them, and blizzard has to jump through endless hoops of buffs and reworks and so on in order to fit a square peg in a round hole.
This is a great exploration of a reoccurring problem. I have lots of thoughts bouncing around, such as FFXIV having similar class imbalance in an MMORPG, or Deep Rock Galactic not having a healer class at all and (probably) being a better game for it, but I can't organize them in any meaningful way. This is something I will definitely be noticing when picking up a new game.
Also, good for you getting into a closed Alpha and having the Devs give you codes. You're starting to hit it big I'm not a big fan of PvP, so I'll be skipping this giveaway, but this is quite the milestone and I'm happy for you.
I remember thinking Defense meant "less mobile DPS characters" in Overwatch, so they made sense at the time. But holy cow, you're right. They really did just have a ton of DPS characters and minimal for the other roles.
Also, still wild to me Symmetra wasn't Defense. Providing a little shield does not a support make.
In Overwatch 1, it was a huge problem that healers that couldn’t heal were bad. (And tanks that couldn’t put up a shield too)
I don’t think Project Loki has that problem exactly- in a Moba you can support in many ways, and in Loki everyone can ‘heal’ in the sense of reviving allies. I think they can be pretty creative over time.
A game I've been spending a lot of time playing recently that handles this balance of characters in roles interestingly is Multiversus. As a platform fighter, it plays differently with the MOBA dynamics. However, the emphasis on twos keeps this balance interesting to me.
If you aren't aware of their system of design, fighters fit into four different roles: Bruiser (11 char), Tank (5 char), Assassin (5 char), and Mage/Ranged (7 char).
Tanks function as slower characters with worse frame data but higher weight, damage output and ease of killing. They fit into the typical heavyweight role and have a large presence on the stage, when given the space to make their moves hit.
Assassins fit more into the glass cannon role. Fast frame data, great combos, but a stray strong hit in the 60-70% range may just lead to a KO off of a good confirm. However, any stray hit from their kits often lead into large chunks of percentage or possible kills.
Bruisers fit somewhere between Tanks and Assassins possessing the stats between them. Decent combos, decent confirms, and decent weight.
Mages fit into the typical ranger category, but depending on the character may lean more towards Assassin with projectiles (like T&J, Bugs, or Gizmo) or a Bruiser with extra gimmicky moves (like Reindog or Rick)
The current roster heavily favors Bruisers, but I don't think this is a detrimental to the balance of the game. The interplay between roles present within most of these characters kits help emphasize a focus on team composition. A frailer Assassin like Arya or Harley may appreciate the stage presence that a bulkier Bruiser like Batman, Garnet, or Black Adam provide. A slower character like Superman or Jason may appreciate the extra stage presence that a projectile-based Bruiser like Morty, Lebron, or Agent Smith may provide.
This isn't to say that Multiversus handles character balance better than MOBAs (see pre-patch Bugs or Iron Giant), but the format of a platform fighter allows the game to function with more uniquely rounded roles for its characters, rather than pushing their kits and playstyles to confine to an idea of the roles present.
Blizzard said they didn't originally plan on specific roles at all, and added the classifications of attack/defense/tank/support just to provide some organization to the hero select screen. Also it's pretty obvious that back then, they thought teams would be fine with compositions like four dps, 1 tank, 1 healer. So their vision for roles/compositions just wasn't how the game ended up playing at all. Basically, they didn't understand what they had made. Personally I think there's a far larger sin they made, and that was thinking that teams of randos would be able to adapt, in competitive play, to teammates using such varied heroes. Like early on when Reinhardt was the only "anchor tank" a lot of people didn't know how to play if there wasn't a Rein on the team. So games were very toxic because people would always try to push others into playing what they wanted because that's all they knew how to play alongside.
Only complaint with the supervive take is thinking that Kingpin is a Tank. He is very squishy. He is a massively sized hunter with insane gank potential. I think he is more about high level plays than he is about absorbing damage like how Oath is able to block damage.
In supervive, it’s also not a requirement to have any supports because healing during engagements is more of a luxury than a necessity in games like overwatch
I couldn't agree with you more. The developer bias towards DPS heroes and neglect of other roles in overwatch has been one of the worst things that the original devs ever did, and there's absolutely no justification for it aside from incompetence. It is a shame to see other developers doing the same dumbass shit, still for no real reason.
I mean given that Supervive shares 99% of its DNA with battlerite- that launched with a really even/balanced roster between the three roles- I think it has more pressing issues in regards to its lifespan to deal with
The cc characters is probably a remnant of the old quad class system: dps (damage), support (healer), tank (agro focus and shield), and Hexer (status effects and recon)
But your point about the unbalamced roster is sn interesting point about overwatch. Would tank cue times have been so long if there were less dps and more tanks?
second video in a row mentioning your turn to die after i forgot what the game was called. it’s time to play it
I absolutely love ludicrously long video essays, especially on topics that I know nothing about because you're just explaining it to me and I love hearing people gush whether it's about something they hate or something they love
MOBA games don't map their classes out in the same "hard force" way as Overwatch. You can play 4 ranged DPS in Supervive and have a perfectly workable ranked team comp, but you can't do that in Overwatch because the classes have insanely different base stats and capabilities. If you have 3 tanks in Overwatch, one enemy Support can basically out heal your entire teams damage in an insanely high number of scenarios.
Aside from choosing your character, you can also choose which items you want to build in a MOBA, so you can build full damage on a Tank and oneshot everyone, but you'll die easier. This means that the same character can cover different roles game to game to suit their team comp, impossible in Overwatch. You can basically play every hero in Supervive as DPS if you want to, and some can cover a number of different roles comfortably. This means that an even split of official classes is never actually needed. This is fine because you don't queue as a tank in this game, you have the same queue time no matter who you play.
Definitely agree it sucked for Overwatch, and it is an interesting problem for sure. I do think Blizzard doubled-down and forced people to queue as certain roles, meaning that they need to balance their roster by class so matchmaking works. MOBA classes are not as clear cut as MMO/Hero Shooters, so it is definitely not nearly as bad in their case.
Bleeding Edge was the perfect "Hero Shooter" and I'm so depressed it didn't become a bigger thing.
i personally rly liked how they had two different selectable ults for each fighter. kulev's a surprisingly fun fella :)
Never heard of it. Kinda hard to advertise a game that looks like that.
So...there's something interesting in the dev blogs that have come out over the years, explaining what Overwatch was/is:
Overwatch was originally Project Titan, which was meant to be a sprawling futuristic MMO, the likes of which could rival WoW (Blizzard's original baby, and one of the hallmark's in video games for the holy triad of Tank/Support/DPS). Project Titan got scraped for parts after years of sunk cost, prompting some reshuffling to happen behind the Blizzard scenes. Overwatch was a rushed bit of development off the demand of the Executives to scrape something together and somehow, someway they hit lightning in a bottle.
They also struck something that had not been seen before, not really: an FPS that attempted to cleave to the Holy Triad. The question becomes, how the fuck do you make an MMO heavy framework work in a shoot 'em up game where, historically, the main protags/methods of play were largely DPS? Because that is what FPS' are about: elims/KDAs/TTK/etc.
I've always and will always bark about the fact Overwatch was a new type of game that people still don't understand in it's full scope (including the original Dev Team, who went on record to say OW PvP was supposed to be a stop-gap until they could restart making Project Titan or "the crawl phase of the crawl/walk/run plan").
But now we are seeing a deluge of new games coming down the pipe that are also strongly experimenting with this same model, prompting a new sub-genre that Overwatch originally pioneered, to start emerging-
-which is why we're seeing a lot of experimenting in different formats, ideas, and views (Supervine seems to be a top down MOBA style, while Rivals is a Third Person Shooter vs. Overwatch's FPS heavy vibe). Everyone seeing OW fall off from it's best state years ago, wants to be the successor that will "get it right"; not just as the replacement, but as the game that figured out just what this new sub-genre actually is and nails the formula that has escaped everyone up until now.
But that also means trying to identify the foundational elements of the genre that make it all work which, unfortunately, seems to include still catering to the DPS-centric gameplay that has haunted Overwatch for nearly a decade now.
Great video as always, Viv. Looking forward to more expanded thoughts and breakdowns with the advent of these new games coming down the pipe.
Tanks and Healers do not directly interact with the "deplete the enemies hp bar" quest line as efficiently as DPS roles.
Games with HP will always favor DPS, as the games win condition relies on that.
Games don't need an even 1:1:1 split across the board for roles, 1 tank,, 1 healer, and 2 DPS is the typical 4 party roster unless the game requires more ways to interact, (like stealth, or disables) Games should include more ways for roles to interact with the game.
Problem with these types of games is that they are trying to create categories/roles for characters instead of making it customizable for every character. This would fix the issue indefinitely. Need healing? Swap out your spell/weapon. Etc.
This is probably something that Valorant does well. All the roles feel rather balanced with each other even tho Duelist (their DPS) is the one people are drawn to.
WAIT SUPERVIVE MENTIONED POGGERS
Now that I watched the whole video yeah, your POV has a lot of merit. This game definitely has a weird way of working with roles and is definitely something the devs need to work on and I am sure they will get to. Right now I just know they are working on so many different things that they need to iron out first. Hopefully it will be better on launch :D
The game as a whole is definitely a lot of fun, but when it comes to roles I lowkey kinda wish they just categorized the hunters by their range instead of fighter/protector/controller. To me it’s infinitely more valuable to know Bishop’s range vs Joule’s range than it is to know that they both count as fighters, especially because it felt like a lot of the time when I was struggling it was because my team would realize that we didn’t have anyone who could do much against someone like a Shrike because we’d all picked close-range hunters.
Either way, given how far out it is from launch, it’s in a pretty solid state. I just need to figure out how to get some utility out of Joule bc she’s my favourite of the bunch and I have never achieved anything with her lmao
@@TheViveros Joule is heavily combo based, I'm sure a video on all the different combos will pop up soon if there isn't one already. I was trying her out last test and once someone showed me the combos it made a world of difference.
The reason why overwatch started with its "unbalanced" roster is that it took a lot of inspiration from TF2, which sorts heroes into offense, defense and support, which works for TF2. I guess the devs assumed that overwatch would be played in a similar way and thus sorted their heroes into tank,offense,defense and support (which includes sym because she would be a "support" by TF2 standarts). Only after the players learned to play overwatch did the current roles stop making sense, and a lot of moving around and hero balancing had to be made. Thats why overwatch moved from Having offense+defense, to just DPS, 2/2/2 role queue, and now 1/2/2 (single tank).
TLDR: Overwatch devs used TF2 hero classes, but the game ended up different so they had to rebalance over time.
the thing i will never forgive the gaming community at large for is the idea that "Support only means healing". fuck that noise, i want a support that only buffs or debuffs. i want a support who's all about keeping control over a location rather than being generally good at fighting. Gigantic has a healthier idea of what a support can do than all the actual hero shooters combined and no, i will not accept criticism. you have Xenobia whose whole method of support is "i fuck with your plans". you have Aisling who can heal, but it's not her main gimmick as a support, she's an Ice Climbers with her Dad playing Nana to Aisling's Popo. you have Zandora who is this weird mix of Lucio and a Tank by the merit of being Paladin flavored. the TF2 Medic (fuck calling it Mercy, play more games.) analog literally outheals DPSes doing damage but has to sacrifice her own HP to do so. Uncle Sven is just here tossing all the potions and one of them makes you jump really goddamn high and the other is a healing potion with surprising long term effects he can bank on while tossing explosive flasks of fire and acid.
i refuse to accept the idea that y'all really just want boring, bland as shit healbots and bullet sponges instead of varied Supports and Tanks who, with DPSes, do things outside the established norm.
Battlerite did it right. It had an almost balanced cast on launch and throughout it’s runtime. And because tanks and healers had such dynamic gameplay and could fend for themselves in 1v1, 1v2 and 1v3 scenarios like any other heroes, you were never discouraged to play them.
I can't believe how much I had to scroll to find someone mentioning Battlerite/Bloodline Champions. Hats off to them for making a melee support based off of burst damage.
also it’s not like most players can or enjoy playing all the characters in their role, making things a lot more difficult for tank and support players depending on their hero pool
Your video hits the nails on the head, and I think I know exactly how to solve the problem: the Risk of Rain approach, aka *multiple ability options*.
Imagine you have some beefy tank like Roadhog. Now, what if he had ability variants that allowed you to spec into different ideas of what Roadhog could do. Perhaps his Take A Breather, normally a "stand there and take it while you heal" ability, can have a version where it doesn't reduce damage or heal as much but allows you to move faster for a bit instead of stopping you in place. Heck maybe it gets two charges that cool down slower but you can use em back to back if needed. Or maybe there's a "Deep Breath" one that lasts longer outside of the actual animation, but has a longer cooldown. How about a version that does a small AoE cloud of healing and damage resist for a few seconds for his team to use? Maybe his hook doesn't pull, maybe he swings it over his head and flips the enemy to the same distance behind him as they were when they were hooked, but it takes longer to perform and has a much longer cooldown (no hook drop over a ledge cheese but it completely repositions an enemy to a very bad spot). Wanna bring back Torb's armor packs? Now you can! Want to sacrifice the utility of your support for a more damage-oriented style? Absolutely!
The main issue is *variety* you know? Give the champions/heroes/etc *themselves* the variety. They don't have to keep filling a specific niche if you can adjust your heroes on the fly to fit your play style. You can pull a given hero much closer in line with another role if you run their loadout like *this* instead of *that* (whatever that looks like). This especially works with games for superheroes because you're essentially just playing a different universe version of your hero.
The main issue there is keeping it ALL balanced and viable, as they struggle enough with balance as it (through their own fault of course), but I can bet they'd be fine.
I feel like that might be a good temporary fix. Games with multiple options to pick a build for your character tends to be "Solved" after a certain amount of time has passed. What I mean by "solved" is that everyone agrees on one build being the most efficient. It's happening right now in Dota. People will leave or flame you for picking a particular facet. When you add variety it leads people to figuring out and deciding what is the most optimal. Plus just like you mentioned, balancing is going to be a nightmare.
It always make me laugh that when I search your channel it shows me greenhouses
The worst part is that that's not even where I originally got the name from - I got it from Survivor: Panama, where one of the tribes was named Viveros after Isla Viveros, which afaik is basically just a resort island these days. So not only is it the Spanish word for a plant nursery, I got it from maybe the dumbest possible place lmao
Supervive looks like it could be fun, but man it feels like a hodgepodge of popular games the devs have worked on before with nothing special to make it stand out. Hopefully I'm proven wrong once I actually get to try the game out.
You're not entirely wrong that it feels like a combination of a lot of games, and there isn't any one individual thing I would point to that makes it special, it just does everything really really well imo, hope you enjoy it when you get the chance to play!
@@JayTheYggdrasilI really hope I do, cause I enjoy these types of games, so maybe it'll be more coheasive and make sense when I do get to try it. Good games are always good news no matter my taste.
I use to love overwatch, I was obsessed, playing every night, but I was a tank main. I was completely satisfied with what i had in OW1, but then going to 5v5 the experience was ruined, not to mention a handful of other issues.
I jumped into Overwatch in 2017, and I got into the Rivals Alpha, and barring a few obvious characters, the Rivals Beta still felt more balanced than Overwatch on it's best patch.
But that being said, going up against some of the more overtuned DPS in Rivals as a Support or Tank, sometimes there didn't feel like there was enough options or 1 right option to deal with a situation. When Hela is head tapping in the back and Punisher is shredding your Shield as Strange you start to feel like an unwinnable situation when there is no Tank that can cover a situation like that effectively. Of course this isn't taking into consideration the 9 other players on the field, but I think I got my point across
I think having relatively clear rules on what each class should do in a game is also important. I think the other issue that hero shooters have is that when abilities are the most important thing in a game, I think it makes it very easy to have unbalanced situations because there's not enough standardisation that allows most characters to fill each others role but just differently.
I think this is why Valorant works so well from a balance perspective, because all the agents are standardised in what weapons they use and their base stats.
Obviously for a hero shooter the whole point is that characters have different stats, weapons and abilities but I think finding a way to either clearly define roles or standardise the cast or at least standardise within roles in some way would help for balance purposes.
The community would probably be low key happier if the only roles were dps and support
I think is a bit skewed to use the keys for supervive as a lure to get more channel members
I think it's a bit unfair to frame it that way. I'm not selling them to the highest bidder, I'm offering some of them to channel members because it feels fair to give them something given the support that they provide, but I also explicitly mentioned at the same time that you could also get them by donating any amount of money to the Summer Slam that's raising money for kids in hospitals or just watching streams for free drops.
I don't know if it's as simple as that.
Firstly, it's a lot easier to come up with new and interesting ways to deal damage than there are ways to tank or heal. It's difficult to come up with brand new ways to fill a healing or tanking role.
Also something to keep in mind is how many of each role is expected per party. League has 6 roles with 4 basically just being fancy damage roles, but on a 5 person team you generally want one of each role. Or heck look at Wow, a raid is 20 people with 2 tanks, 4 healers and 16 damage characters.
So I don't think it's unreasonable that a role that requires less people to play it has less choices. Like, naturally that tends to happen.
I also participated in a few playtests for Supervive, and was definitely disappointed by how few supports there were, especially considering how fun I think Eluna is, I would love more active support design like that
The main issue Marvel Rivals may come in to is finding heroes that can fit more than just dps. People are surprised Dr. Strange is a tank yet ignore the fact the man can create barriers as part of his power set. We have obvious ones like Venom, Hulk, Juggernaut down the line hopefully but then they will need to make sure they are willing to incorporate others that might not be tank in someone's mind right away. Invisible Woman comes to mind as someone who should be a tank but people might not think that right away.
Based on the design of heroes in Overwatch 2 to basically all be DPS... I think Blizzard really hates the genre they picked and wants to be a generic shooter.
Honestly "Project Loki" was a great name I don't know how to feel about "Supervive" lmao.
Idk y they don't just make tanks heavy how they ought to be. They don't need a ton of damage. They need displacement. They need tools to change positioning. Roadhog hook - his 1 shot shotty.
I do hope they fix this because I want to see all roles get love!
Whilst I agree it's an issue, I don't agree that it's as big of a deal as you make it out to be, least not compared to the potential drawbacks. It's much harder to design a good Tank hero whilst being much easier to make a Tank that does damage to the game (by being either too strong or just having polarizing gameplay) so it's understandable why most games end up falling into this pattern. I think the risk vs reward makes it a problem not worth resolving for launch and I'd rather things took time and were right when released if that makes sense. But then I also personally have no issue with say a double support release for a game which I guess isn't the case for everyone.
Interesting perspective but unfortunately feels a bit too narrow and missing the bigger picture. I come from a background having played MMORPGs where this holy trinity design has existed for a long time and I can tell you that this doesn't get resolved by balancing out the number of class options. Tanking is almost universally the least played role with healing followed behind that awash in a sea of DPS players. I honestly think this has more social factors at play because in many ways, the tanking role often takes on the pressure to lead the group while support is responsible for making sure no one is left behind. DPS often just have a lot less responsibility put on them for party management which is something many people just don't want to be saddled with. I don't think this whole dilemma is going to be resolved until the underlying model is re-evaluated.
The think whole tank-DPS-healer trinity should be remodeled into more of a classic dnd warrior-rogue-wizard dynamic. 5th edition has its own problems with balance between roles, favoring casters, but this seems to be particular design issue to 5e and not something inherent to the trinity model. You might think this dynamic difficult to adapt in non-RPG environments but ironically, taking a look at a game like League of Legends will show you a class selection that is nothing like the tank-damage-healer model and support in those games can mean some healing but more often mean buffs and *especially* CC abilities.
They chose to make a sequel out of nowhere?
what do you think the word "original" means?
the Supervive roles remind me more of a MOBA like Dota or League than hero shooters, which feels like what they're going for. The controllers and the protectors feel like a split of the two main support archetypes that can be found in those games: healers and crowd controllers. MOBA games lend themselves to a lot more ambiguity as to roles (League tries to keep their champs within one or two roles and have a habit of nerfing a champ if they end up being played as a role they weren't intended to, Dota rather infamously is so flexible in terms of roles that half the cast has been played both DPS and support over the course of the game's life) so that might be what they're going for with the crossover of function in the roles? That being said if that's the case categorizing the characters into roles anyway feels like shooting themselves in the foot.
The problem goes one level deeper - the original sin was trying to have a Tank / DPS / Support trinity at all.
The fact they were more interested in creating DPS and people naturally want to play DPS shows the Trinity structure is pushing water up hill.
This is clearly staged from an overwatch perspective where a healer is a necessity to win games, but this is a battle royale made by league devs who jumped ship. Bruisers. Tank-busters. Enchanters. Etc... There are so many archtypes in league that don't fit neatly into a role, and a lot of the fun is in their hybridization. ''Supports'' in that game are traditionally defined by getting high value out of low gold investment, when enabling a hyper-carry in the same lane. This is also not just a moba, but a battle royale - so we also have to factor in other games like apex that give the ability to re-heal and shield to any character. The idea of a Protector role, to me, is the ability to provide party-wide sustain during teamfights - either through damage absorption, or the ability to flash heal or quickly rez an ally. Should there be more characters in that role? Probably. But do you /need/ a support legend in EVERY team comp to win something like Apex Legends? Sure, the roster feels incredibly unbalanced. If anything, they could have broken the Fighter role into things like Bruiser or Glass Cannon - but that's getting a bit nitpicky. Their role is to Fight, and we'll have to wait and see if teams can entirely forego having a Protector in team comps at the high level.
And for what its worth, Controllers seem to be characters that have the ability to set up synergies/team wide plays via Hard CC, as well as some capability to quickly make space for their team. Just like with Valorant, I'm sure the devs are very cautious about what a full team of controllers could mean for the overall balance of the game - so I'm fine with these basically being a more specialized crowd control class.
Hopefully, Super Vibe won't face the same "character per class role" problem that OW had. I haven't played the game but based on some clips I have seen, it's a lot closer in gameplay to other top down battle royales where roles are not AS defined and characters can perform different roles. Closest comparison that I can give (and one that I have actually played a lot of) is Eternal Return. It's also a top down battle royale but the controls and item system is closer to that of a MOBA. You play in groups of three, therefore every character needs to be able to pull their own weight. Sure, there are some characters that are clearly meant to be tanks or supports or DPSes, but the nature of the game and character abilities blur those lines and you have DPSes that can do crowd control, supports that can dish out DPS, and tanks that can dive and isolate targets. The game has a lot of problems but character roster doesn't seem to be. The only thing that can (kinda) cause the problem you stated for SV is the fact that the game itself categorizes its characters when I think it shouldn't.
i wonder if theres more dps heroes because theyre easier to make for some reason? like with support/tank you habe to come up with a way for them to heal/defend ans do damage, but with dps they just have to do damage in a cool way.
but maybe thats just a cop-out
I expected to hear nonsense but I was actually surprised with the amount of meaningful arguments supported by extremely good examples of the issue that already affected multiple similar titles.
I completely agree with your perspective, developers seem have a habit to developing gameplay around the feedback-loop of inflicting damage, which causes an imbalance on not only the roster but also on the game as a whole. What this means in practice is, more often than not, the entire game is balanced around those who act in the role of the DPS, while supports and tanks fill the necessary void sim the gameplay to properly fulfill the DPS’s fantasy.
In the end players do not get joy from defending against entire teams rushing at them, blocking spells from multiple different directions, shielding an ally from a strike or keeping your frontline alive through heals because most of those processes are dumbed down to the point where 2 characters fulfill ALL of those multiple niche-roles within their limited kit (3 - 5 abilities) and the rest of the “tank” and “support” rosters are just DPS’s in disguise.
I think Supervive and Marvel Rivals, due to their early development stages, can afford to go back to the drawing table and try to develop more concrete roles for their characters (more Supervive than MR) and develop a fulfilling gameplay loop for ALL roles.
Tanking should be fun! Healing, Controlling the Battlefield with huge CC AOE abilities, whatever the niche is within their game, just make sure EVERYONE can have fun without needing to DPS. If something isn’t fun in a game, it’s because it wasn’t programmed to be in the first place.
certainly not the point of your video, but your reminder for how rare healing was in Overwatch at launch made me wonder what it would have been like if, instead of releasing new supports with similar healing outputs and really embracing support being a "healer" role, they instead tuned down Mercy's healing to bring her in line with other supports. I really enjoy non-healing supportive characters, like Zenyatta's discord orb or Lucio's speed boost or Ana's grenade (or even Sym's teleporter or her original shield boost lol). In Apex, which I started playing after I mostly quit OW in 2021, or RPGs with similar teambuilding aspects (i.e. gacha games :/ save me from this hell) supports are much more in line with this, enhancing your teammates' abilitites instead of just pumping their health back up to full whenever they take damage, and left clicking enemies when they're not (remember when Zenyatta was unique for his personal damage output?). I'm not confident in saying this is what the developers originally designed OW roles with in mind, but it would maybe explain Symmetra's original classification as support and it's interesting to think about.
Calling it now: Supervive is vaporware and/or is a scheme.
I really dont see the roles mattering too much in supervive. The names seem more like a categorization of playstyle rather than role.
At the end of the day people don't like playing supports or tanks as much as dps.
The issue with Overwatch is that the core game more REQUIRES that people pick certain roles for a balanced team which is what creates this artificial need for a balanced roster. If I HAVE to pick a tank and theres only 5 options to the damage roles 15, the variety in gameplay for me as a tank is way lower than that of a dps player. Of course tank players are going to be begging for new characters. But if you took away the role lock, fact of the matter is that MOST players are going straight to the damage section.
Different type of game here. Supervive feels more akin to a LoL type of team comp where you can absolutely win without a dedicated healing character on your team - in Overwatch it's VERY unlikely.
The need for a "balanced" roster in each game feels very different.
Very good points when aimed at Overwatch and Rivals though - interested to see how things play out. Hope these issues dont plague Supervive at all but we will see.
I try to think of this game like League but even then I do feel the same. Why have roles if to do this. Plus it's like the game type is like apex in terms of it's hero classes. It doesn't utilize the holy Trinity class system to precision but there isn't true clarity about how they function either.
Which circles back to the main issue: if we have a role system why skimp out on the other roles so hardly even if it's a testing period
I think this point is interesting to consider. I don’t really have much to add to it.
Buuut from an art perspective: why does Supervive’s cast have less body diversity for its woman than OW1 at launch? I’m probably being a lil harsh bc the game’s not my speed, but sheesh. Kinda feels like we’ve gone backwards.
I’m not particularly impressed by Rivals either but idc about Marvel as a whole.
I don’t think the number of heroes is *that* big of a factor. Overwatch has had periods where more people play support more than dps even though there were half the number of heroes. Sure it may be a factor but if we were to do statistical analysis (were it even possible) I would guess that it accounts for no more than 10% of the variance in determining what role a person plays
It's kind of a problem innate to most of PvP gaming. So long as the most effective AND fun way to win the game is killing other people, the playerbase and the game will skew towards DPS.
I don't think it's a mistake to make DPS/Damage/Offense characters more numerous, especially if a team comp does not REQUIRE a balance of all 3 roles.
If going all-in on damage is viable, then there really isn't any issue on the balance front.
If the damage roles have a wide diversity in the fantasies they can offer, then there isn't really an issue on how you're catering to different people.
And if all of the roles have some overlap in functions, then the issue is even less pronounced.
Really, the role imbalance in overwatch is kind of unique to that one game. Games that came before and after don't really suffer from the same problem, even if the roles are heavily lobsided towards damage-focused classes/heroes/characters.
I hate to say this but if someone does status effects or stuns they're support not dps. The game is made from people who used to make league and in league the best supports are not the ones that heal but the ones that lock down the field and makes sure that you can control the field. Yes you can do well with the healer supports but in league now healer supports need some form of cc because the cc supports are so strong that if a support doesn't have cc they're kinda useless
I will preface this that I'm only going to be talking about OW, as it's what I understand the most, and that I never have played OW, or payed close attention to it's balancing. I'm simply someone that enjoys analyzing game design as a hobby, so my insight may be lacking in most regards.
Anyways, with that out the way, I disagree with your opinion. I listened to the rest of your points regarding OW, and I still disagree with it, especially the part about longer que times at 3:20, in relation to if the character roster was (relatively) evenly distributed between rolls. You said, in your own words, "Imagine how it would've improved que time. *Particularly once OW implemented Roll Que*."
This is particularly a bizarre take to me, because you're insinuating that class distribution in the roster, somehow directly affects que time, during the point in OW history where there was no restrictions in terms of who you can play as. That somehow, que times would be shorter with a even class distribution, back when Matchmaking only cared about how good your are and how far away you are to other players and the servers. It's strange, and I believe you're bias on the Holy Trinity is showing.
The point about not being enough supports? Ok yeah that maybe is kind of fair.
Now what I believe to be the main issue with OW, and PvP games in general, is the desire to make the Holy Trinity, of RPG game design fame, to work outside of it's RPG roots, while's ignoring/forgetting what makes the Holy Trinity work in the first place, which is a reliably predicable AI. AI that can be reliably manipulated to (generally) do what you wanted them to do and act how you wanted them too. So when you pit the Holy Trinity up against an enemy that think, takes advantage of any opining you might give, and is generally unpredictable, the Holy Trinity just falls apart.
That's what I believe to be the main issue, nothing to do with how many people are in each classes, but the classes themselves and the Holy Trinity being forced to work outside the context that made it work in the first place. They're copying surface level elements without understanding the deeper meaning.
It's the equivalent of seeing Minecraft has crafting in it, so the game you're making must have an arbitrary crafting system in it as well to compete with Minecraft, or for that broad appeal. Or the Anime equivelent is the Tsundere trope, which comes from Asuka(or at least she popularized it). Asuka is a flawed person with a bunch of issues and problems, much like everyone else in Eva, but when writers look to copy Eva, they look at Asuka and only see the surface element, which is Asuka beating up Shinji, and only copied that when making their Asuka clone. This lead to many characters who's defining trait is "loves MC, beats up MC" with no nuance as to why they beat up character beyond vague notion of "Love, but can't express their feelings well." Well they certainly can talk to the rest of the cast quite well, why only the MC that they have so much trouble with?
Got a bit off tracked there but my point is devs keep trying to make the Holy Trinity work in a PvP setting, and it never works out well.
I'm super disappointed in theorycraft games they will probably make the game giga toxic as they apparently are following Riots levels of disrespect to its community.
So lets hope Riot Light toxicity won't carry over
A couple of disagreement. Firstly overwatch REAL sin was and still is balancing the game around the idea that "if your pick is bad just swap it." That is the laziest a stupidiest balancing practice i've seen in ANY game, and it's especially dumb in character focused games, you know the type of games in which people fall in love with characters and want to main them.
Secondly i think supervive doesn't necessarily run into this problem simply because the point of the game is very different. Both overwatch and something like LOL require your team to approach a static objective over which you have little to no control. The objective is largely survive and pick your fight and while having a well balanced team comp will help i don't think is as necessary as in other games.
Cool to see this topic. It’s interesting. But the original sin is mid-game hero swapping. OW, and games in general, are so much fun until online communities broadcast the meta strats to everyone. But at least most games have enough depth and skill ceiling to still have counter play against a more-meta hero / composition. So this ruined OW more than other games because of the extreme power in players hands mid game to completely give up on their current hero if they can’t reach the ceiling and simply counter swap to other heroes whose skill floors or player ability in the matchup are more in favor of. And of course over time players can learn the meta even without help. But it’s easier to keep up with for devs to balance.
I disagree with everyone when they start making claims like “hero X is the gold standard of playstyle Y”.
It’s this kind of bias that closes the minds of every player and doesn’t allow freedom or fun trying whacky ideas. Sadly OW never got its patch cadence high enough to keep the original awesome game balanced and healthy… instead hero swapping blinded all the lazy developers / gamers (majority) that simply give up and counter swap instead of getting good and counter playing.
NEW VIVEROS LET’S GO!
100% spot on
to me the single largest and fundamentally flawed idea in overwatch is the ability to swap at will mid game. if they removed it 2 things would immediately happen. 1 a far more rigid top to bottom meta would form due to players having to game plan on a larger scale, coaches and analysts might actually matter under this change! (cry all you want about nano blade or nano reaper meta or mercy meta or whatever meta u want to cry about) metas are extremely important to the longevity of games like these. counterstrike is 25 years old and in csgo i can name maybe 5 total metas in a 10 year esport. remember guys "basketball 2 doesnt exist for a reason" cs2 almost entirely carried the end csgo meta into 2 minus the awp changes. this is how u make a good competitive game 👍
Secondly it would massively improve viewer retention on the esports side again cry all you want blizzard shat out this franchise to farm esports and it was and always will be a competition first game. the reason it would help with viewership? ppl casually pulling up the overwatch world cup having never seen overwatch ever in their lives are going to have the worst viewer experience lmao this game is already infamous for those screenshots out of context of teamfights from the birds eye where its just a shit stained collage of colors and ability flashes. now take that same image and imagine it can change on a dime and completely be different and it is truly out of context for you. u can go from watching a dive comp to have it be turtle to healer to pick to harrass comp back to dive and then finally have it topped off with both teams using all their ults at once.
its just not a sustainable way to build a game for growth casually or competitively 🥱
Why are people making these Battlerite Royale type games? They're super cool but I've yet to see one have even the tiniest bit of success, including Battlerite Royale itself.
Futility at its finest. Some of them are just money laundering schemes.
If you're going to release a game with bad role numbers, you better release characters in the lacking roles.
i think wow's holy trinity just doesn't belong in these games
deleted overwatch and ive never been happier. The game feels awful most of the character identities in ow2 have been buchered in the sake of balance and despite that the game isnt balanced, the game is going to be in perma limbo and have no more stock of intrest to invest in this game.
Papa
brawlstars for pc letsgo
Great video though, just disagree with your POV
bro chill, u gonna run out of air talking that fast
Totally disagree with the original sin thing and even moreso about it being fundamental to a game. At least the way I took it from your video, you seem yo be suggesting having a more balanced class distribution is better. I just dont fundamentally believe this is true, I am curious why you so desparately believe this to be true.
first?
Yep.
The thing is, DPS are *easier* to design. Look at how over half of Overwatch's initial DPS really are if you break them down. Assault Rifle Man. Shotgun Man. Sniper Rifle Woman. Bow Man. Grenade Launcher Man. Rocket Launcher Woman. Revolver Man. Dual SMG Woman. Minigun Robot. So many DPS are literally just a stock shooter weapon attached to a name, a face, and a set of often half-baked gimmicks. Look at how newer tanks half the time are just DPS inflated up to a larger size and the scope of the problem becomes clear.
2/2/2 with equal class ratios was never going to be practical with just how much simpler it is to design someone with no necessities in their kit than someone who needs to be large, short ranged, and have active mitigation (which has also been noticably more slapdash with newer heroes). Likewise, healing needs to be more or less consistent, and ally buffing takes up a huge amount of design space and has incredibly ramifications for game balance. Why do DPS role passives always feel weird? Because there really isn't anything but "isn't a healer or a tank" to categorize them.