many of the king of the hill maps are in my opinion the most linear and appear entirely focused on getting two teams to the point without the distractions of other rooms. ive noticed a sort of trend in the maps for the large main corridor that everyone goes down to eventually connect both teams in the center and for the point to be slightly off to the side of that center with barely any alternate paths existing. even inside the points it was rather linear as they were usually just large, square or circular, high ceiling buildings with three or four giant door entrances or a really giant door entrance and some other smaller ones. i dont think all maps followed the main road into off the road point formula or the geometrically simple point building forumla but there sure was a hell of a lot of them when i replayed it just to see if i remembered.
i may have forgeted up my use of the word boring as a descriptor of tracers guns. they arent boring as much as they are mechanically generic and straightforward. they function fine as damage dealers and fit the character archetype of harassment while not giving the more immediate burst damage of something like a shotgun and it creates an interesting balance but forget me if the guns arent one of or the easiest guns to use in the game, which was the most relevant thing about them in a skill ceiling/floor discussion or whatever was going down i dont know its been a few hours. as for tracer and genji and stuff requiring on the fly threat assessment to be efficient i would argue that both tracer and genji have a large amount of leeway as both have escapes on standby but this is not a particularly bad thing because threat assessment skills are usually learned via dying and nobody likes dying.
the forcing people to work as a team part is only part of how i related it to dota. you see, dota and ect operate by giving each player a limited skillset and lowering the skill ceiling enough to force players to rely on each other as a single player character is incapable of going up against a full team and winning on his prowess as a player alone. as for your csgo example, in csgo a good player is completely capable of killing an entire team of other, similarly good players with good positioning and aiming. in overwatch this is basically impossible and im almost 100% certain it was intentionally done like this.
you see overwatch was not developed in a void. blizzard entertainment is a very large company and any decision to develop a new ip would not be taken lightly by the corporate overlords at the top. overwatch was thus made to incorporate current trends in video games to maximize the possibility of it being a financial success. now here is my crackpot bullstuff on how i think the development process went down. blizzard, dealing primarily with pc gaming, looked upon the pc market and asked itself what was going down. they saw valve. interactions between valve and blizzard go further back than overwatch; there was a lawsuit over the name dota being a valve trademark. so the blizzard shareholders, still miffed about them losing out on monetizing dota, dota originating in warcraft 3 which is their game, and wanting to reap the big money from mobas, created blizzard dota. i dont really know if blizzard dota was a success or not and its called heroes of the storm now so whatever but blizzard wasnt done. they now had to rip a game from valve that was a success economically. this rage combined with a desire for money was tempered with by the recent breakout success of hearthstone. hearthstone is proof that people will pay for the most droll stuff ever and blizzard, having realized this fact, quickly incorporated it into their business model.
with their powers combined, overwatch came into being conceptually. the developers took the team based gameplay of team fortress and spiced it in with traditional moba, and even mmo if you want to say WoW did something, features while trying to make it as accessible as possible. it was a genius stroke of business and corporate think tanking and all of the shareholders celebrated by snorting coke and cheating on their wives with thousand dollar prostitutes. thus, overwatch is a team based objective first person shooter that shares many of the game modes and mechanics of team fortress. it is, however, filled with far more characters than team fortress due to moba influence, yet all of the characters are relegated into a general purpose archetype (support, tank, ect) also due to moba, subsequently mmo, influence. additionally, the skill ceiling was cut, moba and hearthstone influence, and the game was made incredibly straightforward and easy to play, which is again hearthstone at work. money will probably rain from the sky at blizz hq when it releases although the casual players might be put off by the $40 price. additionally team fortress 2 is free blizzard what are you doing. additionally i wrote this all at 2 am and havent slept very well so take that as you will.
if blizzard continues to copy valve it is now only a matter of time before warcraft stike azeroth offensive becomes a reality
authors note: i do not believe copying a franchise that is popular is bad at all as competition theoretically leads to improvements in game design on both sides although that depends on how much the tf2 and overwatch communities overlap and how much both companies want to kill each other.
as for the player limitations i am thinking about the maximum amount of options a player can exhaust instead of the ones i found and include the ones that do not appear obvious to me when i talk about player limitation. it has been shown time and again that players are capable of using the tools given to them in the most hilarious and creative ways unimagined by game devs and the rest of the playerbase but that will eventually be exhausted. it is a simple fact that, and this comparison is very simplified i know, a player that can jump will have less options than a player that can jump and dash. similarly, the widowmakers grapple is definitely one of the tools a player has to be creative with but i still feel that, even with the grapple explored fully, the widowmaker still lacks options. yes you can grapple in creative ways but then what. your new options from this grapple thing are shoot and create mine. i am aware that you can shoot and make mines in creative ways as well, but surely some sort of fourth skill would undoubtedly spice up the character. i am aware that this would probably cause some balance and control issues or whatever but i am personally in favor of merging as many of the classes as possible, although i dont have an exact plan for it, just to give each individual class a lot of options to play instead of separating them out over a bunch of already similar characters. if we go back to tf2 comparisons i believe it would be something like separating the demoman into sticky nade and the other nade classes which, while that would make demo useless like entirely, seems like a very overwatch design decision.
also i just want to point out that you may like the game for the reasons i dont and thats alright whatevs brah there is, as far as im aware, no universal bad in game design that an individual cannot enjoy. similarly there is no universal good.
feel free to quote me if i forgeted up writing this somewhere or need to clarify something i am not in a state of mind i could call clear
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