Overwatch Overkill & Beyond

So I haven’t written a blog post in a while – about two months I’d say – and so I’m taking the time now to do a little write-up of exactly why I haven’t been writing and producing content for my blog here.

I’ve been playing Overwatch.

Yeah, pretty much all of my free time has ended up dedicated to a single game for the last two months. Even for me, that’s pretty crazy. I normally have a fairly short attention span regarding video games, I’ll play one for 10, maybe 15 hours total and have my fill. Some games pull me in for longer, others I get bored of even quicker. But Overwatch – a game that has no single-player and is focused on being a team-based multiplayer shooter – has kept my attention for two whole months, to the point that the only other game I’ve really played at all (outside of party games with friends) was Zero Time Dilemma, a game I’ve been looking forward to for years.

According to the in-game stat tracker, I’ve put a whopping 133 hours of playtime into Overwatch. That’s five and a half WHOLE DAYS. 850ish quick play matches, 100ish competitive matches. I don’t think I’ve ever dedicated this much time to a singular game at one time ever. It hasn’t caused me to be less social – I still hang out with my friends, I’ve gone on trips – I haven’t been a hermit and played only Overwatch. But any time I’ve spent not at work/at a planned event has pretty much been “Time for Overwatch!”

So what is it about this particular game that has drawn my attention so much?

Well, first let me explain what Overwatch is. It’s a team-based multiplayer shooter developed by Blizzard (who also developed games like Starcraft, Diablo, and World of Warcraft). Unlike other shooters (Call of Duty, Battlefield, Killzone) where the objective is usually racking up the most kills, Overwatch has objective-based maps where you’re either fighting to capture a point, or escort a payload from point A to point B, or stop the payload from getting to point B, etc. Killing the enemy is important, but not what a win/loss is measured by. And that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy Overwatch so much – I have never been a huge fan of Deathmatch games (unless they’re named Goldeneye and Perfect Dark), especially in recent years where the longer you’ve played a game the better equipment you have access to, which makes games not newbie-friendly.

Overwatch does not do this. Instead, it has a wide variety of playable characters (22 at this time) that each have their own playstyle and serve their own purpose, which means gameplay doesn’t get stale. All of these characters are available to anyone at the start of the game, and all skills are available as well – making it very new player friendly and something I appreciate. On top of that, you’re encouraged to switch characters on the fly and learn more than one – instead of focusing on “maining” a character and getting to an expert skill level like a lot of multiplayer games do (see Street Fighter or any fighting game, and any class-based shooter where you likely want to focus your skills on developing a singular class).

And this in particular speaks to me because I hate maining. One of my favorite games to play with friends is Super Smash Bros, mostly because of the large character roster and the fact that I enjoy playing with lots of different characters. To me, playing the same character over and over and over is boring and gets repetitive. Overwatch almost actively discourages you from doing that, as part of the meta game is figuring out why your team isn’t working and picking characters to counter what the other team is doing. As such, I’ve spent no less than an hour playing every character in Overwatch – obviously I like some more than others, but the most combined playtime I have as any one specific character is 13 hours.

Another thing that makes the game more addicting to me is that it keeps track of a wealth of statistics. And boy do I love anything that keeps progress and lets me compare statistics. I’m actually kind of a stat fanatic, especially when it comes to ranking things (my obsession with ranking and lists comes highly into play here). So the fact that I can easily see which characters I’m good with, what my win/loss ratio is, and compare it to other people? It’s like stat heaven for me. There are several different Overwatch stat tracking websites out there – Overbuff is the one I primarily use and you can see just how much I’ve played and which characters I favor there if you’re interested.

It’s also fun to watch. It’s exciting watching pro teams battle each other and how their team strategies come into play. It’s also fun just watching groups of friends play it together – Flik is one of my favorites because he and his friends don’t play too seriously and they do fun themed matches. They also don’t tolerate assholes (as shown in the video I linked to) and are all around good, fun people to watch play games. And when you watch people genuinely enjoying a game, it hypes you up to play the game yourself, ending with me wanting to play the game more, and when I’m done playing there’s more videos for me to watch of other people playing…an endless loop.

So all-in-all, it’s made for an impressive two month streak of me using most of my downtime to play Overwatch. I’m not good at the game by any means but I’m not terribly bad, either – if you dedicate 5 days of your life to something over the course of 2 months you’re bound to have some skill at it, right? I’ve uploaded some clips I’ve saved of my own Overwatch play to my gaming YouTube channel here, if you want to see some of the things I’ve done.

This leads into the other thing I was going to talk about in my blog post – over the next few weeks I’m going to be working on a content creation initiative. Last month I attended RTX and got some good advice and tips from panelists that were experienced in content creation/YouTube channels/Twitch streaming. It’s inspired me to get my act together and try to start putting together various types of content for entertainment purposes.

My goal is to end up linking several different types of entertainment together – between my written blog here, my gaming YouTube channel and my Twitch streaming I have a good base. I’m also considering adding a YouTube video blog, and my friends and I are currently testing out the idea of putting together an audio podcast as well. Ideally I would be putting out content 5 days out of the week – a likely schedule would be a written blog on Monday, a gaming stream on Tuesday, a video blog (or another written blog) on Wednesday, a Let’s Play (or a gaming related video that isn’t streaming) on Thursday, and then some sort of content on the weekend – perhaps the podcast or another live Twitch stream. Once I get a regular schedule going I’ll also probably put together a Facebook page (or website) that organizes the content in one place.

So this is my official kick-off towards generating more content for my friends and the internet-at-large to consume. To keep to my schedule, tomorrow evening (probably around 8 PM EST) I’ll be streaming No Man’s Sky on my Twitch channel here – if you don’t know what No Man’s Sky is, it’s a space exploration game that is procedurally generated and essentially it’s supposed to be a vast universe where everybody gets to explore and name things, and it should be something fun to stream since I’ve kept myself in the dark about what the game may or may not contain. I’ll probably be playing that for two-three hours tomorrow night, provided Amazon gets it to me by tomorrow evening like they say they will. Otherwise I’ll still be streaming…I’ll just be playing Overwatch instead! (Surprising nobody!)

Finally, thanks to anybody who reads this and anybody who watches my streams or videos and actually enjoys any content I create. Otherwise it’s just me shouting about nothing into the void. Now onward to greater and more interesting things!

(Or infinitely more likely, more Overwatch.)