My old mains just aren’t fun anymore. Playing Mercy with well over 15,000 healing in lower ranks, keeping the team alive, resurrecting vital players, and helping push the payload, all while avoiding the focus of the entire enemy team, only to get a Cassidy spamming "I need healing" halfway across the map, is annoying ; __ Lucio is fun but doesn’t always work on defence maps, and Bridgette depends on the synergy with the rest of your squad. Kiriko, however, lets me stand on my own two legs in fights, easily jump to my allies with her teleport ability so I can catch Cassidy being a prick and save him, and heal as standard. The versatility is unlike any other hea

I also finally understand why people give a shit about these characters beyond their battle abilities . I feel a kinship with Junkrat. He’s a wildcard, like Charlie in Always Sunny. He’s just a silly little guy, and I love him for it. I’m going to read up on his story before I dive back in tonight - I never thought I’d do that for any hero shooter. I couldn’t even count how many heroes there were, and Junkrat has made me hopeful I’ll find more I love, but if I don’t, I’ll happily main this wacky pyromaniac until he runs out of li

Online shooters aren’t usually my thing. Overwatch having set heroes takes away from the meta and the stress of having to care about loadouts, and means you can pick to a certain extent based on personality. The reason I play as Ashe is as much because I love westerns and wry cowgirls as it is her gameplay abilities. Overwatch’s aesthetic, low barrier to entry, and quick, varied matches means it’s keeping my interest longer than other online games do. TheGamer is going to have its own Overwatch showdown soon too, so I need to keep up even if I won’t dominate the way I did on Tekken nig

Sooner or later though, I’m going to get bored. Sooner, most likely. I’ll just be done with Overwatch 2 support Guide|https://overwatch2tactics.com/ and I’ll tap out. We have a huge swathe of massive games set to launch between now and the end of the year , and helping Ashe move a car around a city isn’t going to keep me away from Bayonetta , Kratos , or Sonic . I’m not sure I’ll be back. Nothing against the game personally, but it has become my go-to game to rewind, even overtaking FIFA . I’m just not sure how long it can hold that posit

Part of the tinkering feels like vanity too. In Horizon Forbidden West , Aloy was too chatty when she was alone , remarking that items will be sent back to storage (somehow?) and repeating the same few lines over and over. People said it was annoying, so it was taken out. But surely they knew it was annoying? Surely part of the point was to make Aloy endearing in this way? I’m sure people think Aloy shutting the hell up is an improvement, but mostly it just feels like fixing something for the sake of it. It doesn’t feel like developers have the license to be creative and eccentric if a few people joking around online is enough for the studio to mandate changing the game. Gaming is becoming more risk averse, not less, in the presence of a constant safety

Everything must be realistic, atmospheric, and other vague adjectives taken from focus groups and written on white boards. It might remain as a callback, but if it does it will be an exception to the rule. Any of these sorts of things left in by mistake tend to be taken out immediately because players having fun in their own way isn’t part of the developers’ vision. Any way you find to exploit something, even in a single-player experience where no one else is impacted, is viewed as a mistake to be fi

Patches are par for the course in gaming these days. While your live-service behemoths are always tinkering with the meta, keeping gameplay fresh, and fixing all the bugs those first two fixes cause, even the smallest single-player titles come with constant post-launch care these days. Day one patch is now the norm, and while games like Cyberpunk 2077 which launch in historically unacceptable states benefit greatly from devs now being able to fix things in the wild, it’s unlikely Cyberpunk would have launched at all if the studio knew it would be stuck with what it had. On the whole, patches offer a safety net that’s good to the industry, but it sometimes feels like they take away a game’s personal

Likewise, anyone who follows the FIFA community even a little bit is cutting inside to trivela from the edge of the box. It’s one of those things that would be fun if you stumbled across it with your mates, but is less fun when it’s the only way anyone in the world tries to shoot now. Ironically, despite the bulk of my complaints here, the trivela is a perfect example of something that needs to be patc

Playing support in Overwatch is like crawling through mousetraps to help your little brother up after he’s fallen, only for him to kick you in the face and call you a twat. It’s a thankless job, no matter how much you heal, and if you’re playing with randoms, you’ll often be hung out to dry in front of an ulting Moira and a hook-happy Roadhog. I swore off the role a couple of years ago, but Kiriko has roped me right back in, angry chat messages and thanks-spamming teammates be dam