You Can Never Play (That) Overwatch Again
It’s time to stop thinking about video games as singularities.
It’s not all that important whether Leonardo da Vinci coined the phrase “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” The idea has been expressed by countless other creators too, but regardless, it’s widely believed there are at least two versions of Virgin of the Rocks that da Vinci had a hand in painting. There’s also a third copy, possibly done his pupil Francesco Melzi. Da Vinci, if it was him, was probably not thinking about Overwatch at the time, but the concept of iterating on art is nothing new.
Seven different edits of Blade Runner were shown to an audience before the story eventually spawned a sequel. The 14th volume of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series was recently released, complete with one remarkably goofy title and six discs worth of earlier, discarded recordings from Blood on the Tracks. There have now been four unrelated productions of A Star Is Born over 81 years.
Similarly, humanity’s history of games is filled with revisions and evolutions. Soccer, rugby, and American football all grew out of a shared lineage but have emerged as completely distinct pursuits. They now allow us to incessantly argue about the newest definition of a catch or the purity of using video assisted review. Dungeons & Dragons is officially on it’s 5th edition of rules, but the actual number of changes and offshoots along with way is anyone’s guess.
Video games, hovering at the intersection of art and play, have always embodied this concept. Pacman begat the superior Ms. Pacman and countless other clones and descendants of wildly varying quality. Capcom has spent the last three decades making Street Fighter over, and over, and over again. None of this is novel, but as with everything else as we’ve gotten gradually more tethered to a web of computers worldwide, the Internet has changed things. Those changes are certainly not exclusive to video games — they’ve also allowed websites to issue corrections on stories immediately and Kanye West to gradually tinker with Life of Pablo between doing other Kanye West activities — but the shift in the games industry has certainly been seismic.
There is no singular Overwatch experience. This is not just true in the broad sense that all art and entertainment are approached from an individual perspective, under unique conditions. It’s more than just the non-trivial differences between which platform it’s played on — graphic fidelity and mouse-aiming precision of PCs are distinct from what’s possible on a console — or whether someone is playing with a group of close friends, a practiced competitive squad, or randomly selected strangers as their teammates. What constitutes Overwatch, and increasingly more games as time goes on, is a moving target.
In the days after the release of Blizzard’s multiplayer first person shooter, Deadspin’s Tom Ley wrote a piece headlined “Overwatch Is Salvation For Washed-Up Gamers Like Me.” It argued that the game’s reliance on teamwork and combining the varied abilities of a colorful cast of characters made it fun even for people normally overwhelmed by the mechanical barriers of the genre. At the time he was right. In early June 2016 the game did not yet have a formal competitive mode and its esports applications were in their infancy. Most people had no idea how to optimally use any given character — some of which would turn out to be wildly imbalanced — on any given map, let alone which team compositions might be more dominant than others. (At one point there was nothing stopping all six players on a team from choosing the same character.) Everyone was learning on the fly and with no established metagame and a structure that seemed to reward more than just cold headshot precision, the game was a blank slate of creative chaos and wonderful inefficiency.
None of this bears much resemblance to Overwatch at the end of 2019. There are many reasons for this: updates to the game itself, the influence of high-level competitions, the ability of huge, networked user base to push any game to its limits and then easily share that knowledge. They are all intertwined. The original twenty-one characters have been mastered, and in some cases completely retooled. Ten new heroes have been added and then also turned inside-out in kind. A constant stream of fresh maps, bug fixes, monetizable cosmetics, and balance patches are always coming down the pipeline, but the basics are understood to a degree that they are second nature.
The Overwatch League, a high-profile professional circuit with a gaudy list of corporate partners, kicked off its first official season at the beginning of 2018. Even those who play casually at the lowest, bronze-league levels now commonly have years of experience, and whether or not they have ever watched a professional match the game they are familiar with is inextricably tied to the one the pros have unpacked on both streams and network television. OWL has been around long enough to have undergone several evolutions and at least one dreary stagnantization in the baseline gameplay. Corresponding patches and new rules have then been put into place to force things to shift once a character was deemed to weak or too strong, or a lineup deemed too stale, and then those new variables have been min-maxed again by a vast group of players looking for an edge.
At a technical level, there is no practical way for your average player to revert all those code changes. But even if there were, that would not effectively put the cat back in the bag and return us to 2016. Someone who is objectively terrible at the game, like myself, can still very much enjoy it, but there is no way to play the Overwatch that Ley wrote about.
There are valid conversations to be had about the consequences of professional scenes on games, for good and ill. However, this isn’t a value judgement, and it goes well beyond whether or not people are being paid to win at a certain title. It isn’t really about Overwatch, or even esports more widely. This is how a large portion of all video games exist now.
Before traveling for Christmas last year, I had been tantalizingly close to finishing Dead Cells. Dead Cells is not a huge studio blockbuster or a multiplayer game tailored to competitive play backed by billionaire team owners. It’s a charismatic roguelike built by developer Motion Twin, which was described to Kotaku as an “anarcho-syndical workers cooperative” of 11 people, all making the same salary. I’d survived to the final boss several times, at least once with a loadout good enough to have beaten them, had I not panicked and repeatedly dove into a spiked pit. When I left for the holidays, I knew success was only a matter of time.
What I did not know was that while I was gone a 1.1 update with major changes was released. It made improvements to allow players to customize their runs and also substantially reworked many of the game’s systems. On my first attempt back after downloading the new patch, I beat Dead Cells, without ever even facing any serious danger. Or I beat this iteration of it anyway. I will never get a chance to finish the particular game I was playing when I left town. This is the state of the medium now. Last year, Kirk Hamilton wrote, “Playing video games in 2018 means reconciling yourself to the idea that you will almost never play a game at the optimal time,” and concluded, “The only thing to do is ride the river as best we can.”
It is, broadly, a good thing that video game developers can now fix catastrophic bugs with a download pushed conveniently to everyone playing a game. This feels like an obvious improvement from the days of Majesco having to include a slip of paper with later copies of Age of Empires: The Age of Kings warning players not to make their profile name less than four characters long or a defect might brick their Nintendo DS cartridge.
For the most part it is also a positive occurrence that video games, especially competitive ones, can now be more-easily tweaked and balanced over time. There are exceptions, but it tends to be helpful that adjustments can be made so that games aren’t dominated or broken entirely by one overpowered character, exploited glitch, or unforeseen strategy. The same mechanic also allows delivery of things like new maps and new characters to keep long-running games from growing dull. It is remarkable what a team like Hello Games has been able to do with something like No Man’s Sky in the time since it was first released. Over years of constant patching, improvements and major DLC expansions, the team has taken the game’s vast and impossibly ambitious initial framework and imbued it with not only more complexity and less monotonous activity, but a feeling of life.
The information that players and media are able to collect and share, in live streams, recorded videos, written guides, and games played across the globe with each other, is transformational. Those accumulated man-hours of effort and ingenuity have spawned the speedrunning community and made the concept of getting stuck on a puzzle or lost in a maze and having to abandon a game entirely almost obsolete. Metagames can be altered forever in seconds by a single player figuring out a new technique and broadcasting it in public.
There is a “BUT!” hanging in the air, here. There are, unsurprisingly, also downsides to being increasingly connected to an ever-present network of soulless computers spanning the globe. Online is a land of contrasts. As with all the other aspects of our lives that the combination of whatever stage of capitalism this is and the Internet have gradually made more dystopian, video games have not been spared.
Games aren’t just connected to the internet to facilitate bug fixes and community interaction, but to maintain constant surveillance and keep their loot box economies chugging. Updates aren’t based just on what’s best for the vision of the game or the enjoyment of the whole player base, but what will generate the most income — through entertained esports viewers, DLC buyers, or just further entrenching consumerist fandom. Instead of giving players time to work out the intricacies of games and find solutions to perceived issues or imbalances, fans demand constant appeasement. Characters used by their hated enemies are overpowered and must be nerfed; their needs must be met and exciting new content must be constantly funneled to them. This ethos, combined with the larger dysfunctions of the industry and its unsustainable business model, mean that games — at least AAA ones — are not allowed to just be bad or even weird. When they are, in the case of something like Fallout 76, developers are obligated to be contrite and sufficiently humble about shaping them into whatever it is that the superfans really want, post-haste.
As the end of the year approaches, it’s natural that people have begun thinking about the legacy of games in the last decade. Scott Benson, of Night in the Woods fame, tweeted asking about people’s Top 10 lists. Vice Games EIC Austin Walker responded, including an honorable mention for “breakfast & battlegrounds-era PUBG.”
Breakfast & Battlegrounds was a series of streams that Walker did with Vice’s Patrick Klepek in the early days of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The battle royale genre was not entirely new, but it was fresh and certainly far less saturated as Battlegrounds was just starting to explode and before Fortnite, Apex Legends, and countless others followed. At the time, PUBG itself only had a single map, played almost exclusively in third-person, and was only just beginning to sort out an industry of streamers and competitive players. Walker and Klepek awkwardly fumbled through the learning curve. They told stories while hiding in bathrooms, eating grenades from more experienced squads, and slowly figuring out how things worked, while bringing along an audience that was doing the same.
Walker may have been this discrete because the process of making the streams was a big part of what made the game great for him, but he’s also identifying a specific version of a game at a specific time. As we head into the next decade, it makes a lot of sense to be thinking about a lot of games less as static objects, and more as dynamic, ever-changing works that are entangled with the networks they exist on and the people who play them. George Mikan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were both playing basketball, but that doesn’t mean they were playing the same game.
