#ive heard a lot of sentiment that some classes in highlander have way more fun and get to do a lot more than others

[coratorium]

wrt last reblog its actually so funny to me how overwatch kind of fucked themselves by trying to have their cake and eat it too and in the process made the characters into like, tools to be wielded instead of classes that fill roles.

like to try and elaborate on this (and this is why im making this my own post instead of going off on a tangent on someone elses post), overwatch has hero switching. as of [current date] there are somewhere between 20 and 200 heroes in the game and any time you are in your spawn room you can swap to any of them within your role that your team doesn't already have.

so this means that when dps hero A is hard countered by hero B, who is countered by hero C, one team is going to play hero A until a B appears on the enemy team, at which point the A player is going to swap to C, and then the B player will die and swap to whatever counters C, etc.

the maps are compact, the respawn timers are short, mobility is high. you have time to respawn on the counterpick and get back in the fight and make a difference. so, if you want to get past a certain rank of play, you have to learn how to hero switch- onetricking a single hero stops being viable. you need to know how to play not just one dps character, but all the dps characters, or at least the ones that are relevant counters to the things that check your preferred hero.

this is in contrast to something like a MOBA, which overwatch obviously borrowed a lot of design ideas from. in a moba you're (usually) stuck on the same character for the entire match. hero B being added to the game has no effect on a match where they're not one of the 10 characters picked. in contrast in overwatch hero B existing can prevent hero A from being used at all, just because the hero A player knows that the second they try to do anything they'll just get countered. and in that way the heroes can affect the way a match is played without ever even making an appearance.

then of course we've got tf2 which made so little of an attempt at balancing for 6v6 play that without player imposed restrictions most 6v6 matches would just be like, 2 medics and 4 demomen.

i'm exaggerating a bit- maybe it wouldn't be that bad- but the design philosophy is just completely different. 6s maps tend to be pretty big. respawn timers are way longer. not every class in tf2 is relevant for 6s. a lot of them are EXTREMELY niche. you're not going to see a 6s team swapping to heavy unless they're desperate to defend a choke in a relatively close quarters environment. if you try to run a heavy for the entire match, you're just going to get flattened- he gets counterpicked out of general relevance the same way overwatch hero A does.

tf2's response to this was not to try and make spy have the same level of impact on the game as the scout and soldier, but to just design an alternate competitive mode where each team has 1 of each class, and then those classes have to find ways to try and make themselves as useful as possible instead of competing to get playtime. the spy immediately becomes more useful in highlander than he does in 6s because the enemy team is guaranteed to have an engineer and a sniper for him to fuck with. the pyro in turn is also more useful, because they have an engineer to protect, an enemy spy to check for, etc. the classes get to exist in a mode where they are interacting with every class on their own team and on the enemy team in every match.

i don't think the differences in design philosophy are inherently good or bad or anything, to be clear. i just think it's interesting.

ok, overwatch hero pool bloat is maybe a little inherently bad, and the most fun i ever had in that game was in the modes where you were locked to one team comp and had to play around that fact. but still.