Perfect Dark was a spiritual sequel to GoldenEye 007 - ditching the James Bond IP for something owned by Rareware. Goldeneye had revolutionized the first person shooter, bringing a genre that had once been simply called "Doom Clones" to consoles and letting you play with your friends. The multiplayer mode was a big deal, and Perfect Dark added to it, allowing you to play with AI-controlled opponents.
There was a period around 2000, 2001, when I was a freshman in high school, and I'd sit in my dad's third floor attic with the N64, listening to Pennywise and endlessly blasting through Perfect Dark's multiplayer mode as a single player.
That kind of repetitive gameplay is something Blizzard, as a company, has mastered. All of their games have some repetition built into the premise - many are multiplayer games, where you engage in discrete matches that end after an objective is fulfilled, and some are built around repeating content to get loot that drops rarely - WoW and Diablo are built on these kinds of gameplay loops.
To a large extent, I think Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm are similar games, just within different genres. Heroes, as a MOBA, is built more around strategy - you have a talent build for your character you'll need to work out and carefully figure out your positioning. Overwatch is a high-speed FPS, where positioning is important, yes, but fast reflexes and accurate aim are the ultimate arbiters of success (and knowing how to get away from D.Va.'s ultimate, which I swear is freaking OP.)
The thing is, Heroes of the Storm is, with one exception I know of, all based around other Blizzard properties. Most of its heroes (again, save one) are from other games, and it tells you very clearly up front that you don't need to worry about the story. Yes, Y'rel and Arthas can fight side-by-side, even if the universe she's from didn't even exist when he was alive, not to mention that even if they could be in the same place at the same time, they'd be diametrically opposed enemies.
But Overwatch actually has a story - indeed, it's got relatively deep lore. But you discover practically none of it in-game. Sure, there are skins that reveal, for example, that Reaper used to be a good guy. But the story is just fluff for the gameplay.
And indeed, Blizzard's attitude has always been gameplay first, which is a valid choice for a game company, but it's also one that I think has sometimes steered them wrong. Take Garrisons in WoW from Warlords of Draenor - their desire to make it a gameplay feature rather than an RP-focused, flavor one, turned them from something potentially cool to one of the worst failures of game design WoW has ever had.
When it comes to Overwatch, the game is certainly fun, but there's a feeling of empty calories there. There's no sense of progression, and the narrative of a given place is subsumed into whether it's a base capture or escort map.
I mean, why the hell are we fighting in what is effectively Blizzard Disneyland? (Sidenote: the fact that Blizzard is headquartered in Anaheim and the degree to which Blizzardworld feels extremely like the Blizzard equivalent of Disneyland suggests to me that the level designers got to take a lot of trips to the park on the company dime. It shows, and I really love that map.)
Anyway, there are rumors of an Overwatch 2 getting announced at Blizzcon this year, that will have a single-player campaign. I'd love that to be the case, though I'm also very curious to see how it would work out. The game is currently balanced toward very quick fights - sometimes you can one-shot a fellow player, and if not, you can often take them down in a couple seconds if you're well positioned. One imagines that for a single-player game you'd want to slow things down a bit. (Actually, frankly I wouldn't mind the multiplayer game to slow down a bit - I actually started to enjoy PvP in WoW a bit once they nerfed damage and healing more than player health.)
I'm still probably going to be playing it a bit more - I have yet to get any of the skins I really want. But I do feel a bit like I'm munching on potato chips rather than having a balanced meal when I play it.
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