Zero Punctuation: Overwatch vs Battleborn

[Kawalorn]

I'm not so sure about both sides. The people who get painted with the SJW brush seem to be having a great time playing the game and shipping all the female characters with each other.

No, not really: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1234757

I fail to see how this displays that they are not enjoying the game.

Because they'd totally be complaining about it if they enjoyed that. It's still infinitely more than what I saw of the other side, considering they aren't complaining at the game and only at Blizzard trying to catch "PC points".

 

[Zulnam]

Overwatch was fun. About the first week or so, for me. Now i can't even get myself to starting the thing. The sh*t reward system doesn't help, i'll tell you that.

Still, it generated some good porn, though. So yay.

 

[SirSullymore]

It's not really a defense of, rather than showing I really don't care about the boxes. I don't play to level or unlock boxes. People who do are missing the point of the game. I just genuinely don't understand the fuss about optional crappy boxes. Whoever has the cash, let them buy it. Regardless of the strategy being considered scummy, it does not hinder gameplay or harm anyone, which is all I care about.

Agree 100%. It boggles my mind how many people apparently bought Overwatch to dress up the characters and not actually play Overwatch

 

[Erttheking]

I'm not so sure about both sides. The people who get painted with the SJW brush seem to be having a great time playing the game and shipping all the female characters with each other.

No, not really: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1234757

I fail to see how this displays that they are not enjoying the game.

Because they'd totally be complaining about it if they enjoyed that. It's still infinitely more than what I saw of the other side, considering they aren't complaining at the game and only at Blizzard trying to catch "PC points".

It's possible to enjoy a game and not love every last thing about it.

Also the fact that they're only complaining to score PC points is something you can never prove. Maybe, just maybe, they honestly think what they say and are voicing their views.

Hell I made a thread about how the female armor in Fire Emblem Fates is fucking stupid, yet I still enjoy the game, and I wasn't just doing it for "PC points."

 

[StatusNil]

It's possible to enjoy a game and not love every last thing about it.

Also the fact that they're only complaining to score PC points is something you can never prove. Maybe, just maybe, they honestly think what they say and are voicing their views.

It is also possible to enjoy complaining more than any (other) game.

Now to be fair, that's kind of what Zero Punctuation is about too, but at least Yahtzee does it with enough wit, verve and originality to keep the viewer entertained. Some NeoGAF tosser breathlessly searching for sins against the Church of St. Anita not so much.

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

Huh, the Battleborn servers are dead? That's odd, I generally have no issue finding a match on Xbox Live, but I have no idea what the PC servers are like and that seems to be where Yahtzee spent most of his time.

I found this particular review to be hilariously observant and I'm glad that he gave both games a fair shake and shit on them equally for the things that they did wrong. Frankly, I'm Team Battleborn all the way myself, but I like Gearbox. They're charming in a way that Blizzard stopped being a while ago, but it's clear that they're also on the downswing because, lets face it, the writing in Battleborn isn't quite as good as Borderlands.

I do like Overwatch, though. It's a fun game, but I like Battleborn's reward system better.

EDIT: It's worth pointing out that Battleborn recently introduced fancy skins that can only be bought with currency purchased with real money via microtransactions. =/ I'm actually really disappointed by this but not entirely surprised either.

Yeah Battleborn is still quite active on consoles where it has a lot less competition, Yahtzee's issues with finding a match are probably because of Australia having much worse internet then the U.S. or U.K.(Yahtzee mentioned it several times whenever he reviews a multiplayer game).

At least in Battleborn you can just pick whatever skin you want and buy it, you don't have rely on a stupid gambling mechanic that's designed to suck as much money from you as possible like in Overwatch.

I do keep forgetting about his servers being weak and it slipped my mind that he was playing Battleborn on the PC. And I get that, sure, you get to choose your skin, so yes, your money goes where you WANT it to go, instead of virtual gambling for more sprays, but I'm still disappointed that Gearbox threw in all the fancy skins that are actually pretty cool, only to force you to pay for them with real money. On the flip side, I haven't had to pay real money for the extra character and it's good to know I'll be able to buy the next with in-game currency as well (been saving up since I bought Alani), so win some, lose some, I suppose.

Microtransactions aside, I just like Battleborn better. I played them both and I made my decision, and I get really quite tired of Blizzard fanboys telling me that I'm lying to myself about enjoying Battleborn when Overwatch is 'clearly superior.' I get that Blizzard makes some excellent games that people get addicted to and all, but frankly, the only game series they make that I actually like is Diablo.

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

I have to kinda agree with Yahtzee when it comes to Blizzard's design choices.
Team Fortress 2's teams was a collection of spoofs on national stereotypes. In Overwatch good portion of characters plays with the idea of your (stereo)typical nerd self-insert fantasy. And it works, like a box of chocolates.
To be fair, it put me off from this game in the beginning. While each one of the heroes looks great, lumped together... well, they resemble a colorful mess of characters torn from different games. Think a clusterfuck that is post-cosmetic TF2 or a typical MOBA cast. Just a pet-peeve of mine, something that will get lost in game.

 

[Seneschal]

Regarding the Posegate (or Tracerstorm, or whatever): Considering that the new pose is pretty much as sexualized as the old one, and the old one is a copy from Widowmaker while the new one is unique to Tracer, it's highly unlikely they actually changed it because of the complaint. More believable that they wanted to already and wanted to score some "good points" with the PC crowd while at it

They did intend to replace it. In fact, if I remember the exchange correctly, a fan had shared their opinion that "it didn't feel right" with regards to Tracer's personality, to which Blizzard responded, "Yep, we know, it's a placeholder," and promptly replaced it with a personalized dynamic flygirl pinup pose that everyone agreed was more appropriate for the character.

And then a lot of people decided to interpret this as "Blizzard being bullied into censorship out of shoehorned-in political correctness and threats from neo-puritans" and whatnot.

 

[Frankster]

They did intend to replace it. In fact, if I remember the exchange correctly, a fan had shared their opinion that "it didn't feel right" with regards to Tracer's personality, to which Blizzard responded, "Yep, we know, it's a placeholder," and promptly replaced it with a personalized dynamic flygirl pinup pose that everyone agreed was more appropriate for the character.

And then a lot of people decided to interpret this as "Blizzard being bullied into censorship out of shoehorned-in political correctness and threats from neo-puritans" and whatnot.

And I remember it very differently to you and despite being right there with popcorn as the drama ensued, not least how you super sanitized what was said and got events a bit wrong (the placeholder comment came after things blew up and dude agreed to change it, so it was seen as damage control by some), if only it really was a simple "it doesn't feel right", but no it was a bit more then that and included a "think of teh children D:" moment, taking away context and stripping it down to a one neutral sentence is kinda cheating. I could keep nitpicking little bits of what people said here and there but it would serve no purpose as:

If there is ONE thing to keep from this thread, it's that it's amazing how everyone seems to remember chain of events slightly differently and have their own interpretation to best suit their bias. I guess there's only way to settle this...
Be sarcastic and condescending with what I disagree with, and asspat the views and forumites who say stuff I agree with!
Huh, might be a few years late but maybe I'm finally starting to figure out how forums work...
(and no this bit wasn't addressed at you, you seem fairly polite and respectable, but commenting on the general tone of other responses here xP)

 

[Erttheking]

It's possible to enjoy a game and not love every last thing about it.

Also the fact that they're only complaining to score PC points is something you can never prove. Maybe, just maybe, they honestly think what they say and are voicing their views.

It is also possible to enjoy complaining more than any (other) game.

Now to be fair, that's kind of what Zero Punctuation is about too, but at least Yahtzee does it with enough wit, verve and originality to keep the viewer entertained. Some NeoGAF tosser breathlessly searching for sins against the Church of St. Anita not so much.

And it's also possible to enjoy complaining about complaining more than a game. Your point?

Sins against the church of St. Anita. I just...*Sigh* really? Really man? Do I have to point out how that's massively hyperbole? Mainly because Anita never comes up?

 

[fractal_butterfly]

First I wanted to try out Overwatch and see what all the fuzz is about. Then I saw, that it costs f*ing $60, while normally this type of game is for free. And suddenly I was not interested anymore.

 

[Stewie Plisken]

For me and many other people, Overwatch did not "stomp" anything, they just catered to the same group of Blizzard fanboys who happily bought cosmetic stuff with real money in WoW.

Sorry, I gotta ask; what does "for me and many other people Blizzard just catered to the same group of fanboys" even mean? That the success of Overwatch is only so because of Blizzard fanboys? Because that's just silly.

Incidentally, I played Overwatch for two days or so in beta and loved it, played Battleborn in a free weekend before release and I hated it. Having said that, Battleborn does do some alright things, the problem was that Gearbox is staffed by orangutangs and burned the game before it ever got a chance.

Sins against the church of St. Anita. I just...*Sigh* really? Really man? Do I have to point out how that's massively hyperbole? Mainly because Anita never comes up?

Have you been to NeoGAF? He was talking about NeoGAF. Sadly, he was not exaggerating.

 

[MgMn]

But seriously now the pose may have been out of character but do you honestly think that after spending so much time in development a team of professional character designers wouldn't have figured it out on their own?
They probably just didn't care, the pose wasn't changed before release because it was thoughtless fan service, and when it caused a stir they sudenly remembered the character is supposed to have a fucking personality.
So I think Yahtzee's point stands, improving the pose had fuck all to do with artistic vision.

 

[Piecewise]

I hate everything about overwatch.

I hate online multiplayer only games because 3 months from now the servers will be dead and the game will be worthless. It's already dropped by 50% since launch.

LOL yeah you just proved how you know absolutely nothing about the game. 7 million initial sales with 10 million active players at the last update. It's increased by 50% not decreased.

Just like how League of Legends, Dota2, CSGO etc. are all multiplayer only and died 3 months after launch. Oh wait... don't let your incredible bias hit you on the way out.

1. I was looking at players online at any given time, not number of sales. Number of sales is a completely pointless thing to base this on because it says nothing about the actual population of people playing currently. Halo 2 sold a lot of copies, I guess that means all the people with a copy are online playing it right now, right?

When you look at actual server max populations at peak hours (in North America) the number of people online has dropped by half since day 1.

2.Just because a handful of games maintain a high following is no indication that this will. And even if it maintains this following for years, it will still eventually become worthless after a while because the audience won't hang around forever. I can go back and play Halo 1 today in single player despite the fact that the servers for it are long gone and the online system doesn't exist anymore. Overwatch? If I try to go play it 10 years from now, it's gonna be a ghost town if it's even still in existence. It's just another in the growing mindset of games--and game ownership--being something transitory that isn't meant to last.

 

[Groverfield]

A better point of reference from Battleborn would be to the creative team's previous game, Wildstar, which was basically "Let's make World of Starcraft because we really liked World of Warcraft but thought it grew up wrong, so let's make our game a modern Reticle-Action MMO the way all of the MMOs after 2010 have been, but take all of the worst grindwalls and hide our lack of endgame behind that. Most people familiar enough with Battleborn to see it's not an Overwatch ripoff were familiar enough with a team that had some really good ideas ruined by really bad nostalgia.

 

[Hawki]

A better point of reference from Battleborn would be to the creative team's previous game, Wildstar, which was basically "Let's make World of Starcraft because we really liked World of Warcraft but thought it grew up wrong, so let's make our game a modern Reticle-Action MMO the way all of the MMOs after 2010 have been, but take all of the worst grindwalls and hide our lack of endgame behind that. Most people familiar enough with Battleborn to see it's not an Overwatch ripoff were familiar enough with a team that had some really good ideas ruined by really bad nostalgia.

Gearbox made Battleborn, Carbine made WildStar. I'm not aware of any 'cross-pollination' between the two games.

And "World of StarCraft?" Apart from the space western element, where's the similarities?

 

[Transdude1996]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The Best TV Show Ever Made!)

No that would be The Sopranos and the Wire and anythign on HBO really.

And the first 3 Star Trek shows.

And Seinfeld.

No love for Stargate? Also, are we just limiting this to live-action shows?

 

[JagerBombastic]

Still not played the games...oh wait yes I have when I played team fortress 2 the first time round, still lovely bum.

 

[JagerBombastic]

Blizzard's massive brass ball's tho.

 

[FireAza]

Uh Yahzee? Blizzard didn't change the tracer pose because of ONE complaint on the forums. Christ, if game companies were THAT attentive to the desires of their fans, games would never be released because there's always someone who's unhappy about some small detail. No, Blizzard themselves weren't pleased with the pose and were planning on changing it even before the butt-gate controversy started. They unfortunately worded it so that the howling chimps that make up the usual participants in these arguments were able to say "SEE?? A single SJWs had the power to FORCE Blizzard to change something they find offensive! I bet they don't even play games!"