Category: Rant

‘Main’ing, as in, “I main Fizz in League of Legends” is a term from MOBAs, so players can let people know what character they are going to be, and for MOBAs it makes sense.  The maps never change that much, and since you can’t swap characters mid-round it lets the other players know to either drop out and find another team or to pick one of their other characters in a different class.  Not to mention they probably only want to invest their real money on only a couple of heroes.

With Overwatch‘s group of crazy heroes players have started to bring the same approach, but the problem is that it doesn’t work.  Since the maps and situations do change you need to branch out and use the entire roster to the best of your ability.  Last night my brother and I were playing and we got the payload within a couple of feet of where it needed to go, but the other team’s defense got impenetrable because they changed up their characters, so we in turn needed to change ours.

I changed from Lúcio to Mercy so that instead of doing some healing to the whole team I could keep just one person alive to keep the payload moving, and my brother changed from Reinhardt to Zarya to give himself a little more movement and offensive capability, so that the opposing team just didn’t set up shop in front of his shield.  The result?  We got that payload to move those last few feet in the last few seconds.  If we hadn’t changed we probably would have lost.

That is because with Overwatch it is best not to think of the characters as heroes that need to be mastered, but instead as load-outs to be swapped when the need arises.  I needed to switch to Mercy because she is the beam heal not the area heal.  It is no different then in Battlefield to swap out the long range rifle for the short range SMG for that final push.  If I had been stubborn and just decided that I was going to ‘main’ Lúcio we probably wouldn’t have been able to keep someone on the payload, and we probably would have lost (it was my brother’s idea to have me switch by the way), but over and over I will hear the words, ‘I main so and so’.  Please don’t.  Use the character who’s kit best serves the current situation.  If the situation changes, change your hero too.

When Battleborn was announced, Gearbox CEO and founder Randy Pitchford used just about every gaming buzz word to describe it:

Battleborn is: FPS; hobby-grade coop campaign; genre-blended, multi-mode competitive e-sports; meta-growth, choice + epic Battleborn Heroes!

— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) July 8, 2014

Nobody knew or knows now what that means.  Randy is a pretty funny guy.  I have heard him speak many times at PAX, so this may have just been a joke, but the problem is that Battleborn’s marketing never made it any clearer.  We were just left to wonder what the heck Battleborn was.  Once the game got closer to release we learned that it was really just a MOBA with a CO-OP story mode attached.

Had they hyped and explained that, maybe it wouldn’t have been unfairly compaired with Blizzard’s Overwatch.  The two games aren’t even in the same genre, but Battleborn’s poor marketing lead people to believe that they were, or at least that the MOBA aspects of Battleborn were just a small part of it, not almost the entire game.  Due to this confusion we almost can’t talk about Battleborn or Overwatch without mentioning the other one.  Which is unfortunate.

If we are comparing games to Battleborn, the games we should be bringing up are Gigantic by Motiga or Paragon by Epic.  Overwatch on the other hand should be compared with Splash Damage’s Dirty Bomb, or Valve’s TF2 (though mostly Dirty Bomb).  Comparing Battleborn and Overwatch’s similar art styles may be interesting, but that is about it.

I understand why this happened, Gearbox’s fans for the most part aren’t big MOBA players and the company didn’t want to scare them off, but had they been honest about what they were making maybe they could have drawn some new fans in.  Instead nobody understood what was going on with Battleborn until it was too late.  I hear if you like MOBA’s, Battleborn is a fun take, but for straight up shooter fans it is a bit of a let down.  I can’t help but think all of this could have been prevented if Gearbox’s marketing department would have advertised their game properly.