With Overwatch 2 rumored to be an upcoming project for Activision Blizzard, the developers are presented with a new opportunity to rethink core design ideas that would otherwise be out of scope of a mere balance patch. One of the more glaring issues that revealed itself over the years of play is the counter-intuitive nature of ultimates.





Killing everyone with an ultimate is a misplay





One of the most counter-intuitive aspects of ultimates is that it’s actively a bad decision to wipe an entire team with one. This is mainly the case because it will keep your team from getting clean up ultimate percentages for the other members of your team and getting ahead in the ultimate economy.





Indeed one of the most important revelations has been that some ultimates are exceptional at helping your team build their own ultimates and keeping the snowball rolling, such as the GOATs staple Graviton Surge. A Genji that kills an entire team with his Dragon Blade not only kept his teammates from generating ultimate charge, he also didn’t get any for himself and therefore the decision to go for all six opponents in most situations becomes a clear misplay.





Shooting opponents is too often a bad decision





Historically, shooting opponents in Overwatch is often a double-edged sword. While you are charging up your own ultimate, by merely damaging and not killing a target you are also charging up the opponents healer and because both Transcendence and Sound Barrier are likely to be stronger ultimates than the one you are charging, poking for your ultimate is often not the best choice. This tends to be a real problem for an FPS game and the average player mentality that comes with it when playing at most levels of ranked play.





Currently, poking in GOATs is a fundamental part of tactics because you are trying to deplete enemy cooldowns and shield charge before getting up close and personal with them. Engagements also take place with higher frequency so not too much ultimate charge is exchanged between healers and damage dealers.





Hero switches are suboptimal





Overwatch’s developers expressed on several occasions that at the core of the game’s design was the option for players to switch their heroes in order to counter their opponent's strategy. At the highest level of play, we only see these options being used at the start of a round or a new checkpoint, and in stall situations. Rarely do we see teams change up in between, and if they do their chance of success is considerably lower.





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One of the main culprits for this is once again the importance of having an ultimate and how Overwatch has evolved into a state where they are the main focal point of any chosen tactic. For example, fights are approached very differently when nobody has an ultimate than when one team has a Graviton Surge and the other doesn’t have a support ultimate to counter. We even see suboptimal hero compositions for specific points being chosen because a player still has one of the stronger ultimates charged from a previous fight.





Ultimates signal the wrong expectations





Those who have been at live events for Overwatch have probably noticed when a seemingly successful ultimate tricks the audience into having an emotional reaction, but when these abilities have a delayed effect and don't immediately lead to kills, the hype surrounding the play is unceremoniously dispersed.





At the Atlantic Showdown, the audience would always start roaring as soon as a Reinhardt hits an Earthshatter on multiple people, expecting it to be a fight winning move. Yet about half the time, the play doesn’t end up being significant in this very situation and will only impact the fight down the line (or worse yet the consecutive fights) when it is no longer apparent that it did. A successful Earthshatter might require a Barrier that Zarya wouldn’t want to use in this situation or a Sound Barrier to save the team. The audience often ends up confused about how a five-man Earthshatter wasn’t a fight-ending play. The audience is cheering for a significant play but the impact often will only take effect (in terms of kills) several seconds or even minutes after the play when the lost tempo and cooldowns cause names to finally start popping up on the kill feed.





Furthermore, there seems to be an issue with the visual and auditory transportation of ultimates into expectations and emotion. Statistically speaking, a Sombra ultimate that hits a significant number of opposing players is as impactful as a Shatter that landed, and yet rarely do we see a crowd explode over a Sombra ultimate that hit every opponent. One could expect this to be the case because everything about the Reinhardt’s ultimate feels powerful, from the animation to the voice line he screams on top of his lungs. Heroes lying on the floor before their enemies communicate a more intuitive display of dominance than their electronic devices not working after all. Granted, perhaps this isn’t strictly an issue that is fixed only by game design but also by educating audiences on the statistical significance of certain abilities.





Revisiting design decisions





The first two aforementioned issues can be attributed to the way ultimates are gained in Overwatch. Initially, when the game was still in early beta, heroes were even able to gain ultimate charge by receiving damage. Intended as a comeback mechanic, it was taken out in later builds as it promoted unnatural tactics such as not shooting your opponent at all and simply trying to get them to shoot you in order to charge your own and your healers ultimate. While not nearly as disruptive, the current way of either shooting your opponent or healing your teammates as a mechanic to gain ultimates has caused issues as strategies became more sophisticated at all levels of play.





﻿One certainly has to recognize what gaining ultimate charge does as a fun creator for the game, as it seemingly rewards aiming well or keeping your teammates alive. Unfortunately, it also rewards undesirable behavior as previously outlined and leads to many a lost game with little feedback to the player regarding what they’ve done wrong and even encourages them to do as much damage as possible with gold medals.





Ultimates are often too powerful to not structure entire fights around and yet have a tendency to not feel as immediately impactful as they in effect are, misleading the vast majority of the player base and audience. In many ways, understanding and playing Overwatch well requires players to unlearn core FPS principles and the ultimate system appears to be one of the main culprits for this confusion. Can it be fixed in Overwatch 2?



