There are loads of methods to die in a game of Overwatch. From being devoured by non secular dragons, to shot within the head by a time-travelling cockney, to being knocked off a cliff by a super-intelligent hamster. But a technique you may’t be killed is through fall injury.
Except that very almost wasn’t the case. In a post on the Overwatch forums final evening, one participant requested how completely different the game can be for those who needed to account for gravity-based accidents. As they level out, Junkrat must watch out together with his mine leap, whereas Pharah couldn’t simply launch into the air with no penalties.
The thread caught the eye of Overwatch’s lead designer, Jeff ‘Papa Jeff’ Kaplan, who chimed in to say that “we actually tried falling damage in the early development of Overwatch.” Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t the gravity-obeying characters who precipitated issues – Reaper, Widowmaker, and Pharah have been all on the listing of problematic heroes, whereas extra ground-bound heroes like Reinhardt and Roadhog stay off Kaplan’s listing of airborne troublemakers.
“With Widowmaker, it felt strange and unintuitive to be able to grapple to high places but not get back down,” resulting in an odd phenomena the place gamers can be grappling themselves downwards to keep away from a fall. Pharah gamers would wish to “feather your jets right before touching the ground” to keep away from a nasty chunk of injury.
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But it feels like Reaper had the worst deal – “we kept teleporting to high locations with no ability to get safely down.”
The bizarre interactions meant that the group started exempting characters that might stand up excessive from fall injury, giving all of them the reward with none of the danger. Eventually nevertheless, “it felt arbitrary who would take fall damage and who was immune,” so the group eliminated the mechanic from the game fully, permitting any character to launch themselves dangerously into the air. Given what number of occasions I’ve unintentionally crippled myself in a game of Counter-Strike by misjudging fall peak, I’d say that that was most likely a great choice.
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