Marvel Rivals (An Ode To Overwatch) | A Fine Time Special

[00:00:00] It's time for Fine Time Hello, party people. It's your boy Dre. We're back once again. And I am having a first-time guest here. I have guested on his podcast, Select and Start, a couple times now. But now he is here, Kiefer. Thank you for joining me. Hello, long-time listener, first-time chatter.

[00:00:31] You know what? Can I tell you something? I love when people say that to me. You know why? Because this show is obviously fashioned like a radio show. We have voice drops and everything and indents, radio indents. It just fits the vibe, right? First-time caller, long-time listener. Yeah, it's a very easy listening podcast. It feels like there should be songs playing in between y'all yelling about whether Pokemon are real or fake or not.

[00:00:58] Well, see? We got a real listener of the show, everybody. He listens. That's a deep cut. Man, it's been months since we did Pokemon real or fake, huh? It's been a hot minute. Yeah, Steve, get on it. I know you're listening to this. I know you love Marvel Rivals. You were absolutely listening to this episode. Get on it.

[00:01:18] Anyway, thank you for joining me. We are here, as the name implies, to talk about Marvel Rivals, kinda, but honestly, mostly, I wanted to talk about Overwatch, because that's the thing we kind of share here. We are two lapsed Overwatch fans who, for one reason or another, we fell out of favor with it, but as it turns out, we still want that experience, right?

[00:01:43] We just don't necessarily want it from Overwatch, and that game is now Marvel Rivals, which is satiating both of us greatly. So I wanted to talk about Marvel Rivals, but also our experiences with Overwatch over the years. In fact, I mean, who knows how this is going to shake out? I feel like we're going to talk about Overwatch more than Marvel Rivals, which is kind of secretly what I'm hoping for.

[00:02:06] I mean, it's bound to happen because this is a game based off of another game that's been out for, oh my god, nine years is what it's going to be. Yeah. And that's so much history versus how this Marvel Rivals has only been out for a month, as of the time of this recording. It's in its first season. With all that, it's just like, naturally, we're going to talk about one thing more, and even when we are talking about Marvel Rivals, we're just going to be like, it's like Overwatch in this way. Exactly, but obviously in some really good ways.

[00:02:35] But yeah, before we really get certain earnest, please talk about Select and Start. I love this podcast. Ever since you started it, it's been... A blast to listen to. It's been a blast for me to be on it. Tell the people about Select and Start, just in case they don't know. So Select and Start is a podcast I do. I host it, I edit it, I promote the thing, and it is part of the Moonshot Network. My podcast isn't like the typical video game podcast, which is usually about the gaming news du jour.

[00:03:03] It is about people's personal experiences with a video game that means the most to them. So I bring on a guest. They talk about a video game that they have a very close personal relationship with, and we go into why this game means so much to them and why this game had an impact on other people that played it. And we also talk about how people can play it in the current video game landscape where it's kind of hard to play video games that are older than 10 years old. So all that stuff is wonderful.

[00:03:29] I have a myriad of guests on, video game developers, video game journalists, other video game co-hosts, and just people who just are enthusiastic about video games. I had Dre on to talk about Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario Galaxy. Both really, really wonderful episodes. And if you're listening to The Fine Time, I would really recommend listening to either of those first to get a feel for what the show's like. Thank you. I mean, well, one, thank you for saying that. Two, thanks for having me on twice to talk about the Mario.

[00:03:58] I've just become the Mario guy. I have been on our mutual friends Flashback 64's podcast to talk about Mario 2. Yeah. And coincidentally, Mario Galaxy with a panel. So it's just, you know, I guess I'm just the Mario guy going around everywhere. Yeah. I'm a Mario slut, really. Mr. Mario. The Mario expert. Well, yeah, everyone go check out Select and Start. Of course, the links to that stuff will be in the description of this podcast.

[00:04:26] But let's get started. Let's talk about almost said the Overwatch. Maybe that's what his name should be. Instead of Overwatch 2, it should have been the Overwatch. Yeah. That was the issue, was the lack of the, we need to reverse Sean Parker. You know, like how they had Suicide Squad in 2016, then they had the Suicide Squad, right? Just like that. That'll fix it, I'm sure. And the Suicide Squad killed the Justice League. It's like, yeah, too much to it. It gets worse again.

[00:04:57] It's a delicate act. Let's start with a little personal history with Overwatch. Do you remember the run up to this game? Because I kind of do. Because I know Blizzard fans, right? So they were excited. I was just like, I don't give a fuck, right?

[00:05:24] But then I played beta with them. Because I'll put it this way. I had never played an online shooter before. Really? Honestly, never. I have never played Team Fortress. I have never even played like a Call of Duty, right? Like, I just didn't care. That was just not my scene. So when I saw this, I was like, oh boy, here's a bunch of people shooting guns at each other. Because like, here's the thing. My only experience with this, because I'm old, everybody. Everyone knows this. Was back in the 90s with like LAN parties.

[00:05:53] With like Doom and Quake and stuff like that. And like Deathmatch does not interest me whatsoever. That is so boring to me. Whether it's free for all or Team Deathmatch doesn't do it, right? So I was just assuming this is just going to be the same kind of thing. Only it kind of looks like Phantasy Star Online. What's this monkey in this giant suit? You know, like, and Blizzard character designs aren't even necessarily my favorite. So it's just like, I don't understand this at all. I talked mad shit about this before it came out.

[00:06:23] But what did you, the run up to this? Were you like excited? Were you, what did you think? I was neutral about it, honestly. It did feel, I mean, I found the words for it later. Which is like, this is like if Americans made Street Fighter 2. In a way that they're getting all these like international people coming together to kick each other's asses. And it's not necessarily racially progressive or anything like that. But it is like, well, here's somebody from every other place. And it's like, all right, cool.

[00:06:53] Do they have a background? No, but we have a variety of characters and different designs for them. And it's like, all right, surely they'll add lore later. We'll get to that. But I really didn't feel anything about it. What happened was I went over to a friend's house while I was home from college. And he was playing Overwatch as it had come out. And I'd seen a lot of Overwatch. Obviously, it was privy to that. I knew that this was a popular game. I saw, God, I don't watch any of these YouTubers now.

[00:07:20] But I remember watching like highlight reels from people like, say, Critical. Who were doing like team kills. Or just doing teleports and trolling people into falling off the edge of the map. That kind of stuff, right? So that was like very early on into the release cycle when I actually did see the game and saw somebody else play it. And I thought, oh, I am interested in playing this. So it was like fully winter 2016 when I first actually got my own copy of Overwatch and started playing it on PlayStation 4. That was the way I was playing it.

[00:07:50] Yeah, I was a PlayStation player as well. I've never really had any PC worth of shit enough to ever play anything on there. But I did play the beta period. I think they had an open beta in like March 2016. I remember playing with my friend at his insistence. And he still makes fun of me to this day. Actually, you know, you probably know who he is since you listen to the show. It's Vin. Friend of the show Vin, everybody. Yeah. Yeah, he's a Blizzard fanboy. Or at least he was at that point still. Because how could you be after that? Right?

[00:08:20] After, I don't know, the events of, I don't know, maybe 2017, 18 onward are just. That's a whole podcast within itself. I remember like, oh, things were bad when they announced Overwatch 2. But again, we'll get there. Yeah, exactly. It was like a panic announcement. But yeah, he kind of conned me into playing this. And I called it pleasantly mediocre. And he's never let me forget it. But here's the thing.

[00:08:45] I didn't understand how contingent my online experience was to other people. And I know that sounds stupid to say now. But again, I had never played a game like this before. So it was just like, okay, here seems the glowy spot where everyone's supposed to stand and protect. Okay, I guess I'll go over here. I'm Soldier 76, I think. No one's coming. I think they're all playing COD over here. I think this is what we're supposed to be doing. Okay, we won. Sure.

[00:09:14] I guess that was okay. We won. Right? Like, I didn't understand what a bad match I just played. Right? Because nobody was playing the objective. That's how little I knew about this kind of stuff. Man. Like, no Counter-Strike? No Unreal Tournament? No nothing? Mm-mm. Oh, okay. I've been to a friend's Unreal Tournament 2003 LAN party. Is that a game? Unreal Tournament 2003? I'm pretty sure that's a video game, right? Yeah. I think.

[00:09:45] Anyway. But yeah, I've seen stuff like that. And again, it just Deathmatch, just not for me. It's Unreal 2004, by the way. Four! Okay. Four. But yeah, that was based on my experience. But then, of course, the game came out. It comes on around my birthday, then gets it for me for a birthday present. You're going to play this game, motherfucker. And he was right. He was absolutely right. I fell in love. And let's just go there. What made you fall in love with Overwatch?

[00:10:15] And here was the – I'll start with the most unexpected one for me. It's like I said earlier, I've never really cared about Blizzard character designs very much. In fact, some of them I just straight up don't like.

[00:10:54] And that's still true. I've played a game like this before. I don't know if this was like common practice in other types of games. But it doesn't seem like it was. And that made me fall in love with the game because I fell in love with the characters. I really actually cared. And, you know, there's all this supplemental stuff, right? Here's some Overwatch digital comics. And here are some like animated shorts. I didn't care about any of that. All the stuff I cared about was like in the game, you know? And that was so cool to me.

[00:11:23] Even if it wasn't – again, I don't even know how original that thought was for them. But that's really what attached me to Overwatch, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think you got it. It's the core appeal of the thing. I had played some online shooters before, but not a ton. My older brother was really into COD, so I'd had my fair share of playing Modern Warfare 2. So I knew what a standard online shooting experience was like. But I really loved Team Fortress 2.

[00:11:50] Team Fortress 2, I was playing since that went free to play on my shitty little laptop in high school. And I played that through bits of college. And it was a thing where it was like kind of declining because there was not a lot of support and a growing number of bots. And just a lot of little things that ended up piling on into a thing where it's like, this isn't really fun for me anymore. But it was – I would say Overwatch and Team Fortress 2 have a comparable number of hours in two.

[00:12:17] So I just sort of jumped ship from one hero shooter to another hero shooter. Okay. And, you know, while I wasn't being – I wasn't able to play on super modded maps where there's a fucking whole like overworld of Majora's Mask or Ocarina of Time or fucking Goldenrod City from Pokemon Gold and Silver. There was plenty of – the actual variety of the games themselves. Not the variety of the games. They were very similar to what Team Fortress 2 had on offer like capture the control point, move the payload.

[00:12:48] But the variety of heroes actually. It was this thing where, oh, this is an online shooter where there's not just nine characters to choose from but dozens. And that makes every match feel distinct with the matchups and everything that goes into that. And, no, yeah, that's the thing. Like the appeal for Overwatch for me was there were so many people. I didn't feel like I had a dedicated main in Overwatch.

[00:13:12] It was somewhere where I could – if somebody hard locks somebody at the beginning of a match, I could just like, oh, okay, I have like 50 million other people I can choose from right now. That's fine with me. Yeah, it took me a while to branch out, obviously, because it's just like the first character I picked was Soldier 76. It's like, okay, gun, shoot, gun. I understand. Run, heal, button. I get it. Great starter character. Yeah, excellent. So it's like, okay. Then I was like, who's this Symmetra lady? Wow, I have no idea what I'm doing. Let's hold off on that for a while. Torbjorn.

[00:13:43] Oh, I can just have a turret and then I have – then I can also shoot them. So I should put this in an advantageous spot. And it's almost like – and I'm sure Team Fortress and other games were like this too. It's like a fighting game where you learn matchups, right? I feel like that's also the thing that I really loved about Overwatch because I understand fighting games. I'm no fighting game expert by any means, but growing up in the arcades, I played a ton of fighting games.

[00:14:09] I understand that, oh, if I'm Zangief, this is how I need to approach Chun-Li. This is how I need to approach Ryu. That's the same thing. If I'm Torbjorn, this is how I need to approach Winston. This is how I do not need to approach Reinhardt at all. Stay away from me, right? You learn the characters you can really have one over on and which ones it's like, okay, I can't really take on McCree or Cassidy now, right? Yeah.

[00:14:34] It's somewhere in between like a turn-based RPG or a fighting game in terms of pacing. It's not too slow. It's not too fast. It's something where it's like, I can put an hour into this and I actually know what's going on. Yeah. That appeal was so strong to me. Even all the way through, I stopped playing. That's something Blizzard actually never lost. The characters they introduced, even all the way through Overwatch 2, were fucking fantastic and so much fun.

[00:15:04] It's such a shame that the game is not fun anymore because it's like, I loved it. God, Junker Queen, excellent. Ilari, excellent. Sojourn, so fucking good. Okay, you're saying names I don't know anymore. Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm sorry, but this is past your time, right? But like, oh God, the characters were still on point. That was the reason why I kept playing so long, just because it was just the characterization and then the further characterization with the skins, insane to me.

[00:15:34] It's the carrot that they dangle in front of you that's very important. There were loot boxes and stuff in Team Fortress 2, but it was like hats and cosmetics and other weapons. The way that TF2 played was very different, where you could have a build for an engineer or a spy or a heavy or a man that were different, depending on what your approach was. But in Overwatch, the characters would play the same regardless. But the loot box, the cosmetics, definitely felt like a good carrot to dangle in front of you.

[00:16:03] It made it feel like the game was growing, even when they weren't introducing new heroes at a very quick pace. It felt like you had a reason to keep joining another match, to level up, to get a loot box, to do another thing. It's the carrot, right? Yeah, but it was a great carrot. You were correct. And also just great fucking skins. I don't even, here's the thing. I think they got better at them over time.

[00:16:30] Well, like in the first, I don't know, six months or something, they were pretty cool. Like there were some cool ones, but then over, then it's like you start getting really crazy stuff like baseball pitchers and yada. Or, you know, like you just get used to getting way out there. Like, you know, Lunar New Year Zarya. Like what? Why is she even wearing this? Is this culturally appropriate? Should I be calling somebody right now? The Street Fighter 2 problem. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny.

[00:16:58] We always used to make fun of all the little intro songs in Overwatch, like the Noobani one or something. Or like stuff like that. It's like, oh, this sounds a little stereotypical, I guess. I don't know. Like, maybe. Yeah, I can still like hear like the Orientalist music that plays anytime you're in an Eastern country. Oh, yeah. Oh, Nepal. This especially. We used to make up lyrics over it saying, I don't even remember now. I'm sure Vin remembers. She remembers that stuff. We used to say something about racism.

[00:17:27] I know the word racism was in our lyrics. I'll put it that way. But yeah, yes. The that is the word for it. But yeah, it didn't. But you're right, though. It's a Street Fighter 2 problem. It's not racist. It's just very like, you know, it's not. It's, you know, it's one of those things where they overthink certain things and then underthink other things. And it's like, I don't I don't know what you're doing, but I guess you're just swinging. You're swinging to get an event out there. Right. Yeah.

[00:17:57] Like what holidays are there? It's like, here's like they're fucking Yom Kippur. Let's do a skin. That would be bad. But like you're right, though, like there are certain skins that did feel like characterization, especially what were they? The legendary skins. Yes. The one that feels sticks out to me now was Anna had a you know, she was an old lady and then she had her younger legendary skin.

[00:18:22] And then suddenly it's like, oh, OK, this adds texture to the history of this world. These older characters who have a history with this organization and how this stuff, this stuff shapes out. And it's like, I don't know. It's just like it's another thing, too, where because this is pre us using the battle pass in every online shooting game, like somebody with a legendary skin is like, oh, that is like just a shorthand for you're a dedicated player of this of this character. Huh? Yeah.

[00:18:53] Yeah, that's that's really that's really what it is. And like, well, now I mean, we'll obviously get to Marvel rivals next, but just like, yeah, with the way the way the mastery stuff works in that game. It's like, oh, you have that spray. You are a Magneto sicko, baby. Like, you know, like, you know, so, yeah, it's the same thing. But I think that's good. Right. Like, I think that stuff is fun. It's like, oh, this guy really. I mean, you don't know if he knows his shit with this character, but he sure played a lot of it.

[00:19:20] So they it's here. Favorite characters, favorite Overwatch characters. Name them for me. Who did whether like whether it's the ones you played the most or just the people you like the most. You could take that either way you want. I was Zenyatta main. Like I said, I didn't have like a dedicated main, but I ended up doing a lot of support and a lot of tank stuff. And so those are the characters I ended up playing the most. And my favorites were Zenyatta. So I just love him. I love his design.

[00:19:50] The fact that he is a robot monk is just really fun texture. Again, I wish that they had done anything more with this world to understand what's going on with that. But I loved his design and I love the way that he like hit really hard and also healed. That's also why I liked Moira when she came out. I loved her. I love throwing a dark orb. Then I just hear like that. So satisfying. As it's bouncing around. And I'm just like spraying piss at everybody else to heal them with my hand. Okay.

[00:20:18] I thought we were the only ones who called it piss. I'm sure. I guess everyone else called it piss too. Maybe that's what I'm recalling there. But like it was just like get fucking pissed on. That's what we say in the chat. I'm out of piss when you're out of juice. Yeah. But another character. And I remembered this one when I was getting ready for this episode was I played a shit ton of May. I remember when they changed May from whatever she was before. I think it was a tank into a damage character because it's like, fuck it.

[00:20:48] We give up. But she's fucking damage, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. I think it was defense. Remember they had offense and defense. Right. And then they consolidated that into damage. That was kind of the, well. Right. Oh my God. Do you remember that? Hanzo, Torbjorn, some other characters. And then when they did that, they finally moved Symmetra to damage because it's like, bitch, I don't. Why would she ever support in the first place? Remember Symmetra 1.0 with the shield?

[00:21:17] She could apply shields to people individually. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. Yeah. And then they just changed her, reworked her completely into what we call Symmetra 2.0. Then she was damaged. But yeah, they did some weird shit. Oh, well, that's one thing they did in Overwatch 2 as well. They changed Doomfist to a tank. Really? Okay. Yeah. He has like a big block and everything with the two crossing his arms in front of him like that and just like blocking people as he comes in.

[00:21:47] It's really, it's really interesting. Real ship of Theseus thing, this game. Yeah. This is very strange. Any other characters before I blab about mine that you really were into? There are characters whose designs I love but didn't play as them too, too much. Like Sombra was a character I loved but just could never get the hang of. And it's like, I don't want to take up that character slot in case somebody actually knows how to play Sombra. Bridget, I played a ton of even though I didn't do a lot of, oh my God, the bigger guy.

[00:22:17] No, fucking Reinhardt. I didn't do a lot of Reinhardt because like I could never get over how slow he was. But I loved Bridget as like this like nice little support bridge in between that. Roadhog, I loved his hook, Jeff's Kiss. And I loved Junkrat as like my other damaged character I played as. Oh, you remember when remember when the game first came out, Junkrat could damage himself with his own shit. Yes. With his own bombs. That was the worst.

[00:22:45] I mean, like you could still get when they buffed him, when they took away that and they gave him two mines, two charges of mines instead of just one. That made him like, whoo. Yeah, I liked him before that. But yeah, you would do like trick shots where you'd use one mine to take yourself off and then like in the air second jump. It was crazy. I could never quite get the hang of that. I could do obviously the one, but doing the second one was always a bit tough for me.

[00:23:11] So I always like catapulted myself with one and then through the other one, like just, oh God, that was always my favorite thing. Randomly threw a mine into the crowd and just boom and whatever happens. It's like, oh, I just I just got a double KO. Just some bullshit happened. That was great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Diva Junkrat Junkrat was one of my favorites, but my most used character in Overwatch was Winston.

[00:23:35] If I if I mean to quote unquote mean anybody was Winston lowest damage in the game, little tickle gun, as we always called it. But just so much fun leaping in and out of there. I loved it. The bubble, the Winnie bubble. Yeah. Just just the most fun to me. Obviously, much realizing your teammates healing takes some bit of coordination. Right. But man, just slap. That was my favorite thing to do as in Yada, my second most used character.

[00:24:04] So we're both kind of Zenyatta people here, but not by much. Zenyatta sometimes is number one. Then Winston really depended on the year. God, I played Overwatch for years. It's so fucking wild. Where did the time go anyway? Yeah. Throwing a healing orb on a Winston while he just goes and does his thing. Just like you said, chef's kiss. Torbjorn was definitely my favorite damage character. He was definitely third. I used him so much.

[00:24:31] I loved the turret, the old way building it up, the armor packs, which, of course, they all got rid of later. Change this whole ultimate, blah, blah, blah. I guess we can talk about some of that stuff. But Symmetra 2. I started using Symmetra maybe just a month before they changed her into what we could say is Symmetra 2.0, which is the one with the shield generator. Yeah.

[00:24:54] Alt and the contact lens kind of little shield, which is weird, but I liked it. It was always great when a D.Va bomb was coming in. You just hit that contact lens button at the right time. It's like, oh, I didn't die. What happened? Interesting. Yeah. Just makes you feel like a badass. Yeah. So I really enjoyed Symmetra 2.0, we can call her. Bye.

[00:25:31] Over time, I feel like they started making gigantic character overhauls that were just not that fun. See, they used to make moves in the name of fun. Like we said with the Junkrat thing. Oh, what if he had two minds? Oh, Sombra could only be invisible for 15 seconds. What if she could just do it forever? Mm-hmm. You know? Like they used to do it that way. Then just everything came crashing down, it felt like.

[00:26:00] Like I said, with the Torbjorn overhaul, they took away the armor packs. The turret was not nearly as good before. You could still repair it with the hammer, but remember it had like level one, then it had level two, then it was like level three turret or whatever. Yeah. All that went away in favor of what we called the jizz, the fucking lava on the ground. You just sprays it everywhere and it's just like, okay, that's cool. You can deny a big space, but honestly, not as fun.

[00:26:31] Symmetra, when they changed her to what I always call 3.0, definitely not nearly as fun. The shield generator was great. I loved that thing. That was like my favorite ult in the game. Stash that somewhere? No, you bitches got to come find that thing now, right? If you really want to do some damage and now can't do that. What do you think about what I'm saying? So I stopped blabbing on forever. Do you feel like eventually they started making changes in the name of like not fun? Because that's just basically what turned me off.

[00:27:01] What happened? I think I remember a moment where it's like, why are they making it dramatically different in this way? And it's when they started doing the thing where Mercy could do like a team revive and then they changed that. I forgot. They did like a Mercy rework. She used to be able to do a full team revive and or was it that she had like a long cooldown ability that she could revive one person out of time? It was her ultimate. It was her ultimate. And then they changed it. Yes. A long cooldown ability, like 45 seconds or something where she could revive one person. Yeah.

[00:27:30] So it was like that with her being like a mainly a healer with like a courtesy gun. I don't know why they did that. It just like did this thing where it's it just felt very bizarre. Right. Because it's one thing to like not buff a character or nerf a character, but just like give the sort of just change things around a little bit. But it's another thing where you're just sort of doing a rework that almost destroys what

[00:27:59] was like the trademark of the character. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just it feels it's a feel bad change. I think that's what I'm going to describe all these things as going forward are feel bad changes because it just makes the character less fun. And obviously the biggest thing that made the game less fun, at least to me, was the introduction of roll cue where, OK, now we're going to have two tanks, two, two damage, two support.

[00:28:30] That doesn't motherfucking work when you have not designed or balanced your game around that in any way, shape or form before this. You have to have that going in and you have to make the characters that way going in. You can't just introduce that. You can't introduce that layer on top of the game. It doesn't work. That's the first time I stopped playing the game whenever they introduced that. And in like what? Late summer 2019. I was like, I'm out.

[00:28:57] I'm just not I'm just not playing the game this way. They got industry brain with it where it felt like it felt like they were not pandering, I guess, but they were too consumed by the competitive market and sort of using that to make things like in the name of balance. And I just remember like the what was the lead developer, Jeff or something like that? Yeah, Jeff Kaplan. Kaplan. Like you could see him like as the dev updates kept coming out, like him getting more and

[00:29:26] more exasperated by like the scope creep that kept coming up from them doing like retoolings and reworks and introducing a new character was exciting at a point. But now you could just sort of like anticipate this becoming a disaster because how this character starts one way and then they kind of have to, you know, like it's like they aren't play testing it properly. They're not. Yeah. It felt like we were play testing a lot of the characters like, oh, my God, the hamster character. Oh, wrecking ball. Yeah. Wrecking ball.

[00:29:55] It just felt like which is a totally fine way of doing it. But it was also like that competitive market thing where that's like things could change from day to day, update to update with how like the game fundamentally played. Yeah, it's just it was just it was just a mess. It was just a mess top to bottom. And the thing was it. Here's the thing. I think this is the reason why they introduced roll cue. There was a meta going around. I'm sure you remember this where it was like three tanks and three supports. That was the thing people were doing.

[00:30:24] And I forget the meta had a name. I don't remember what it is, but they kept saying they didn't introduce roll cue to defeat that, but they absolutely fucking did. Like they can say whatever they want, but we know the truth. Like that's exactly what was happening, especially their Overwatch League, which now no longer exists. That's what everybody was doing. And it's like, OK, so are you just never going to show Soldier 76 or whoever on the screen again? We're just everyone's just going to play this way. This can't happen.

[00:30:52] It was just very bad optics for them. Yeah, I understand. Like we have a what is a 20 plus characters for you to choose from and you don't want the same six or eight being used in every match and their counters being used. Right. I understand like how that's not conducive to play, but it is a thing. And I can't armchair like regulate these things, but I can tell you as a player when something feels off because it just felt so right in the beginning.

[00:31:19] And I'm not to say like, oh, they launched it perfect and didn't need any retools and everything like that. That is not the case, of course. Yeah. No, but it is a thing where the, you know, the dosage is the poison. I guess you can do something too much on the other end to completely foil something else. Um, and that's what it felt like they did. It felt like their changes felt more punitive than they did balance. Um, yeah. Yeah. Feel, feel bad. Yeah. Punitive.

[00:31:49] That's actually the word for it. I called it feel bad changes. Yes, that is, that is absolutely right. It's a, you were punishing me for being like for, for playing the character the way I've always played the character. And it's not that I'm not used to change. I've been through two overhauls with Symmetra, right? Like I'm still, I still up into the end played her. It was still fun. It just wasn't as fun as before. And I don't think it's a case of like, oh, well, you've been playing the same game for several years.

[00:32:15] That's not really it considering how much that game changes over time and how much I still played it at that point. I was not tired of overwatch. No, you know, I was still playing it well in the 2019 and roll queue definitely put a bucket of water over that where it felt like, okay. Uh, I, most of my mains were support anyway. That's fine in terms of like me getting matchmaking done, but it just didn't feel right to, you know, I liked the on the fly changes.

[00:32:45] Something make it something that I like about rivals and hate about rivals, but it's a thing where it's like, yes, I hate it, but I love it. And I would rather like have a sweaty match because of poor team composition than be locked into something where I can only make some, like I can only change within the, the, the hero class. It's it, I don't know. At that point, it just makes it feel like work.

[00:33:08] Uh, and I don't want it to feel laborious that I chose to, uh, pick a tank or a support character. And I don't want to wait 20 minutes to play, uh, an offensive class. Oh, the queue, the queue times. Oh my fucking God. It was wild when they introduced it. This, this commitment to something before a match even starts. It's just like, you're that's worse variety than whatever you were trying to do to balance. Yeah.

[00:33:39] And that's just, it's just, it was just such a bad idea. Again, you can't, you can't play, you can't build a game for three years and balance all around, not having that. Then just add it. That doesn't fix anything. It just makes everything worse. So that's the first time I stopped playing the game. Um, but yeah, you're right. Like the, the dynamicness matters. Like, okay. I was playing with, um, five friends and a rando the other night and we were, we were, I think we're two, two, two.

[00:34:05] We had two, we had two dualist, two, two Vanguard, two strategists. And I was, I think I was a tank. I think it was venom or something. But then storm showed up and iron man showed up on the other side. And I'm like, nah, these bitches are dead. I switched off. I switched to punisher. Done. Crushed them. We, we shoved it right up their ass. I got MVP, envy punisher, as I always call it when I get MVP and as him and just like, yeah, but like, that's a dynamic kind of switching.

[00:34:34] You used to be able to do an overwatch, but you cannot do anymore because it's like, okay, obviously we're getting crushed on the front lines here, but I'm Zenyatta. I can't do anything about that. It doesn't matter who I pick. I can pick who's the tankiest. I can switch a Brigitte. It's not going to matter. Right? Like I can only do so much here as a support. If we really need that extra damage or that extra tank, I can't do it. Right. There's less of a personal touch because you are just sort of locked into something before

[00:35:02] the match even starts and you're making the compromise of like, well, I guess I have to play support or tank because I actually want to play the game I just turned on. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So when did you stop playing? What do you remember when or was there a moment where you just reached like, I'm done or where you just kind of just fell off? Two things happened. And my friend and I that I played, the friend that I played it with was talking up Apex Legends and that was a hero shooter that had the more Fortnite model.

[00:35:32] And I wasn't, I didn't want to play Fortnite. Uh, I didn't want to do a PUBG, but I was curious. It's like, oh, they did a hero shooter model based off of Titanfall two. And it's also this big, you know, 60 person. Okay. I want to check this out. And I played it. So I was putting a lot of my online multiplayer time into Apex. And then also the role cue thing happened. And I just sort of over time lost a taste to play Overwatch.

[00:35:59] And like I said, Zenyatta main love that guy, but like, I never got to play May anymore because I didn't want to wait 10, 15 minutes to get a match going or anything like that. So it just, again, it started feeling more and more like this game was work and I don't want that to happen. Uh, and FOMO was really the thing keeping me going. Yeah. It just, I, that's the thing. Right. Cause like they still introduce like cool maps and skins and stuff.

[00:36:26] And it just seemed like it, but the, the core of the game that just felt so diseased over time where it's just like, man, I just can't. So basically I stopped playing at the role cue introduction, August, September, 2019. Then the Rona happened. Then we got really bored. So I said to then, Hey, um, maybe things are better. You want to, you want to poke around Overwatch again? And they weren't really that much better, but it was definitely something that was better though. It was better.

[00:36:56] They had balanced the game out. It took months for that to get back in shape. I don't want, I'm sorry to anyone who played in between like, you know, fall 19 and summer 2020. Holy shit. You must've been going through it. Jesus Christ. Um, but it felt, it definitely felt like a much more balanced game and much more fun at that point to play roll lock or not. But here's the thing they introduced to like, okay, here's the open queue version. You can still play the way you did before, but no, we actually can't because now you're

[00:37:26] like your eye is on roll lock, right? So if you're balancing for that, the other mode, isn't going to feel that good. You can't have both. You know, that's the thing for people who are complaining about that with Marvel rivals just have open queue and roll lock like Overwatch. No, that does not work. We just saw this. Yeah. It reduces experimentation. It keeps people from finding out interesting combos that aren't maybe meta, but something that's just really fun to play.

[00:37:53] I know that, you know, some people doing three supports, uh, with DPSs, that's, that's something that people are like saying we should do something. If somebody picks three supports, because I could basically break the game. If people are aligned to know what they're doing. And I'm just like, look, I don't want this stuff to be punitive. We can find there's certainly ways that we can do incremental changes. I think that was the thing that brought down overwatch and a lot of how Marvel rivals

[00:38:18] functions is trying to learn from the mistakes of Overwatch about this, um, uh, this, like this punitive hand that turned this game into a money sucking, uh, labor like process of grind, I guess would be a better way of saying it felt like a grind to play a lot of it. So for, from what I understand, you have never played overwatch two, right? You just only play the original. Okay. I got tempted so many times. I got tempted so many times. Well, here's the thing.

[00:38:46] I'm about to, I'm about to blow your mind with some of you want to talk about punitive. I'm going to tell you some of the shit they did, but we'll get there in a sec. Do you remember in 2019, I think it was at the blizzcon. It was after the blitz chung thing. And like the whole, the whole bit, right? The Hong Kong, like the whole, the whole controversy, I think. Yeah. And they were panic dropping everything. Here's Diablo four. Uh, we're doing overwatch two. Like that was the panic one. Right. Yeah.

[00:39:11] And do you remember Jeff Kaplan said like overwatch two was like a separate game, but you could still play with like overwatch one people. Do you remember that? An entire confusing explanation. And everyone's like, Oh, fuck are you talking about? Yeah. It's like, if you like your old insurance, you could keep it sort of thing. I don't know. Like it was, it was so weird and it never made any sense. And we never got any more explanation because Jeff Kaplan left blizzard in 2021. I, he had had enough. He left before overwatch two came out. Yeah.

[00:39:42] And yeah, just like this, like obfuscating language. And it definitely, it just felt like the, like the most cart before the horse thing I'd ever seen. I knew how sweaty it was when they announced it and they weren't talking about like what it had. Like, I think PVE was mentioned. Uh, and that was it. Like, I think beyond that, that was like the one kind of solid thing that they said. And then it's like, yeah, it's different. It's overwatch too. What do you, what do you want from us?

[00:40:11] And it's like an explanation, an idea of what this game is going to be like. I know, right. You know what overwatch is shut up, right? Gameplay. I don't know. It's just, man, it was, it was wild. Um, but obviously, and I'm, I know, you know about this. The biggest change in overwatch two was the change to five V five. A set of six V six. So you never experienced this five V five stuff yourself.

[00:40:36] So they, what they did is removed a tank one tank to support two, two damage. Um, I remember there was an explanation before the game came out from like some sort of developer play along with the developers kind of video. Right. And they said, the reason why they're changing to five V five is two things to remove like confusion from the battlefield clutter. If you will, if there were, if you took away two people, one person from each side, rather it would be easier to read.

[00:41:06] I don't think that's true. Number two, they said they wanted players to feel more impactful, feel like they were making more of a difference on the battlefield or something to that effect. To which I say, no one gives a hot fuck about that. That is not what you're overwatch was so popular. Overwatch didn't win game of the year at the game awards in 2016, because people felt like they were making an impact on their team.

[00:41:35] They wanted to play this fun game with these great characters and these cool locations with their friends. That is it. They don't care that they went seven and 14 with McCree. That's they don't, they're not here to make an impact. Who cares about that? Unless you're some e-sports head. I can't, I can't, I, that just showed me where their head was at. That's what they were thinking about. They were thinking about experts. It's almost like they were going to Reddit and taking their feedback from there instead of like actual people. I think that's the thing.

[00:42:03] Like, I think they got too insular with it. Like it's this thing where people who they don't have a layman's view of how this stuff works. They're thinking about it from the people who are getting the most feedback, which are comp players. And on the blizzard business end, they're like, well, e-sports are very popular right now. Valorant, CS go fucking Dota. God forbid legal legends. This five V five shit is like trying to match those things.

[00:42:28] And it sucks because like, you're taking the thing that made you distinct and changing it to fit into a model that you ended up in, I suppose, and saw the economic opportunity. But then it just became too, the, the, the mindset shifted. And I could tell that a lot of the developers were getting frustrated at how like this thing was trying to, to shape out like the, the, the battle pass nature of it. Like that's what I guess that was like the biggest change from overwatch to overwatch.

[00:42:58] She was like, it's a battle pass. Now it's a fucking battle pass. It's, it's, it's like, we're just laying it out there. And I don't know, man, it's, it's, it's this thing where it's just like this game just straight up doesn't exist anymore. This game I gave three years of my life to on and off just does not exist in any form. Now I know how wow players feel. It sucks. Like I gave so much of this time to it. And it's like, I have team fortress two still installed on my computer and I can open that up at any time.

[00:43:25] And I hear that they fixed up a lot of the shit that was wrong with it. And that made me go to overwatch in the first place. But it, it's this thing where it just feels like under this, this panopticon of Activision Blizzard, a subsidiary of Microsoft, that this thing can never be allowed to have its original identity because it's not the most money extracting version of what it could be. Yeah. I just, you, you said it, you're absolutely correct.

[00:43:55] It just, and the five V five and the, their explanation for the five V five just absolutely cemented that. I'm like, oh no, they are so wrongheaded right now. And I don't know. And yeah, as you can imagine, the five V five wasn't bad on the surface, right? Like I actually didn't mind it. It's just that. Well, okay. Obviously with the role cue in the original game, team creativity cratered, as we said, it created, it craters even more in this.

[00:44:24] You have no more tank dynamics. Rosaria will never see, you know, Reinhardt again, or, you know, like it's just like out there. Yeah. It's lonely out there. And, you know, as you can imagine, it created what they said is correct. It did create more impact and like you have, you make more difference, but that's not necessarily a good thing because if you're a tank, you better tank baby.

[00:44:50] If you, if you have a diva as your tank and they speed off right away to go play call of duty with the other team, you're losing, you know, you're losing and that's it. It matters so much to the point where it's absurd. So now if you're the tank, you better motherfucking tank. And that's it. It's this thing where you can see how they just gave themselves their own problems. You introduce role cue. Okay. Now the wait times are taking longer. Let's take one of these things off the map. The class that traditionally people like to play the least the tank.

[00:45:21] So now there's only one tank needed. Okay. Now the queue times have been reduced. The problem that you created in the first place, it's like, you know, to use a very contemporary example, it's like, you know, Trump wants to ban TikTok. TikTok gets banned. Trump's like, I'm going to bring it back. It's like you motherfucker. You were the one that broke it in the first place. It was your idea. It's this shit, right? It's like the Activision over like Activision Blizzard Overwatch shit. It's just the fucking GOP. I don't know what to say. It's just you fucked it.

[00:45:51] There was a natural order. You introduced fucking rules and barriers and hierarchies to this shit. And now, now no one wants to be tank ever. It's like everybody, it's an obligation. It is. You've, you turned it into work. You turned fun into work. You on gamified a video game. How do you on gamify a game? They sure did. They 100% did. And that's the thing. After a while, because I still played with Ven at this point.

[00:46:17] It got so bad with the rando tanks, just not wanting to tank or obviously only picking that because they were forced to, where I said, okay, Ven, new rule. Either me or you is tanking. One of us is queuing his tank or I'm not playing the game. That's all there is to it. Because that's how bad it got. He's doing it or I'm doing it. Because we are not trusting the populace to do it anymore. And that's how we played the entire time we played Overwatch 2. We made sure we were queuing. One of us was absolutely going to be tank. We had to do it.

[00:46:47] And that's not fun all the time, you know? Fine time. Fine. I can't help but notice that most of these, I don't know, characters that have been introduced since like 2020 are tanks. Oh yeah. Hazard, Junker Queen, Maga, Ramatra. I don't know these guys. Ramatra is so much fun, man. Oh, it's such a shame. I'm glad. Junker Queen's fun too.

[00:47:16] I mean, like, and then there's a bunch of support people I don't know. I had this Alari, Juno, Kariqo, Lifeweaver. I'm not sure I know those ones, but- Lifeweaver is so fun. Oh, that's what sucks so much. I wish I could play. These characters are actually fun. That's the thing. They fucked up all the old characters. Actually, let's get to that. Let's get to that. All right. I played Overwatch 2 in beta, right? And they had a lot of stuff that was fun.

[00:47:39] Imagine if Reinhardt, while he was dashing, could like, had the turn radius of a Ridge Racer drift. Shit. Yeah, it was so much fun. He was going around corners. Guess what? The game comes out and he doesn't have that anymore. God damn it. That was just too- That was far too fun. We just can't be doing that. Right? Yeah. Moira's orb, they changed the dark orb. Now, I'm not sure if this was good or bad, necessarily, because you talked about the satisfying, right? You didn't do that anymore. The dark orb stuck to a person.

[00:48:08] You throw it at somebody. Boo. Yeah, see- We had a character called Zenyatta. That's exactly what he did. It was fine. Exactly. You loved it. But you had to actually aim, though, unlike Zenyatta, where it's like, okay, I want to put it on this person. Okay. And then you threw it. But you threw it. Now, I only got to play with that for like a few days, and then the beta ended, and then the game came out. She didn't have that, and she never had it since. So I'm like, I don't even know if that was going to be good or not. Right? Okay.

[00:48:35] Let's talk about, before I get to the old character some more, let's talk about one of the new characters, where I forget. Lifeweaver, when he first came out, he had a thing where he would die, and then when he died, he would leave behind a lotus flower. And if a character picked up that lotus flower, it would heal them. So it would be a way to heal while he's dead, or, oh, you died in the middle of battle. Oh, but your teammates can still pick up this thing. That was cool, right? Within a week, that was gone. They overhauled the character. That thing was gone.

[00:49:04] If you didn't play Lifeweaver in the first week, you never saw that lotus flower. What the fuck? Why would you spend months developing a character, and then in week one, be like, nah, that's not a good idea. What the hell is going on? Again, I think it's just like you got too internal. It's this thing where you need to have casual playtesters, and you need hardcore playtesters. If you're going to do this meta bullshit about balancing everything, you need to see how it plays in a casual audience.

[00:49:32] You need to see how it plays with the hardcore audience. But I don't think they're willing to put out the money to do that because, again, they're trying to min-max making money here. And the people who do give a fuck about it, who are trying to make the game fun, are getting punished for it. And the people trying to play the game are getting punished for it. It's no wonder Jeff left. It's just – Yeah. What is the point? What is the point of making a fun game if it's not allowed to be fun? Yeah. It's just – It was just so – It just showed the absolute mess that was happening at the top, right?

[00:50:01] Because it's like you – They don't – Those characters don't just come – You know, exist into – It's whatever, man. It's just crazy. I got bad news for you. Farrah can't fly anymore. What the hell? Yeah. She basically has this jetpack thing where she can move real fast. She can kind of – She basically can't get up there and Justice Rains from above. Like, it's just – Bro. It's like she flies so low to the ground, I was like, I'm not playing this character ever again. You know what they did to Senyata?

[00:50:30] They fucking – Okay. So you know how it was great where it's like you see who's in the middle of battle. You put the Discord orb on like a tank or something. Everyone's going after them. Okay, I'm going to throw the Discord orb there. They did a fucking hidden cooldown thing where if you put the Discord orb on an enemy and then you take it off, they can't be re-discorded for like seven seconds or something like that. Okay. So you can't switch to Discord orb or – you kind of have to commit with the orb now, which is like that is expressly not fun. No, it isn't. That's the thing.

[00:51:01] Like you need – it's great to have it because, oh, one, what if you pick the wrong guy because you're in a panic of battle? Two, the dynamics of a battle should be changing at any given second. But I guess if you're reducing it to 5v5, there's only so much going on in the screen anyway. And they're just like, oh, well, we accidentally made Senyata too strong. Again, a self-imposed problem by you changing the entire structure of the game. It's like, yeah, fundamentally these 35 characters are going to play differently in a 5v5 setting. And these maps are going to play differently in a 5v5. You made this problem.

[00:51:31] It is an invented problem because you're trying to be like League. Why would anyone want to be like League? I've never played League, but obviously I know a lot. Yeah, I will never. I'm not a MOBA person anyway. It's not really my scene, so I probably never will. I guess if I were ever – I don't know. Smite 2 just is kind of in beta right now. I was kind of an eyeballing it even though I'm not a fan of the art design, but I don't know. Kind of eyeballing it. I'm never going to play League though ever in my life.

[00:52:00] It's this thing where it's like I can't believe that Arcane is even remotely good. The fact that it's quality, it's like tempting to play League. It's dog shit. Don't. Yeah, I will never. Okay, one more thing though that Overwatch 2 did that I don't think gets enough talk. And I think this goes back to the listening to esports or to Insular, as you said, was the removal of Assault, a.k.a. two-point capture.

[00:52:27] So Volskaya Industries, Hanamura, et cetera, like all gone. Horizon – I always call it Horizon Zero Dawn. What's it called on the moon? Horizon Lunar Colony, gone. Yeah. Paris, gone. You're taking content out of the game and calling it Overwatch 2? Yeah. Well, here's the thing. There's a lot of people who didn't like that mode. I love Assault, okay? Maybe it's just because I love Torbjorn or like Zubetra or people who could really trick themselves into a great, great defense there.

[00:52:56] Trick or treat as we always call it. I love Assault, man. Anubis. That shit was great. I don't know. Okay, so they like – I guess experts didn't like it or – I don't know what happened. I think that was strictly an Overwatch League move where they thought, okay, people get – you could have a really long defense and it's quote-unquote boring to watch or like people get steamrolled in a minute and a half and then it's over. It's like who cares? I don't know.

[00:53:23] Like do you not want the mode variety? They added another mode in Overwatch 2 at the launch called Push Mode where you escort this robot back and forth. That's a lot of fun, but that's not Assault. So, man, I just thought that was really shitty of them to remove an entire game mode with so many fucking maps that are iconic. Like, yeah, it's – I don't understand what the workaround for that is.

[00:53:47] Like one thing that Team Fortress 2 did, like you had your quick play option, but you also had like, oh, I want to select a specific mode. And that would affect your queue time, certainly. But it's this thing where it's like, oh, you know, I want to play Assault, then you just do what the Assault equivalent is. You don't want to do that, then you can just pick a different mode. And I'm sure that would mess things up a little bit in terms of matchmaking if some people are just like, I don't fuck with this mode. And then the people who do actively want to play this mode get punished and the wait times wait longer.

[00:54:15] So it's like I don't know what the solve for that been. I can't – again, I'm not an armchair dev. But it feels like the answer of just let's take this whole mode out of it for reasons – again, you made the sandwich. Why are you mad? Yeah, yeah. It's just the amount of self-imposed problems are just fucking crazy. You're just removing so much art basically from the game for no particular – here's the thing. All those maps are still in the game.

[00:54:45] Like if you want to make a custom game play Assault, you can. Also at some point, they also often add Assault to the arcade rotation. So you can go in there and play Assault. However, it's just not the same with 5v5. And the way the characters are now and the way they play now. So Metro used to have six little doodads she could put up. We used to call it the car wash. Remember that? She doesn't even have that anymore. She has a few of them and she has some different tricks. And like the teleporter, they made like part of her – they made it like a regular move, I think.

[00:55:15] But it just doesn't work the same. I don't know. Point is, with the game as currently constructed, I don't even want to play Assault anymore. So it doesn't matter if you add it to the arcade. So again, all the self-imposed problems just crashing down on themselves to create just something I don't want to play anymore. So around – You made a business. You made a business out of a game. Sure did.

[00:55:36] So like about a year ago, they introduced this thing or they were about to introduce this thing where it was like we already had a problem with like – because you know how it is. Someone's Reaper or they think they're Mr. Billy Badass and they just want to run off and play COD and play their own video game. They don't really want to play Overwatch. We – you know, that's often a problem in these kind of games, right? They enabled those people because they added some sort of passive heal to everybody.

[00:56:02] So now if you don't take damage for like five to ten seconds, I forget what it is, you'll just start regenerating health. So now it just enables those people to just do that anymore. And when I saw that was being introduced, I said to then, dude, I'm not – I don't even want to put myself through that. Let's just stop now. After the season, I'm done. Sorry. Yeah, it's not promoting team play. That's the whole existence of support is built around the idea that you need people to heal you. Yeah. That's how you play as a team. But fuck that, right?

[00:56:32] So yeah, that was basically the last draw. That was like almost a year ago now and I have not played Overwatch 2 since. I'm not going to lie though. I miss it just because like there are – like I said, the characters are still so good. The new maps we're making were stupendous. Yeah. I have. I have a bit here that doesn't work because this is an audio medium. But I brought something to this episode. Uh-oh. Show me. He's getting up. He has to get up and get it.

[00:57:01] I wonder how big this object is. Let's see. They used to make toys for Overwatch because the character designs were so fucking cool. And I collected these toys because I liked Overwatch. Overwatch. Um, I – as a Zenyatta main, not a lot of Zenyatta merch. But SH Fig Yards, which is a more boutique import brand made a Zenyatta figure. And my best friend got that for me for my birthday. I'm not a toy collector to be clear. Okay. But I liked Overwatch so much that I have these toys. Here is –

[00:57:31] Ooh. Yeah. This is – these are Hasbros. These are like the $20, $25 kind of toys. You buy it like a Target or whatever. They used to sell a shit ton of these. That's Azaria he's holding up with the beam gun. Lucio. Oh, wow. That's cool. It's like really cool. Junkrat. Oh, wow. With the – that is so fucking cool. Yeah, they come with stuff. And yeah, I got a Tracer, a Mercy, a Pharah, a Hanzo. I'm trying to see – a Genji, a McCree.

[00:57:59] They changed fucking McCree's name because it turns out the developer who he was named after was a sex pest. But I just always thought it was like a Mad Dog McCree reference in the first place. That's what I thought, right? But no, someone's name is legit Jesse McCree. Yeah, that's cool too, McCree. Yeah, there's a few here. And this one's really fucking cool. Look at the Bastion – not the Bastion, the Reinhardt's to scale. So he's much bigger, much wider than the other toys. That shit's crazy.

[00:58:30] He's very metallic, everybody, and just humongous. Yeah, he towers over the other ones. Lucio looks like a little pipsqueak. I guess he does next to Reinhardt anyway. So I think maybe the smallest character they made was Tracer, right? So here's Tracer and here's Reinhardt. Like literally almost double the height. You could fit at least three or four Tracers inside of Reinhardt. That is something. It's cool I collected these toys. And again, I'm not a toy collector usually, but I cared.

[00:58:59] I cared about Overwatch a lot. But I still do – like I have a Soldier 76 hoodie. I still wear that shit. You know what I mean? Like that'll never go away. I will still always – I will still always like Overwatch to a degree, you know? Like and that's the shitty part. There's so much good that is about – there's so much good in that game still and I just cannot play it. I cannot play it anymore. But you've seen recently, right?

[00:59:24] They're experimenting with all sorts of 6v6 modes and shit and like – which is just incredible, right? Just fucking incredible. Oh, yeah. It didn't work? Damn. Guess we're bringing it back. Imagine. Just bring it back. Now they're going to have the reverse problem of adding another character to the other side and now it's going to be imbalanced again. Again. Again. Like guys, anyway. Invent a problem. Solve the problem but make it worse than the original thing was.

[00:59:54] It's awesome. I think – yeah, I know. It's crazy. I think the last thing I really have to say about Overwatch at this point is that I actually did not expect the cancellation of the PvP as promised would be such a sticking point with the public. I feel like that's when the audience really super turned on it on Overwatch 2. And rightfully so, obviously. Here's the thing. Overwatch 2 does have PvE.

[01:00:23] It just wasn't what they said it was going to be. So you know how like, you know, events like – I don't know if you played the Junker – Junker – I almost said Junkerstein. Dr. Junkerstein's, you know, Halloween Nash or whatever it is. Yeah. Like the Horde mode or whatever. They have stuff like that but like very involved like long PvE missions. That does exist. It just wasn't what they said it was going to be with the character levels and like the whole bit. So it's funny that it does actually exist in the game, PvE in some form.

[01:00:52] But everyone's like, oh, they canceled PvE. Fuck this game. But it's like it's actually there. Just no one gives a fuck, which shows how much they fucked up, right? Yeah. Like they had those like hero missions where it's like play a classic Overwatch chapter kind of thing. And it's like Ana and Soldier and Reaper before we became Reaper. And they're just like taking out robots left and right. And it was great. And, you know, it was a little fun thing. And it wasn't the main game.

[01:01:17] But it was just nice to have a little side mode that like gave people lore breadcrumbs to keep people going and to play the next seasonal event. But they just never delivered on the idea of this thing having an actual story. And I know that like that's the thing with hero shooters is like it doesn't make sense for you to have like heroes and villains playing against other heroes and villains because of team comp or whatever. But that's, again, a self-imposed problem. The game doesn't have to your matches don't have to be canon.

[01:01:44] It's just like if you introduce all these characters in this world that they're all like and you would just expect there to be a narrative based on anything. But, yeah, but you can also make something out of that because it doesn't quote unquote make sense. If Magneto's on your team, he just talks shit to everybody whether he's on your team or not. Like that's the fun part, right? He's a villain, but he's also like also how does Magneto know everybody? Is he just that nosy or just like he talks shit to everybody? He has like something very specific to say.

[01:02:14] If you are a hater, if you're a hater, you have knowledge. If you do your research, if you're a hater, you do not hate randomly or indiscriminately. If you're a good hater, you know what you're talking about. I aspire to be that level of hater. Magneto is just the biggest hater of all time and it's so good. But, yeah, I guess maybe that's it. Maybe we should start talking Marvel rivals unless you if you have any parting shot to Overwatch here before we move on.

[01:02:41] No, I mean like showing you my Hasbro toy collection of this shit to like show that I was invested in this series beyond playing it every couple hours in a week. Yeah, no, this shit sucks. It's gone. I can't play it anymore. I have a disc in a case that say Overwatch on it. If I put that disc in on my PlayStation 5, Overwatch doesn't play. Whatever it was I played eight years ago now isn't that. I do wonder what happens.

[01:03:08] I wonder if it just installs Overwatch 2 or like, yeah, I don't know. That would be that'd be interesting experiment sometime if you could bear to have that on your solid state drive there. All right. Yeah. Sorry. Farewell, Overwatch. Maybe someday. I don't know. In the future, you can get your shit together. I'm not completely giving up on you. But as of right now, we are not friends. We are not enemies. We are nothing. Rest in Moira piss. You're coasting with.

[01:04:07] Let's talk Marvel Rivals because I feel like this game, I'm sure it had been known that like a Marvel hero shooter has been being made for a while. But I didn't really know about it until I think like Summer Games Fest last year. So I don't know. I feel like I found out about it quote unquote late. Do you remember when this was like unveiled? Do you remember being nonplussed or oh, that might be cool or just whatever?

[01:04:35] It was like the yeah, it was like a March. It was like was it like a state of play or something like that? It was something like that, right? It was announced last year among a bunch of other stuff. So it's just kind of like surrounded by so many other things. And my relationship with Marvel games is like these could be great. These can be dog shit. There's there's there's two things right now. When that was announced, I had just started kicking Marvel Snap, which was also bad during a TikTok ban because apparently the same company that owned TikTok owned Marvel Snap.

[01:05:06] But it was just this thing where it's like this could be good. This could be bad. I don't know what the economy is on hero shooters right now, like what the general public thinks about that. But I didn't think anything of it when it was originally announced, except like that exists and it appears to have a beta. Yeah, that was which I did not get into and I was sad. So I only got to play at launch here. But yeah, I remember the lead up to it being very interesting. You know, I don't often just watch stuff on Twitch.

[01:05:34] I'm not much of a like gameplay watcher guy. I watch people. I watch a there's a couple of people I like to watch. It's not necessarily to watch and play games. They're just fun personalities. Right. But I did there was a Marvel during the first beta. There was a Marvel Rivals channel that was up and streaming it. I was like, I knew right away. And like, I watched it for like seriously 30 seconds. I'm like, oh, they did their homework. They know exactly what they're doing. They learned all the right lessons from Overwatch.

[01:06:03] This is going to be good. You know, it's kind of like the thing where like, you know, we're so far in fighting games now where it's like you look at a new fighting game. It's like, okay, that's going to be the shit that that's going to that's going to hit. It's kind of the same thing with this at this point where it's just like, okay, you know, this is going to be good. Did you have a moment like that? Or did you just play the game? It's like, oh, did you have like a revelation? It's like, okay, this is this is it for me. This is going to be good. I think it was when it came out and the word of mouth was like, this is good.

[01:06:32] Question mark was like the thing that's everybody was surprised at how good it was. And it was literally free to play. So there was no barrier to entry. So I just downloaded the game and I was like, sure enough, this this game kicks ass. Sure does, man. It's just oh, okay. So I loved the shit talking of sorts that they did.

[01:06:54] I knew they were really going for something and they were confident when they had that one trailer last summer where it ended with. And I put the image in my notes because I wanted to read it exactly. It said all heroes unlocked and free to play at launch and beyond. Oh, baby shots fired. Because that's one thing I didn't mention about Overwatch 2. They tried to lock the fucking heroes in the battle pass, which is obviously a fucking terrible idea for reasons.

[01:07:23] I don't even think we need to get into. Yeah. So, whoo, I obviously we didn't. That's such a bad idea. Anyway, the fact that Marvel rivals had that image. It's almost like the everyone is here shot from like smash ultimate, right? Yeah. It's like, okay, we're dropping our dick on the table. This is what this is what we're going to do. Absolute shots fired at Overwatch 2 and they they met the hype.

[01:07:47] I think Marvel rivals is not perfect by any means, but I'm having so much fun. Remember having fun with Overwatch? Remember that? You turn on a game and then you press the play button and then you're instantly queued into a match. And that is just enough to have like your dick flopped onto the table. I open the game and I press play and a game starts. Awesome. I haven't been able to do that at Overwatch since 2019 before the pandemic.

[01:08:18] Yeah. Like, oh my God, the matchmaking you. I press the square button at sometimes before I am done depressing the square button. I'm in a match. It is practically instant sometimes. What are they doing? What kind of sorcery is this? I don't know. They, they, they, whatever it is, like they just made like, there was probably like some internal meeting where it's like, what did Overwatch do wrong? Let's pull all our resources around those first and then sort of build a game around that. So it's like, all right, well, we want to have six be six.

[01:08:45] We want to, we want to make sure that like we have multiple, like, what was it? I think they already have like 37 characters in this game playable. Yeah. 35. Yeah. Something like that. Which is only a few less than what Overwatch has now. Right. So like they have 37 playable characters announced and it's a good variety of characters and it's, they don't have role queue. You press square, you get into a match instantly. It's like the stuff that they sort of built around. Like we know what went wrong with Overwatch.

[01:09:15] Let's make the Overwatch people want with characters that it's already familiar with them. It's a brilliant concept that like makes money and gets people like interested in a greater Marvel universe. And it's like, I remember people when like the Concord thing went down, people were like, oh, hero shooters are just dead genre. Right. Like it's over. Like the party is over. Right. No, it's not. It's just, it's not, you got to give, you got to give people an interesting art style. You got to give people like characters, an IP they recognize and they will flock to it, especially if it's fucking free.

[01:09:45] Yes, exactly. I love this game. I played it for a month. I haven't put money into it yet. I've, I've done the battle passes. Okay. And I, I haven't, I have a few premium skins because you know how PlayStation has that PlayStation stars program. Here are your points you can spend on whatever. Right. But to get like an actual game cut, like to get stellar blade costs like hella points or something. It's like that nobody will overreach. Well, I guess you can, but it takes forever.

[01:10:10] Anyway, unbeknownst to me, I had like 21,000 PlayStation stars points, but in the recurrent thing, they have like Marvel rivals premium currency you can turn into. So I turned my, I turned my PlayStation stars points into like 8,000 premium Marvel rivals bucks or something. So basically for free, quote unquote free, I've gotten like some skins. That's the only reason why I have them because I got to look that up to see if I have that.

[01:10:36] If I have some Kohl's cash, I can turn into the Ava skin for Penny Parker. Then you got an old Starbucks card with like 17 cents on it left or something. Maybe you can turn it to some, uh, to turn some premium currency. Yeah. They did their homework and it's so impressive. Right. And I really, God, overwatch two got rid of so many things. Remember at the end of the game where you used to vote on the cards. Yeah. They don't have that in overwatch two. They like Marvel rivals brought back the thumbs up.

[01:11:06] You can thumbs up the people you want or the people you don't. Oh, you're a shitty tank. Fuck you. You're cool. You're cool. Right? Like you can do that. It's, it's fun. Everybody fun. I promise. It's okay to do in a hero shooter. You can self thumb yourself. It's great. I feel like it's like liking your own tweet, but I mean, like I do it anyway, but I don't like, I will do it to myself because I'm going down the row anyway. But like, if I, I especially do it to myself when somebody did a bad job and I want to like

[01:11:35] thumb up everybody except that person. Oh, I definitely do that. If someone was a crappy venom, just swing it all over the place. I'm like, dog, you're not getting my everyone. But you. Yeah. No, thank you. I have a soft rule for these games. It's always DPS's fault. If you just like go in with that mindset, if you go in with that mindset that it's always the damage people's fault because they have the worst attitude, then you will be a happier person. I will side with a shitty tank over my thing. I don't get mean.

[01:12:03] I don't like participate in like rando chat very much. I don't accept, except when somebody is trying to get shitty. And then I just like say, okay, eight kills, like eight, eight deaths, two kills. Yeah. That's like, that's the, yeah, that's the, it's funny that they always think that's the reason why they're dying over and over is because we're not healing them. That's the reason why not that they're trying to one V six, the enemy team on the point. Like it's, it's our fault. Right.

[01:12:30] Or it's like sometimes like bad, like people, like three different dumb asses are screaming for healing. Bitch. I'm Zenyatta. I have one, a word, but it heals really slowly. I really don't know what to tell you. You're just going to have to deal, but heal beggars do not get healed. That's my rule. I don't care if we lose. I don't care if it's considered throwing. I do not care. I do not care enough about this kind of game to care whether I win or lose. I just want to have fun. So if me not healing you means we're losing, that's fine.

[01:13:00] Stop begging. Right. Like I do play comp. I do play comp and I can understand getting agitated that you have a one in a few matches, but at some point you really have to look at the common denominator. It's this thing where like, if you want to hard lock a character, like insta lock a character as soon as a match starts, then you have to be considerate of the composition of the thing. Uh, it is again, hilarious to go into competition and then see four people pick dualist and then like one Vanguard and then one begrudging support.

[01:13:30] And it's like, all right, we're, we're getting fucked, but at least I want to see how this plays out. Uh, and then like somebody else will like switch to whatever. Right. I never insta lock dualist. I just like wait and see. Cause I'm not a, I don't really have a main for a dualist anyway. I have my, I have like everybody else would have figured out. But I, I don't know if I do. I really like using punisher. I guess we'll get to characters in a bit, but like, yeah, if, if, if I go into a match and four people insta lock dualist, I'm picking dualist too. Fuck it. I don't care.

[01:14:00] We're going to lose anyway. I might as well just, I can shoot a gun. We can do that. And then halfway through the match, we start getting our ass kicked and then it's like, Oh, now we have venom. Okay. Now we have mantis. Right. Well, you guys could have done that from the beginning. Right. Not put us at this giant handicap, but Hey, what do I know? Right. But it's just, it's especially funny when it's defense and it's like, all right, let's, let's see how this happens. 250 HP, 250 HP, 250 HP. Wonderful. I'm excited. As fuck.

[01:14:27] It's like, yeah, but yeah, but you know, it's funny as much as we're bitching about this, I will, I will gladly take that over roll over roll lock. Oh, absolutely. 100%. No, that's the thing. Like minor annoyance that can at least produce a funny result or, uh, just this, again, there's this preemptive policing. It's this thing where it's like, I would rather be mad at a random person than know who to be mad at.

[01:14:57] If that, like, I know like, Hey, developers of, you know, Activision Blizzard making my, Overwatch, why'd you fuck the game? Why'd you fuck every game I have to play ever instead of like maybe the one in one, it to one in two at most where this might start. And then it sort of resolves itself as the match progresses. Cause that's the thing. Like people are always like, there was this thing going around during season zero of Marvel rivals where it's like, you guys ever notice that? Like you get really far in a push and then suddenly at the end, the other team locks in and wins.

[01:15:26] Do you think that the game is like cheating in some way to help the people have an, the, the first thing is like, all right, listen, if you're doing payload and you're pushing the further you push, the more inherent advantage the other team's going to have because they're closer to the spawn, the payload's closer to the spawn. That's just how that works. Second of all, people are like sort of realizing, Hey, my stubborn strategy isn't working. Maybe I should actually participate in a team now so we can actually win. Yep. That's just normal human behavior against like the natural balance of the game.

[01:15:54] But like some people were like adamant that the game was like making like some sort of, um, auto aim thing happen as somebody was losing too hard. It's just people just aren't that smart. And they realize, Oh, something bad. Yeah. People. Oh, something, something bad is happening to me. Maybe I should change my behavior. Not maybe, you know, maybe I should prevent bad things from happening to me. That's not human nature at all. God forbid. No, God hates me. That's the problem. Um, what did you think of the third person viewpoint?

[01:16:23] Cause overwatch is a first person game. Marvel rivals is a third person viewpoint game. And I thought that would be strange for me. Honestly, it hasn't mattered at all. I think, I think it's been perfectly fine. I, I just haven't cared. I've encountered people that feel strongly about this. I don't mind. I think it's actually great because I think it is a, I don't think it's great from like an actual design perspective. I don't really see a pro or con for it in terms of like how I'm actually interacting with the game, but in terms of the marketing of the thing, the actual, like one, you're

[01:16:53] paying for skins, right? You're paying for skins. You want to actually look at the skin that that's value added to like these, these investments that you're making into a battle pass or like this, this premium dollar thing, whatever the premium currency, whatever that is, that's people like in a free to play game, like putting the actual like value of your dollar on the screen. Great. The other thing it's like, it's just great for branding for Marvel in general, people who want to look at these characters and just take in their designs and like have like

[01:17:23] this instant recognition thing. I see the appeal again from an actual gameplay perspective. I, I feel neutral about it, but I see the vision and I think it's a smart vision. I think so as well. And I, I, I do get that with the, like, Oh, you get to really see the skin the way instead of just, you know, my play of the game. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. Marvel rivals does not have play of the game. Like Overwatch, it has MVP, whatever the algorithm, whatever they designed it to do

[01:17:49] determines who was the, who was the best in that match. And the other team gets an SVP second valuable player. Right. And I think that's really great because obviously before play of the game would just go to always go to damage. Oh, soldier 76 did scrub visor. We always call it a scrub visor. He did scrub visor again and just killed everybody. Okay, cool. Right. And then it's just like, okay, that's always it. I'm never going to get, we're never going to get MVP as a Yada for doing a baller experience tranquility.

[01:18:19] Right. We're never going to get that. That saved the game. We're going to, so it's just, I really do like play of the game because, or MVP rather, because it really takes into, Oh, this Magneto blocked like 30 K damage. I feel like we should factor that in. Right. I just feel like it's fun and it makes for, for a casual audience. It makes it feel like, Oh, no matter what I play, if I heal really good, I will get recognized for it. I think that feels really good. I think it does too.

[01:18:48] Um, and I think there's probably a sort of like, you don't have to sit through a movie before the next match happens aspect to it too. Like you can hang around and then watch the highlight of whoever you can watch your own highlight. You can watch somebody else's highlight just to see like, what was my best moment in the game, uh, algorithmically or whatever, but that's totally optional. And I think that's cool because like, it lets you look at people's highlights and like, you can learn like, what is the appeal of this character and how do they play it? And that's nice too.

[01:19:17] But you also don't have to like watch a 15 second clip if you don't want to. Yeah. That's so, that's so weird that like, I've seen some people complain about like, Oh, it takes. So Marvel rivals not quote unquote loads too much because we're in the PS5 era and nothing's actually loading. They're showing us what they want to show, but it's just like the defeat screen. And then the MVP screen, it's like, bro, do you remember the entire movie of play of the game? Like that's much longer, you know, Jesus Christ.

[01:19:45] It's just like, Oh God, I look, I used to love my play of the games. It's like Torbjorn where I just die, but I already altered him. My level three turret would just kill like four people, but I'm just on the ground dead. And that's like my play of the game. Right. You're just like Peter Griffin death pose on the ground. But like, that doesn't change the fact that that's right. Yeah. That's why I'm really funny. I'm a Penny Parker, man. I, my main Penny, that's my thing. And like Penny reminds me of like the engineer days or the, the Torbjorn days, not because,

[01:20:14] uh, she has a turret. There's nothing. There's no one-to-one for that in this game, despite how many characters are just sort of like, let's just put Reaper and soldier 76 into this character or put Zenyatta into this character. There's definitely that. But, um, it reminds me of that because like, you can just put down mines and then the mines and the webs that you put down as Penny will live after you have been killed. Your nest, the thing that like sends out the little tiny, uh, spider creatures that kill people.

[01:20:42] If they step into the nest that gets destroyed, but your mines will stay and your webs will stay. And if you, if you put the mines in the webs, the mines are hidden. So people just walk right over them and die. And then I'm just in a small point seeing like double kill. And I'm like, I'm, I'm not there. I'm not there. That's great. Oh man. You know what I used to love to do is I knew I had a mine out as junk rat and it would stay there after death. So you'd be coming back to the point. It's like, I'll just detonate it now. KO.

[01:21:11] You're not even, you're not even remotely close to wherever that was. It's just like, okay, I'm just taking a chance that someone might be near it. You just like, leave it like right before you die spitefully on the payload. And then like, I'm just going to, okay, somebody died. Just really fun stuff like that. Yeah. Fun. Everybody. It's the Marvel rivals. So much fun.

[01:21:43] Yeah. So you said you like Penny Parker. Who else do you like? I really like Mantis because Mantis reminds me a lot of Zenyatta in terms of like, she hits hard, but she also heals. Uh, and the way that that heal is dispersed is, um, you have like four, uh, leaps on your, on your UI that are like, sort of like your reloads for healing or giving somebody a sort of inspirational boost. And when that happens, like you heal somebody and there's like a little timer that goes across

[01:22:13] the UI that says like, this person will have like healing until this meter runs out. And then you could add that again, or you could just dedicate those resources to somebody else who needs healing. And it's like a soft Zenyatta. It's like a Zenyatta that you constantly have to monitor versus like, you just put the orb on somebody and then they go run around and like that person keeps the orb until you assign it to somebody else. So Mantis just reminds me of Zenyatta a lot. So I've been playing Mantis a lot and I've been playing Penny a lot because Penny's fucking fun. I've not tried Penny yet at all.

[01:22:42] So, uh, yeah, that's the thing. It's, I saw the four star difficulty, uh, during season zero and I was like, oh, so not a lot of people probably get her down yet. And I just played it on the lark and it's like, oh, she's fun. Cause of the minds that she sets off and like the spiderness, this game basically plays itself if you know how to play Parker. Um, and I got to platinum in season zero competitive, just mainly playing Penny Parker during the matches. That's, that's awesome. Yeah.

[01:23:10] I didn't, I didn't try any, I think at the very end of season zero, I tried like a little bit just to see what was just to see what was going on. But, uh, yeah, I haven't tried much comp yet. I definitely will get there, but yeah, that's cool that you got so high with her. Um, I've been trying, um, Magneto God, I love Magneto as a someone who just, I mean, honestly, my heart of hearts, I think I just like tanking the most. I think I always have even an overwatch. Really? Um, yeah, I, I just, I like to push.

[01:23:38] I like to push the pace and I like to direct the action around me. I don't even know if that's the right term, but like, especially in pushing a payload, I'm there, baby. I'm not going to be off fucking around. I'm not going to be chasing around like a star Lord or something. I'm there. I'm pushing that payload. You heal me. I will stay there. I'm not going to be back. I fucking hate coward tanks who just back up forever from the payload. That's coming right at them. Hey, we're supposed to stop the payload. Maybe you can move up just a few feet or stand your ground.

[01:24:08] You coward. No, I, I will. I will stand my ground. Yeah. You have like 600, 700 HP for a reason. And you definitely have some, uh, cool down. I thing that you can use. That'll give you another, another few hundred. Like just get in there. Just get in there. Just get in there. Oh God. I love that when I, when we're, um, pushing a payload and the enemy team just keeps backing up, backing up. I'm like, yeah, we were winning. We won. We're there. They're, they're never going to come here. Cowards. Um, so I, I hate that shit. So I do not play that way.

[01:24:38] I love to tank and Magneto gives me all the tools in the world. I think maybe this is a good point to talk about, like the way these characters are. I don't know why I hate saying the word kit, but the way these characters are kitted is very interesting. And then he has a shield that you can put up and almost as like, it's like a shield. Like, um, I don't know. Did you still play overwatch when, uh, Sigma was there? Sigma, the guy was the last guy who was playing.

[01:25:07] Magneto is fun because he has the shield. Right. But then he also has the bubble. He has a Zarya bubble that you could put on yourself or put on someone else. Yeah. So he has both those things. And then he has like a shot. He has like another shot that's like builds up over time. That's like a more powerful shot. It's crazy. He has like so many different things. I think that's the most impressive thing about Marvel rivals. It's like, they're not afraid to overwhelm you because it doesn't feel overwhelming. It's like Overwatch would never give you that many things.

[01:25:37] Yeah. It's really impressive. And that's why I think Magneto and other characters, I think are impressive that way. What if you, what if you thought about that? Like characters have so many tools compared to Overwatch. It's interesting because I think it makes for different styles of play, uh, for different team compositions, right? Which is a complimentary thing with the fact that, uh, that the central, uh, X factor, I guess you can call it, uh, this game offers for the two, the hero shooter thing is complimentary compositions.

[01:26:05] So let's say you're a Magneto main, somebody picks Scarlet, which suddenly you have a triangle, uh, sword that you can use that gets kitted out with like Scarlet, which is like, uh, Scarlet, which powers that are vaguely nebulous. Um, if you are a Penny Parker main like me and somebody picks venom, you have a triangle attack that gives you temporary invincibility where you let venom stuff come out of you. And it's like, Oh, that thing. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I've seen that.

[01:26:33] That's a venom buff that Spider-Man and Penny get because they're both spider people and venom gives that to them. And there's also, and in return you give venom an extra 150 HP so that like, yeah, it's great. It's a great thing. It doesn't necessarily change the tide of battle. Uh, before today, um, we did a competitive match where we had a really shitty, um, defense and it's like, okay, we're going to lock in for attack. Everybody's going to pick a complimentary person and that's going to help. And then we fucking ate it. We ate it.

[01:27:01] It doesn't necessarily make the match good, but it is a thing where if you know what you're doing and another person knows what they're doing, suddenly you are just complimenting one another in a really fun way. Yeah. The, the, the team up attacks are, are just so much fun. Overwatch would never, man. They would, they would just, that is just even, even at their most fun, they would just be like, nah, we, we can't do that. That's unbalanced. What happens if the game, what if their characters are too strong? The answer is who gives a fuck? Yeah.

[01:27:31] Who cares? Who actually cares? Like Marvel versus Capcom two is one of the most broken fighters of all time. It's also one of the most fun fighters of all time. Competitive balance doesn't always matter. People will play that game to the end of time. And if Marvel rivals is still fun, they will play this game to the end of time too. Yeah. I think what happens is, um, uh, we talked about this multiple times from different angles, but Overwatch's fundamental problem was like it was making load bearing changes to appease

[01:28:00] a very small portion of the population that was sure the most dedicated and the ones that were, you know, the industry around like competitive and everything like that. But that affected its long-term legacy by people just sort of bouncing out of the game and you're losing just people who play the game because they like the characters and just the general gameplay, the quick players, the people who log in only press quick play. That's all they want to do. That's probably the vast majority of people who play any hero shooter. They're not in it for the glory.

[01:28:29] They're there because like their friends are playing it and they want to play something too. And it's easy. And so far, and it's only been a month. I feel like it took Overwatch three years for it to like kill for me to lose interest. Um, so far they seem to be very committed to fun based on how many things just from the start are a reaction to the negative feedback that players gave to Overwatch. Um, and not like from a competitive standpoint, but just in like an actual second to second minute to minute gameplay experience.

[01:28:59] It's, I haven't encountered anything like that has been so busted that there hasn't been a counter to it. All like the memes about like, Oh, I fucking hate Jeff. Jeff can die. I, as a Penny Parker main, I have like a million counters to Jeff. Yeah. It's great. And it's just, it's just one thing that he can do. You know, it's not like he can do that all the time. And it's just like, I don't know. For those who don't know what we're talking about, if they haven't played Marvel rivals, Jeff has Jeff's ultimate can basically swallow everybody friend and foe.

[01:29:29] So you just spit out your teammates back onto the point and then go over the cliff and just spit at the enemies over the cliff. So they instantly die or some dumb Jeff means just suicide vomit and just take them all and take everyone in the subject and everyone pops out, which is a weird animation, but you know. Yeah. But it's funny. But if it is me as a guy who has a spider nest out, it's just like, Oh, there goes Jeff with half his, with half my team, uh, right through my spider up. Okay. Jeff died. Nope. Nothing happened. Great. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:29:59] The answer is like, you need a counter. You have 30 other characters. Yeah. And that's, that's the thing, right? This, this character, I can't defeat it. Well, it's like, do you only pick one character who gets defeated by this? That's what happens. It'd be like, cause I used to play a lot of Farrah too, probably besides Torbjorn. I play a lot of Farrah and God, when soldier 76 did all I'm done. There's nothing I can do about it. It's over. That is the hardest. That's like one of the hardest counters in the game. Uh, uh, Cassie, you can just shoot fair. Out of the sky. Look at, he split.

[01:30:28] It's just like, you know, but yeah, that's, that's the way it goes. Yeah. If you play with the team and play for the team, you're not going to find yourself compromised to, uh, because of, uh, one specific thing. Like if you're with your tank, uh, they could put a shield up and then you aren't necessarily cooked. It's just like, you gotta, you gotta just know your area and you have to know the player besides the character you're playing. If you only play one character, you're not really going to get a feel for how the other ones actually play. You're just reacting to a set of movements that you don't know how to counter.

[01:30:58] Marvel rivals does have some stuff that feels kind of, you know, like the, like, you know, the Jeff alter or whatever, but like, does anyone remember how legitimately fucked up overwatch was like the first six weeks? That shit was crazy. McCree was an absolute menace. You could character stack. You could have like six bastions or something. Like it was, it was wild. I forgot you could character stack. Jesus. Yeah. They got rid of that real fast. Well, cause like, here's the thing.

[01:31:23] We didn't win attacking Anubis for like weeks after the game came out because like they would have two Torbjorns, two bastions, a Reinhardt blocking one, a Mercy flitting around healing everybody. And then then res them when we actually kill a couple of them. It was insane. It was impossible to break through, but that was overwatch. It was so much fun trying to crack that shit. It wasn't again. I think if you're the type who just literally cares about winning or losing, maybe, I don't

[01:31:51] know, maybe video games aren't for you, but I don't know, man. Like I, it was, it was a lot of fun to, to us at that time, but yeah, man, let's not pretend that like, yeah, does do some of the healing ultimates feel a little like Luna snow is like experience tranquility times a thousand, right? Like, yeah. Does it feel a little oppressive sometimes? Sure. Yeah. I would love it. I love it.

[01:32:18] If the, you know, the roads less traveled are helpful and useful and you know, it's the thing where it's like, I almost feel like people are that if there's anything like this game support, like everybody has healing and they also have like some attack that can actually do damage. Like the whole thing with mercy, mercy was a healer and a very specialized healer that was very useful. And you know, it was like you're, you're playing for the team with that here. This is probably not the best thing to do if you're trying to make people play as a team,

[01:32:47] but there's a lot of heavy hitters in the support, like Jeff, not necessarily like his old is like the main thing going for him. But like I said, Mantis can, Mantis literally has a circle button thing that can give her an offensive boost in addition to the, you know, inspirational boosts and healing that you can do for others. It's nuts. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's a lot of fun. Adam Warlock can dish out some damage if you, if you know what you're doing too. He has like this Zenyatta charge where you can charge up like five shots and kind of, I never really did that much with Zenyatta.

[01:33:16] Were you a big charge shot care? I didn't really do, I did it very rarely. I did it pretty often. It was, it was just fun to do because I loved the animation for it. Whether or not it hit was secondary to the fact that I just loved the animation. It was great. Yeah. But yeah, I didn't do it too much. Yeah. Cloak and dagger. If you see cloak and dagger, that's like the most annoying person to deal with because not only are they doing massive heals, but they're very avoidant and the cloak part can fucking hurt. Yeah. Oh God. Yeah.

[01:33:46] Oh God. The alt is like crazy. Deny you the whole, like God, if you're playing control or what's it called in this game? Domination. Forget about it. They can cover almost the whole thing. It's kind of, it's kind of crazy depending on the zone, of course. But yeah, it's, it's, it's really powerful. Again, I'd rather, I'm glad that healers have great alts like that. You know, it's, it's fun. And it's this thing where people are also talking about how certain alts are much better than others.

[01:34:12] Like people are like joking that some alts are useless or they're not scary. Like the fear Magneto one. It's a thing where I, I feared Magneto a little bit in season zero, but lately, especially now that I know how it works, it's like, that's not a big deal, but I have noticed like, oh shit. If you actually shoot around Magneto, then like he absorbs your bullets and shit. That's uh oh. Yeah. Um, but like now that people got to feel like some of the more dangerous characters feel less intimidating.

[01:34:40] And the other thing is you see the value of a more passive old that doesn't wipe the team, but is useful in bagging assists or just causing some inconvenience to the other team if they're dominating. That's really it. Yeah. The Magneto one is just kind of a scare tactic. I kind of think of it like fear is a justice reigns from above. Like you weren't always killing people with that. It was more the threat, right? That was, that was the point where it's like, you're making them scatter. That was the thing about the junk rat, uh, the rip tire.

[01:35:09] You're just making them scatter. He might only kill like one person with it. Right. But it's about, okay, we're going to, we're going to disperse them from the payload or whatever, because if y'all stand there, everyone's going to die. Right. Yeah. Um, that's also why I like using storm a lot. Storm is not, I would say probably not that good of a character. Like all things considered, if you're going to pick a, if you're going to pick a flying character, I think Iron Man's a much safer bet. They did buffer in season one big time. Yeah. I'm really glad they did because she needed the help, but her alt is crazy.

[01:35:38] The, the, the, the war, the whirlwind is nuts. I love that thing. Yeah. I saw like the pick rate for her in season zero was like 1%. Like she was one of the bottom picked characters. And now I see her really often and I'm fucking scared of her again as somebody who's like leaving landmines on the ground. Like I don't have the best counters to aerial characters besides like shooting at them a little bit. Um, but, um, yeah, I like the variety here and I like the idea that like, I can't stick

[01:36:04] with the same character, the whole match necessarily, because I want to, uh, fight back one really annoying guy or maybe make them, you know, counter and then I can go back to the other guy. And then it, I like this. I like the idea that like, I can just like spite, go after a person that is doing really well on the other team. If I just pay attention versus like the role queue problem where like all matches kind of homogenized because there's an expect, there's an expected build there.

[01:36:42] Another, another hidden problem. Maybe this is just me with the role queue thing. Cause you were talking about taking a slot or cause you're like, I'm not that good with Sombra. I don't really want to take that away. Like if someone's actually good with Sombra, I don't want to pick her. That was kind of the problem. Whenever I actually rarely did play damage and overwatch too, I felt like I couldn't pick Hanzo anymore or pick like someone I wasn't that great with, but I was real that I thought was really fun. I felt like I couldn't pick Cassidy or something.

[01:37:10] Cause it's just like, this matters so much now that I don't feel like I can quote unquote waste a pick on this. I better pick Torbjorn or I better pick someone I'm actually good with Sojourn. Right. Because it's like, you know. And then you think that, and then you have to be put into a tank or support, which is another thing where it's like, you feel like you carry that loss on your back a little bit because you took like the easy thing to get into the game more quickly. And then y'all lost.

[01:37:37] And it's like, damn, I feel like shit because I didn't carry my team to victory. And it's just this thing where it's like, it doesn't feel good to play that. It doesn't feel good to be stuck in a certain place because you committed to something before you even knew what the vibe was like. Yeah. And you don't know what the other people are good with. Maybe they're just picking support to get some daily out of the way or whatever. Like, I don't know. Right. But like, yeah, but like, that's the thing, right? Especially if I'm playing with friends.

[01:38:05] Like I know people who don't really play, oh, I need to block, you know, 30 K damage is better if I do that. It's like Dr. Strange. Dr. Strange is creeping up there, by the way, he's also my like, but probably my second favorite tank. I got it. Like tanking is everyone in this game venom. I still haven't tried Penny, not Penny Parker. Jesus Christ, not Thor. God, I'm going through all the going through all the America. Oh, Captain America is fun, too. Yeah. All of them are fun.

[01:38:34] God, I love shooting bad Penny Parkers, by the way. They're so when a Penny Parker is bad, they're so bad. They're fucking awful. You just lay waste to them so fast. Every time I see the nest, it's like, I'm not supposed to see the nest as a Penny Parker mate. I know I'm not supposed to see that. Why is it out? Bam, bam, bam, bam. And it's like, you weren't supposed to do that. And it's like, yeah, you weren't supposed to leave it out there. Yeah, it's like, and they're just like, oh, now what do I do? I guess I'll amble over here. I guess I'm dead. Yeah.

[01:39:02] Bad Penny Parkers are hilarious. Going back to what I was talking about with characters being ultra kitted, I guess. I just think it's interesting. Again, with the way this game did its homework, is that like, have you have you tried Hawkeye at all? And I don't know if that's your kind of character or. I haven't messed with him much. I knew that like he was super overpowered and like they fixed him a little bit to not kill people from right across the map. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:39:27] But he just has so many more tools compared to, I guess, his counterpart Hanzo, right? From Overwatch. He has like a scatter arrow and he has like the regular arrow that you can switch between at any time. You have a sword. So if someone gets up on your face, you actually have some recourse. You just kind of cut them real quick. It doesn't do super big damage, but it's something, right? It takes a big chunk out of them. And you have like a big jump. They actually, they took that from Hanzo directly. They eventually gave Hanzo like a giant double jump.

[01:39:57] Hawkeye has that too. And it's like they're learning, right? Star Lord is essentially Tracer 76. Like he is Tracer, but who can fly? But his ult is Soldier 76. So it's really, it's a really fun agglimation of the two. And then Punisher is obviously more Soldier 76, but he also has a shotgun you can switch to at any time. You also have the Bastion turret for some reason that you can just pull out.

[01:40:24] The way, I guess what I'm trying to say is I love that they gave characters so many things. I can't imagine playing Overwatch now and going back to like basic bitch Hanzo and being like, wow, I can just, I can just shoot these arrows, huh? And that's kind of it. Yeah. I play as Winter Soldier and Winter Soldier's ult is like Doomfist and he has a uppercut a thing that's like Doomfist. But also he has a grapple arm that he pulls people in and he can stun people too. He has a huge kit.

[01:40:51] It's nuts how much you can do with one character and play them completely differently. Like the fact that he has a gun and a bunch of melee attacks is crazy. Yeah. It's Winter Soldier. Being able to switch between an assault rifle and a shotgun for his just left mouse fire is crazy. It's yeah, it's, it's just so much fun. Yeah. It's like, oh, you know, Venom's up on the point. It's shotgun time, right? As, as Punisher, it's just like, oh, I need to just pelt the crowd of bullets. Do that too. And then with the, the, the, the turret thing, right?

[01:41:20] God, it's just so much fun, man. I, I really enjoy playing every character I played has been fun. I just stayed away from the ones that I know I am not going to like, I don't play Widowmaker. I'm never going to play Black Widow, right? Like I just, I'm, I'm not going to do it. But it's funny though, in this game, I don't know if you know, I don't know if you've ever played against a whole bunch of Black Widows. It seemed like Widowmaker was a fairly popular pick in Overwatch. I don't see Black Widow hardly. I rarely see Black Widow.

[01:41:49] And I was like, I, I don't know. There was like a Black Widow person in one of my matches recently and she cleared house like 60 kills and I imagine it's crazy. And it's like, I didn't, I guess like the one Widowmaker player out there knows ball or knows something that we don't. But the things that I'm like struggling against are, you know, magic and lots of people pick magic. So it's just kind of this thing where it's like, God, here's another fucking magic.

[01:42:19] I hope our, the magic on our team's good and the magic on my team's never good. It's always the other magic that feels like they're doing more. Occasionally I will have a good magic on my team. God, that's a character I would like to learn. You know, actually maybe that's a good question or the characters that you are ass with that you would love. Like, I would love to be a great Black Panther. He's so much fun, but I'm so bad with them. It's like the Genji thing where I've not, I worked myself into being an okay Genji, right? But like, I was never a great Genji. I would love to be a great Black Panther. He's so much fun.

[01:42:49] A good Thor is scary. I would love to figure out Thor. Yeah. Cause he has like this good, like offensive. He's like an off tank. He can do both if he can hit really hard and he can just be relentless. And it's scary when one actually knows what they're doing instead of just hanging out in the middle lane, like wondering what to do. Um, yeah. Uh, Hela is someone I'm trying to get a hang of too, because her kit's really awesome. And it reminds me a lot of Zenyatta in some weird ways too. Yeah, kind of. Yeah.

[01:43:16] I'm not very good with like the, the multi shot where she kind of focuses in those like five, like, I don't, I'm not really sure how to aim that yet. Other than that. Yeah. She, she is fun. Yeah. I really, uh, Vin is good with Thor. And of course I like to use Magneto. So when we double tank, we call it team daddy just because they're, they're old in this game. Why, why is Magneto so old? I don't really know the lore of Marvel rivals yet, but he's like ancient in this game. Well, I mean, canonically he's from, he's a Holocaust survivor.

[01:43:45] So I'm wondering if they're just, yeah. Yeah. So I think maybe that just make him old for that reason. Cause he's supposed to be, he's supposed to be fucking Patrick Stewart, not Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and all that. And this is, they just dilfified him here. So he's like a foxy grandpa sort of character. Oh my God. There was a comment on, um, on Twitter on something I forget now, but someone called him a thick daddy mags with two C's and it has not left my brain. That has given me brain worms for like a month.

[01:44:11] So, uh, yeah, the thick daddy mags and a daddy Thor apparently are the, the tank, the tank combo. My only thing here is, and my girlfriend made the observation that, um, you know, I was playing cloak and dagger and she said, why is her ass like that? And I said, comic book writers, a comic book artists, plus like just horny video game players plus just decades and decades of sexism.

[01:44:37] Um, and so like every, like my roommate, my girlfriend and I all sat around and like looked at all the character models up and down and the men are lacking in the ass department. I have to say like, that's something that overwatch was really good at was like getting some asses in there for like equal opportunity asses. The, the, the BBLs are very gender dominant in this one. I'll say. So I want to, I want to see something. I want, I want the characters to get patched. So captain America has a more prominent ass.

[01:45:07] Um, that's America's ass right there. We need, we need to have more ass. I will say if there's any man with an ass, his ass is more prominent, but it's just like, we need, we need thicker characters. I don't know if that affects the hitbox at all, but like. Yeah. Like Wolverine is thick, right? Like he's stout and thick in this game, but he doesn't really have any ass. It's not really. Yeah. I mean, this is important. Just take my calls. Take my calls. Magneto has kind of an ass, but it's like, it's more hidden by the Cape, right?

[01:45:36] So you're not really going to see, you're not really going to see it. Yeah. There's a lot of capes that are covering asses too. And this is not a problem when you pick Sue storm or a cloak and dagger. And it's like, okay, not now that now there's two blonde women that I'm seeing in the back lane. That's fucking us all up. And I, oh, venom has some ass venom. Venom is thick. Yes. Yeah. Um, the game seems to have seasonal buffs, right?

[01:46:01] Like, okay, this season storm is 10% more damage or something like that. Or like, you know, whatever. That is such a crazy idea that I think most, most companies wouldn't even approach. Can you imagine if street fighter six was like, okay, for the next three months, Chun Lee is going to do like 20% more damage. Like people would revolt, right? That would be crazy. But this game is Marvel rivals is doing it. And what do you think about that?

[01:46:29] That's like almost insane to do, but I love it. I love it. Uh, because I don't take this stuff super seriously. Um, but also I like it because it gives people an opportunity to play characters that they normally wouldn't play. Normally there's like that battle pass incentive to play a character like, uh, Mr. Fantastic's new play Mr. Fantastic and get his battle pass stuff. So you can get these, you know, the, the, the currency in the game and that's all well and good. And that's totally, uh, a, a normal way to introduce a character by incentivizing it

[01:46:59] through that. But I like the idea that like, oh, this character is buff for the season. Try it out. Maybe you can get a competitive edge. And if you like the kit, maybe you can continue to play them after the season's over. Um, I just liked the idea that like, there's just more than one thing going on that can encourage people to look outside of their normal, like three or four characters. They might play as, do you have any criticisms of Marvel rival so far? Any deep criticisms? We've had a few so far. Um, I think the only one I have is that I wish you could disable kill cam and the options

[01:47:28] because I don't really care. I know how I died. I don't need to see that. I want to see what my teammates are doing while I'm dead, you know? So I hate having a mash on the button to get rid of it, you know? Yeah. I mean, that's not really a Marvel rivals specific, uh, you know, criticism, but I do agree. Like there should just be this kind of thing where you can play the game that you want to play in terms of accessibility settings or whatever the, I do agree.

[01:47:53] Um, but, uh, in terms of like, besides like we need more men asses, um, more maps, I guess is my only other criticism. I kind of, I like the map variety is kind of lacking right now, but I agree. I agree. And I, I think like the map, like layout, the level design just isn't quite overwatch level was, uh, I, I liked the, I will, I would love more variety because I feel like, especially

[01:48:19] like I get into the same map, like two matches in a row and it's like, I just did this and I want to do literally anything else because I just lost here. And now I just feel like I'm getting more flashbacks at five minutes ago. So, uh, so I'd love a little bit, a little bit more map variety, but I would also, uh, but the, the, the destructible environments thing, by the way, incredible, incredible. Oh yeah. Great stuff. Great stuff. Yeah. I was going to mention that next, but yeah, you beat me to it. Yeah. I love that idea. And it's so cool. It's so, it's not just like you're crambling this little, little statue here or this little

[01:48:48] thing there, you're doing an entire walls of stuff that are collapsing. It's, it's fantastic. Like if somebody is like hiding a spider nest in the Penny Parker's instance behind a wall and you can probably eventually break that wall down. It's not universal. There are certainly, there are certainly things that stay broken, but, uh, it's just nice that like the, the tide of a battle can change because the environments change or some way or in the case of a lot of the capture the point ones, uh, the environment just like changes on its own over time and you have to adapt to like what the new transformation is.

[01:49:19] Uh, so it can change the tide of battle in a very interesting way. It sure can. I really, yeah. The destructible environment thing. That seems like the kind of thing that seems like a boardroom meeting. Oh, what if you could shoot the walls and they would crumble? It just seems like something. And then the developers go, we can't do that. That's fucking stupid. But then it's actually in the game and it's cool, you know? So it's, it actually does work. The only other thing I wish for, and this isn't really like a criticism. What I really want in this game is mystery heroes.

[01:49:48] Remember overwatch had mystery heroes where you die and then you get a different character. I love that. I played so much mystery heroes. You know, one of the most fun things overwatch too, despite how expressly unfun it was, they did have one season where they had competitive mystery heroes. That's great. It was so much fun. I never played got more in my life. So yeah, I, I love goofy shit like that. Have more goofy modes. I think is, is, would be, would be fun. But mystery heroes is, it would get a lot of play from me.

[01:50:18] Yeah. The thing is like, it's still pretty early on that I can't really identify things that need like drastic fixes, but it's also a thing that my main thing right now is I just hope they don't fuck up what we have. That's good. And I hope over time we do add some optional modes that do enrich things like mystery heroes and things like that. Absolutely, man. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, shit. I think I'm out of, I think I'm out of things to say about Marvel rivals. Sorry, Overwatch. I still miss you, but I can't be with you right now.

[01:50:46] Marvel rivals is my new friend and we'll remain that way. Yeah. I mean, I, it's rare for me to play an online multiplayer game when I have to like do a video game podcast because it's like, this is a thing that could conceptually just absorb all my video game time because I'm like, okay, just one more match. Just one more match. And anything that makes me go, okay, I want to just one more. Anything that can do that. I think is, has, has something. This, I told you during the super Mario galaxy episode, and we were like speculating on this. If this game is a seven out of 10, I am happy.

[01:51:15] And let me tell you, it's exceeded that expectation just a little bit. So I'm locked in. I'm happy. That's good. I'm glad. I'm glad you're enjoying it. I'm glad we finally got to do it. We, I feel like both in both of the episodes I appeared on, on select and start. I did. We did talk about Overwatch just like briefly, just because it comes out. It's like, we, we really need to sit down and do this. So I'm glad we finally did. Glad we talked about Overwatch and now we have Marvel rivals. In fact, we, I mean, we were talking about talking about Overwatch before even Marvel rivals happened.

[01:51:43] So I'm glad we could kind of combine these two related things. Yeah, me too. Uh, I'm glad that there's something there that can fill the void and this doesn't have to be a sad ending. I'm glad that there is some reactive force out there that actually listens to, um, people's concerns about something being gone forever. And while it may not be a one for one replacement, it is at least, there's at least something like that out there. Um, and I hope it inspires the original to do better in the future. Absolutely. And like I said, I'll always keep an eye on it.

[01:52:13] I'll always have an affinity for it, even though I'm not playing it, but yeah, Marvel rivals right now is really hidden. Well, Kiefer, thank you for joining me. Uh, this has been excellent. Uh, come back anytime to talk about men's asses, women's asses, uh, you know, non-binary, any, any asses you want to talk about. I'm, I'm here for it. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, any and all asses happy to be here. Thanks for having me on it. I know it's been a long time coming and I hope that I can be on again soon. Yes. I really hope you can.

[01:52:40] We'll find, um, when Marvel rivals two happens in 2030, maybe we'll, uh, we'll talk about that. Um, but for now, thanks guys for listening. Thanks for joining us. Check again, check the description of this podcast to find links to Kiefer's podcast, select and start and find the links to find time as well. See you next time. Bye. We'll see you next time. On, on, on, on fine time. Bye.