Overwatch – Michael Elgart

Deep Rock Galactic is a cooperative first person shooter in early access from indie developer Ghost Ship Studios. Players are galaxy-fairing mining dwarves sent on dangerous missions on a hostile alien planet. The missions contain a variety of objectives and types of enemies, and allow for up to four players to play together.

This past year saw a slight uptick in the number of videogames I was able to play. This was particularly possible because I started talking with a couple old friends who often gamed together and they invited me to join them in playing specifically co-op games.

Multiplayer games aren’t exactly foreign to me, as I played World of Warcraft on and off since 2005. However, back then, I didn’t have great internet and I played very casually. I never got into raiding, and so I never really chatted with people on VoIP. I did often do multiplayer with people in the same physical location, and in fact I had a WoW arena team with my brother in high school as we played in the same room, negating the need for voice chat. Since then, I just didn’t play that many videogames cooperatively, and I didn’t have a consistent group. I still played a bunch of single player games, but I tried something new with Overwatch, as I wrote about a couple years ago. That was a lot of fun, but my lack of consistent playing group meant that after Overwatch, I went back to single player games…or Netflix.

This new group opened the door to Deep Rock, and it is spectacular. With the major caveat that I’ve only played the game with people I like hanging out with, Deep Rock seems to check every box you could have for this genre. The gameplay is pretty simple to learn; you shoot aliens and you mine rocks. But once you know the basics, you can start exploring the complexity of the game. There are multiple classes with different guns and abilities. They allow for grappling across levels, creating instant platforms on walls, permanent moving cables, or digging out tunnels through rock. More stuff is being added every month as it is still in early acess. Each class can now undertake quests to upgrade their various weapons which can be swapped out. There is quite a lot of firepower to choose from, with a big rotary machine gun, flamethrower (or ice thrower), shotgun, or even automated turrets, depending on your class.

There are also multiple types of alien bug creatures. Some are pretty standard enemies that run up and attack you. Others are suicide bombers that will stand next to you and detonate. If you know where they are coming from, you pick them off from a distance, but if you let them get close, you better call them out to your teammates who are busy mining rocks or trying to stop other bugs from eating their face off. There are also flying bugs, some that will try and pick you up and drop you far away from your teammates, ranged acid spitters, and giant armored beasts. Some bugs are even attached to shadowy cave ceilings waiting for you to drop under them, where they grab you and pull you helplessly away. Your only hope is for your teammates to blast the leach before you expire. These make for some hilariously chaotic battles.

And that’s not even counting the various types of levels you can play in. Each “ecosystem” on the planet has its own quirks and difficulties, from poison shooting mushrooms to radioactive crystals to giant sand storms that blind you for a short period of time–even in the midst of an enemy wave. The level design itself is beautiful even though I believe every level is algorithmically generated. There are several different missions types, including simple mining missions, missions to collect rare alien eggs, salvage operations where you recover equipment and then use it to escape the planet, and others. My favorite is extraction point missions where you are dropped in an area with many large crystals you must dig out and return to a central location while surviving waves of enemies. Then you have to protect the outpost until the your cargo is rocketed away, and finally battle your way to a rendezvous point.

The cooperative nature of the levels really makes the game for me. Putting up a good fight as aliens slowly surround you is tense, but when one of your teammates is suddenly picked up by a grabber and flown away, the panic starts to set in. There is intensity when making a daring run for one of your downed teammates, throwing up a temporary shield and reviving them while swarms of bad guys surround your bubble waiting for it to disappear. Another fun moment was at the end of a level where we had completed all the objectives, we now had to make it to the extraction rocket they sent. Somehow, the only way over to that part of the cave seemed to include narrow bridges of unavoidable enemies and it was taking too long to deal with them. It didn’t look like we could make it to the rocket before the level ended, meaning all of our work would be for nothing. With 90 seconds left, The digger thought he might be able to burrow straight through 60 or 70 meters or solid rock to get the chamber with the rocket, so we covered him, as tons of giant bugs tried to crawl into our tunnel while he slowly dug it out. We popped out right next to the rocket and got inside before time expired.

I recommend Deep Rock for its fun collaborative environment and interesting gameplay. Its level and mission design is really cool and it’s a pretty fun alien shoot ’em up, too. But the biggest personal takeaway from this game is that adults need to look at cooperative videogames as a medium for social gatherings. Modern society, and the internet in particular, has created a somewhat isolating social landscape. Netflix and HBO and YouTube mean that we live in an golden age of television and creativity, but also that we don’t need to interact with others in person in order to experience it; it comes directly to our devices in our bedrooms or living rooms. Cooperative gaming can act as a virtual social room, placing you at least ear to ear with your friends as you share an interactive experience and challenge. When I play Deep Rock, I don’t think of the time spent as “entertainment”, I think of it as “social interaction”. Even though my friends are thousands of miles away, we are talking about life and hanging out. I see this as a fulfillment of what people thought the internet could be; a place to allow people to connect in ways they could not before.

If you’ve been wondering where all my political blogging that I did last year has gone, I’ve transferred it over to a new blog to better separate personal stuff from political things. I’m not linking it as to make it slightly harder for random prospective employers from the far future to find it. If you don’t know what my new blog is, just tweet at me or message me privately.

I enjoy videogames, but I often don’t have enough time to really indulge in them. I’ve had great experiences with past Blizzard games, and so when Overwatch came out in May, I decided to get it.

Not only do I not usually play video games, but I also don’t tend to play games when they first come out. I also like to stick to single-player, story-driven games (Portal, Arkham Asylum, Skyrim) and sometimes strategy games (Total War series, Civ V) or both (XCOM). And, of course, I tend to play these on a long delay, waiting for Steam sales to reduce the financial burden of my infrequent hobby. But in this case I decided to go for a multi-player game soon after it had come out. Many have rightly stated that Overwatch is a Team Fortress 2 rip-off. Of course, I think people are far too protective of intellectual property anyway, and good rip-offs can be even better than the originals. Blizzard took the excellent gameplay ideas in Team Fortress 2, inserted their art and character backgrounds from their failed MMO Titan, and then created an amazingly fun and deep multi-player shooter.

Competitive role-based multi-player gaming is pretty fun. Trying to beat puzzles crafted by game designers is great too, but there’s something you can’t reproduce without battling against other people and their strategies. I always enjoyed player-vs-player parts of WoW, but part of it always came down to players who sank more time into the game got better weapons. This isn’t the case in Overwatch. Of course, this isn’t a new game genre either, but the creativity of what you can do and the absolute chaos you can fall into so easily is incredible. It’s just pure fun.

Blizzard also just did an incredible job with all the details apart from gameplay: the world is engaging and beautifully detailed, the game isn’t buggy at all, the point system is well crafted, the matching algorithms work quickly and efficiently, and the community dialogue has been amazingly transparent. I don’t know what the game is like as a power player who wants to play competitively for dozens of hours a week, but I know for what I want as a casual gamer who will only sink a few hours into it a week, this game is essentially perfect. It’s also very easy to get into, and Blizzard has already started releasing additional content with no extra cost. If you haven’t played this game and were thinking about it, I can fully recommend it.

But this video game has also coincided with a renewal of board game popularity, not just in my life but in the entire market. This is somewhat surprising given the already mature market for games on computers, consoles, and mobile devices. Nonetheless here we are in the midst of a board game revolution. Somehow in the past year I’ve found myself playing Catan, Codenames, Escape: The Curse of the Temple, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Avalon, and more. I’ve undoubtedly played more board games this year than any other year I’ve been alive. And I even dabbled in Go a bit this year as AlphaGo made headlines. I suspect this renewed interest in applied game theory in a fun setting contributed to me buying Overwatch.

Unlike other multi-player video games which might rely on grinding to give players an edge, these board games rely exclusively on luck and skill; time devoted doesn’t factor in besides how long it takes you to learn. To me it makes these games a fundamentally higher brain exercise than something like WoW or Skyrim could ever be. For me personally, this is a pretty exciting way to see gaming go mainstream (In a related vein, I’ve really enjoyed Crash Course’s new Games series with Andre Meadows).

When you put games on this axis of simple tactics to complex strategies, it also becomes clear why so many people want to watch games like Counterstrike, League of Legends, Rocket League, or Overwatch rather than games like WoW, Minecraft, or Grand Theft Auto; games that require more learned skill, innate talent, and strategy are far more interesting to watch that games that rely on grinding. And if you move further along the axis towards complexity and strategy, you’ll start to run into competitive physical sports like basketball and soccer. Obviously strategy and complexity aren’t sufficient make games universally popular (cricket is fairly complex but isn’t very popular in America, american football has similar popularity issues in the rest of the world), but they are necessary. EconTalk had a great discussion this week regarding the development of sports into entertainment; 50 years ago the major sports of today were nothing like we know them. They have developed into much improved products, and it wasn’t just TV exposure; the sports are measurably better in every way. Rules, nutrition, training, professionalism, advertising, etc have all improved drastically. There’s no reason to think games beyond the physical won’t see similar growth over the next 50 years.

It’s also worth pressing that this gaming revolution is a sign that Things Are Pretty Much Ok (TM). Despite what you may be hearing, violence and terrorism is trending downwards, fewer people are living below $1 a day than ever before, and apparently despite the ongoing technological isolation of our society, social board games where people play face-to-face are doing better than they’ve ever done. Seriously, if we agree that developed countries have mostly solved lifting everyone above subsistence existence, we get to philosophical questions of human existence beyond survival. What should people be doing, what activities should they engage in? Enjoying social gatherings with strategic brain games, seems like a wonderful way to spend that time, and I think could provide a proxy for a type of win condition for economic policy. The future of games isn’t just fun, it should be a major part of our culture for many years to come.