So the focus of my Subversive Play project, was to utilize the custom game feature that Blizzard has implemented in Overwatch to try out something different than the normal way the game is played…the result is something similar to bumper cars.
To explain, Lucio, one of the characters in the Overwatch cast, has an ability to knock people away from him in a small cone directly in front of him. This, in combination with his low damage (he’s a support class), has led people to be opportunistic and look for easy kills by simply pushing people off the map.
So, I wanted to see how far I could push this character ability by changing customization options; modifying health values to 300%, reducing damage done to 25%, and lowering the knockback cooldown to 0% (meaning the only way to get kills was to knock people into the hole in the map).
This lead to a much longer game than normal, as people would spam their knockback as soon as you got close – it was almost like magnets repelling each other. Once in a while, you’d get lucky with a double or triple, but it was incredibly hard to clear the point to capture it; it took 12 minutes to finally satisfy the victory condition, and while it was initially a novel idea and pretty fun, at around 5 minutes in I started to get tired of playing. I feel like playing the game in this context kind of gave me an appreciation for the work that was put in by the developers to balance the game and keep gameplay succinct and fun.