One way to breathe a new life into multiplayer shooters could be removing any guns from healers.
Make them potent, but vulnerable!
Why is it important:
- Players that don’t like shooting, but love teamwork would finally be represented (yes, I’m speaking of your girlfriend!)
- Having to protect healers would benefit more organized teams, rewarding teamwork
- Healers would have a more dynamic gameplay revolving around avoiding damage: stealthy movement, ability to quickly traverse dangerous zones, coordination with fellow teammates are all required to benefit your team as a healer
What might need to be tweaked:
- Healers should be made into the only revivors, and we should either punish death more (which we’d better be careful of if that’s a dynamic game) or give buffs on revival
- Healers should get more movement abilities to increase survivability. They may also get speed boost when running towards teammates (similar to Conduit Savior’s Speed in Apex Legends)
- Team compositions should accommodate for several healers as to not introduce a single point of failure
Overall, I think it could introduce a new dynamic to team arenas and skirmishes, as winning now requires more coordination within a team and better understanding of everyone’s roles.
Hasn’t Overwatch if anything shown that focusing on the small highest end crowd doesn’t actually work in the context of heterogeneous classes to play? Unlike MOBAs, so I can totally see why a dev would assume it to be the correct choice.
While I have not played overwatch myself, I have heard about a few things with it. From my point of view overwatch had it’s own problems including characters that did only one thing but that one thing really, really well. Which is frustrating. It also didn’t help that they tried to force things instead of actually working with what they had. IMHO it’s a master class of what not to do with a game unless you want to to fail.