Good Wednesday afternoon everyone! It’s already 5 in the morning and the boss is gently asking if I have “Mecker Wednesday” on my mind. Of course – right after just “one more round” Overwatch. But the game simply doesn’t have enough content!
You can already see where this is headed today. Overwatch has been out for almost 2 weeks, and since the game falls largely under my reporting, I have to deal with several comments and discussions. What really bothers me are the (in my opinion) poorly thought-out complaints that the game lacks content. Sure, it’s not always sensible to look back, because games were developed, distributed, and maintained differently back then. Nevertheless, it well illustrates the shift in expectations that has crept into the minds of players over the last decade. Did we scream for new “content” back then? No, we did not. Games on the consoles that accompanied a large part of my childhood, such as Mario Party (the good old… parts 1-3), Warcraft 3, or Counter Strike (which I was never good at – but hey, it was fun on a LAN). Back then, there were no cries for new and more content – why would there be? The fun in these games was (and still is, to some extent) to engage with what you already know and what has been proven, and to get better constantly in order to compete with friends.
Do multiplayer titles need “content”?
And while it may seem that I’m just trying to “defend” Overwatch, these demands really annoy me. I’ve put so many hours into other games, like Left 4 Dead 2 and Evolve, and I was satisfied with what the games offered. The variety in these games comes from encountering other players. Every round is different, no fight is the same. That is – at least for me – significantly more “content” than much else that developers could still add.
Perhaps I just have a different definition of content than all those players in the comments. A game like Witcher 3 needs a lot of “content”, since it’s a single-player RPG. World of Warcraft needs more “content”, otherwise the item spiral doesn’t work anymore. But Overwatch, as a pure multiplayer title? Nah. Not from my perspective.
What do you think? Do shooters that are announced from the start as pure multiplayer titles really need more “content” in the form of single-player campaigns or similar things?
