As I blogged the other day, I’m struggling to transition my son from my PSN profile to a family sub account I’ve set up for him. The main reason for this struggle is he has played Overwatch a lot on my profile. He’s up to level 103(?), which shows a fairly heavy time investment as generally perceived wisdom reckons it takes an hour and a half of actual play to go up a level from level 30 onwards (actual play time will be longer as you wait for games to become available, and go through menus etc).
Considering I started playing on his profile on Saturday at level one and finished yesterday on level 9, I didn’t think I was doing too badly.
If you’ve never heard of Overwatch, let me fill you in. It’s what’s called a first person shooter (FPS). That means you see the world through the characters eyes (in first person), unlike a game like Tomb Raider, where you can see the character on screen (this is called third person, it’s a bit like an out of body experience). Lots of FPS are aimed at adults, are full of blood, swearing, and overt violence. Overwatch is primarily aimed at kids (it’s certified 12), has bright colourful graphics, no blood, dismemberment or bloody corpses. The only swearing is provided by the players over voice chat, which can be hilarious as plenty of sub tens appear to play and their idea of “big manning it” seems to be calling each other silly bums.
I used to play FPS a lot in my youth. Back in the mid to late 90s I put quite a lot of time into Doom II, later Unreal Tournament (1999) and Counter Strike (2000). I played all of these on the PC, with a keyboard and mouse set up. Fast forward many years to the launch of Call of Duty II on the Xbox 360 in 2005 and I found I couldn’t do it. Quite simply my hand to eye coordination didn’t work properly using a console controller for a FPS shooter and I was properly rubbish.
I tried on and off for the better part of ten years but never really felt the motivation to play enough to click at FPS on consoles. There were so many other games to play that I could pick up and play, it seemed pointless.
Things began to change recently when I picked up Star Wars Battlefront on special offer, and I’ve been working at improving my coordination against the AI on that.
So when it came to levelling up the boys profile in Overwatch, I thought it would be an ideal opportunity to put some hours in to get my skill level up at first person shooters in general. By and large, the skills are transferable.
After an afternoon and a bit of the following day playing, progressing from level one to 9, I’d got the computer difficulty up to medium from a starting point of easy. I was getting a few player of the games, and thought I was doing fairly well. At it’s heart Overwatch is properly multiplayer, that means you don’t just play on a team with other real people, you play against other real people. To hone your skills you can play real people versus the computer and that’s what I had been doing. It was time to see what my new found skills could do against other people.
There are various games you can play (these are called modes), capture the flag, 3 vs 3, 6 vs 6, and so on. I went for a 6 vs 6. Now in some game modes, like last one standing, when you die, you die and that’s it for the round but for most game types, when you die, you respawn (come back to life) in 10 seconds.
My game of 6 vs 6 went something like this:
Set off from spawn point to site of battle
Arrive at battle
Die 3 seconds after arriving at battle
Respawn
Set off from spawn point to site of battle
Arrive at battle
Die 3 seconds after arriving at battle
Respawn
Set off from spawn point to site of battle
Arrive at battle
Die 3 seconds after arriving at battle
Respawn
Set off from spawn point to site of battle
Arrive at battle
Die 3 seconds after arriving at battle
Respawn
Set off from spawn point to site of battle
Arrive at battle
Die 3 seconds after arriving at battle
Respawn
Set off from spawn point to site of battle
Arrive at battle
Die 3 seconds after arriving at battle
Respawn
Set off from spawn point to site of battle
Arrive at battle
Die 3 seconds after arriving at battle
Respawn
Set off from spawn point to site of battle
Arrive at battle
Die 3 seconds after arriving at battle
Respawn
Set off from spawn point to site of battle
Arrive at battle
Die 3 seconds after arriving at battle
Respawn
Set off from spawn point to site of battle
Arrive at battle
Die 3 seconds after arriving at battle
I spent perhaps 90% of my proper multiplayer game running from the spawn point to the battle, 1% of the game time being shot and 9% of it waiting to respawn. This was an object lesson in how far I have to go until I’m remotely competitive at Overwatch or any other first person shooter.
This may take some time…