Overwatch – Quake/Team Fortress
Overwatch has been one of 2016’s smash hits, and its success has largely been built on its ability to deliver a point of difference from other contemporary shooters. Competitive multiplayer shooters are by far and away the console market’s biggest sellers, with titles such as Call Of Duty and Battlefield consistently ranking as commercial top dogs year after year.
MOBA games, too, have recently attempted to breach the console market after dominating the PC gaming scene for years. Overwatch is the hero-shooter mashup title that has successfully combined both genres, and for that the team at Blizzard deserves significant praise. The origins, however, of Overwatch are quite clearly based on a twenty year old Quake mod, Team Fortress Classic, and in turn, the more recent and hugely popular Team Fortress 2.
[zergpaid]Indeed, similarly to how sci-fi and near future shooters saturate the current FPS scene, so too did deathmatch style sci-fi shooters such as Quake, DOOM, Unreal Tournament, and later squad based shooters such as Counter Strike, and Firearms dominate the competitive PC shooter space of the late 1990s. Ironically, the point of difference that Overwatch offers over its rivals echoes that of Team Fortress Classic’s 20 years earlier.
From the mechanics of its co-operative gameplay modes, to the different attributes of various classes/heroes, the core gameplay revolves around effective team cohesion to achieve objectives, and that’s a concept firmly inspired by the iconic Team Fortress Classic.