Fat Princess and Overwatch Compare and Contrast
Odd comparison, right? The big-budget fps Blizzard game versus the old top-down strategy fighting PSN game. Both games have one main thing in common: They are mmo rpgs with a large amount of classes and specific uses for those classes and are known as kings in their respective fields of mmo rpg gameplay in the FPS genre and in the top-down (or whatever it's called) genre.
Fat Princess Review and Summary
Fat Princess, let me remind you all, is one of the best online mmos of the 7th generation consoles and the Play Station Network. I happen to have mastered the game and still to this day go back to it. Why? BECAUSE THEY NEVER MADE A REAL FUCKING SEQUEL ASIDE FROM THAT FAT PRINCESS ADVENTURES WEAKSAUCE BULLSHIT! Fat Princess' developers must've mastered RPG MMOs because they had it down to a perfect, yet immensely simple, science. 6 classes, each of which upgrades to a unique class in itself so technically 12 classes (13 if you count the option to run really fast and have no class). The game was chiefly played online though you could easily massacre the squishy A.I. in offline mode though the A.I would also appear in online mode if there are players missing from the game. Also there were 3 classes called the Pirate, Giant, and Ninja which you could buy as DLC and they were a bit OP but usually I can manage them (except the pirate who is OP as fuck because he can launch bombs and is a ranger/knight while also having 6 hearts holy shit they should have cut down his health and attack power). So yeah the DLC kinda fucked things up but it is still a fantastic game with a wide range of colorful minimalist levels accompanying fancy workshops that produce hats at your bases you can put on. These hats when put on morph you into one of the 12 different classes depending on the kind of hat it is and you can upgrade the workshops during each online game to produce better hats. And something most people haven't mastered is the fact you can switch back and forth between the upgraded version of the hat and the downgraded version of the hat on the fly which is very helpful especially when playing as the mage who is a fire user as his base level and is an ice user at his upgraded level.
Overwatch Review and Summary
Overwatch pretty much is the go-to master FPS right now and for good reason. Has lots of variety in classes and weapons and builds upon existing games while adding immensely unique new elements to the game (with continuing new additions such as Ana alongside frequent nerfing and buffing to improve balance). Why do they nerf and buff so often to improve balance? Because they have developed a complex matrix of interactions between 21 fucking characters it is a miracle they have it as balanced as they already do. Mei is still a weakling but otherwise I would say the characters are all balanced to a point where if you became a pro at all of them, you would stand a good chance against any other pro. The maps are varied and beautiful with unique music and fleshed out detailed environments and the character designs themselves have powerfully unique personalities and are plain beautiful (and have an oddly large amount of 3D-animated porn to prove as much). Everything is fast-paced and chaotic for the most-part even when playing as a slow or stationary character and the maps are very straight-forward end-to-end designs with a few obvious and not-so-obvious alternate paths on them. The abilities are also impressively diverse especially in regard to the character ultimates and... this is where the Compare and Contrast comes into play.
Compare and Contrast
Complexity and Difficulty
Killing felt satisfying in Fat Princess and even if you were a noob you could still wail on the enemy team's A.I. players and you could instantly tell how powerful each player was based on their ranking of King or Duke etc next to their names during each match. It was very fair and I appreciated that it catered to core and noob players. And this, my readers, is where Overwatch's problems start to flare up for me. Overwatch, is a fucking chore to play for me. I had to watch a guide for literally every hero after having tried to play as each one without watching, because those guides were essential to figuring out how to use each one's complex series of abilities. It suffers from what I call "Street Fighter Syndrome" because you have to learn about the abilities beforehand or else you are going to have a bad time against even the most average of players who know you have to learn beforehand how to play. And I get you have to focus time on mastering moves in games early on to improve later except, even with the tutorial and reading the game's explanations the moves are still hard to understand. With Zarya I could not get more than 2 or 3 kills each match yet after watching a video I easily shot up to a 10-12 average per match. Fat Princess had simple controls and though they were unique to each character with immense diversity as it is with Overwatch, you never felt overencumbered with options and special ways to use those options like Overwatch forces you to deal with. I get that it is appreciable to many that there is a strong level of strategem required to be good at Overwatch, but even with Fat Princess no matter how new you were the game it never felt like a hassle to play and it didn't feel like you were a noob unable to so much as scuttle in the world. In Overwatch you also can't read the rank of someone as 'Duke' or 'MLG' like you could while playing a round of Fat Princess and as a result you can't focus on targeting easier players if you are for instance not a great player and instead have to deal with everyone equally without regard to if one of them is possibly too good for you to take down. Overall, Overwatch is a game that's just really complex and flat-out not friendly to people starting out in the genre (like a lot of bullshit videos say). I get the argument that a lot of these characters don't use guns and hard-to-aim weapons but that isn't the issue -the fact you have to learn what characters work in what situations against what characters while also understanding the moves of your character and other characters is ridiculous to expect of players yet is mandatory if you want to so much as stand a chance in Overwatch. Fat Princess made it so even though pros clearly could do better than new or intermediate players, everyone could still get a fair amount of kills and contribute points in their own ways with any class. The only character in Overwatch I can say even a noob can get lots of points on consistently would be Mercy. So yeah, Overwatch is complex and difficult as fuck.
First Person View v Top-Down View
Getting Killed Off-Screen
This part, is no longer a criticism of either game. This is a criticism of the difference between two different design choices which can be used well, or poorly, in the right hands. I don't know about everyone else in the gaming community, but I have always hated knowing I could get killed from behind at any time by someone I cannot see. That creates such an awful paranoia in me and it just makes me angry and feel cheated that I got killed by something I couldn't see. This is the problem I find consistently with FPS games -you get killed from behind and it feels frustratingly unfair. Yeah, you can look back and forth but even then the moment you turn around to check your back you could also get killed from the front and yet again you wouldn't see the player until it is too late. People complain about the Spy in TF2 because he brings this issue to the pinnacle. But for me, every single player in a FPS IS A SPY because at any time, it would not be hard for someone to find the right moment to sneak past and move behind you which happens constantly. To Overwatch's credit the maps are more linear so you don't deal with this problem as much as in other games but it's still there and I still get killed far too often as a result of it. Maybe that speaks more tones about my skill and gaming intuition but that level of 'mystery' or 'gamer's intuition' or whatever you wanna call it which goes into dealing with enemies that could suddenly appear from behind, is just a nightmare I view as an issue with FPS games as a whole. Now let's discuss this problem in the context of a top-down game. Remember the time you got killed by a player you couldn't see when looking at a game from the top-down perspective? It is not possible for that to happen unless they shoot you off-screen in which case, that is rarely an issue and they just have to get lucky in actually hitting you without being able to see you. In Fat Princess you could see where players were easily and if you die it is your fault hands-down except in the case of some glitches or a lucky archer/ranger shooting in your general direction. That is why top-down games can innately seem more fair because at least when you die, you see it coming and know it's the choices and skills you built up which led to this moment.
Aim Difficulty
Part of the appeal of a top-down perspective is it is simple. You move with the left analog and aim with the right analog (unless you choose to invert the analogs) and that's how it is even in a FPS. However, the difference is you never have to account for depth. Distance, is not a hard thing to account for especially on a 2D plane. That is freeing and understandable with enough skill. In 3D oh... God is it the difference between MLG Pro and MLG No. First-person games requiring you to aim are at least twice as difficult to play as aiming in a top-down game because you have to be able to see really small things on screen and do very precise shots in 3D spaces that can often require pixel-perfection far more tedious to master than in a top-down perspective. In top-down you just move the analog in the direction of who you want dead and as long as you're pointed in that direction you can end that player. In first-person you have to move the analog in the direction of a player and then consider how close or far that player is. That is immensely difficult to master and that is not necessarily a bad thing... it's just really hard and makes a game much more stressful as a result unless you just happen to be talented or quick to learn how to aim like that. It works well in a more relaxed game about exploring or building or hacking with weapons but in a game about shooting where you have to aim precisely it makes the game immensely more stressful whereas in a top-down game the same action would be several times easier.
Overall
Fat Princess was the best mmo rpg I ever played and it kept things simple and relaxing yet satisfying and had lots of varied elements to understand (which I admit I didn't go over all of including the resources and point-capturing etc.). Overwatch... it is the best mmo rpg fps I ever played even including Borderlands games but... it's just way too complex and difficult. Both games are immensely varied class-wise and look beautiful (more so Overwatch than Fat Princess) but when it comes down to the mechanics, I don't want an art-house of different mechanics I just want a strong variety that keeps things simple to understand. Overwatch has a lot of varied classes but they're so specific and you have to understand so thoroughly how they work to a point where I just can't sit down and relax while playing the game. Why is one of the most popular FPS games ever so ridiculously convoluted with mechanics to the point where you don't stand a chance unless you know the specific techniques to fighting each of them off? I tried really hard to enjoy the game and it's beautiful and the controls are fun but... if I can't relax and just enjoy myself and must instead be constantly focused on aiming just right ensuring I don't get killed from behind accounting for all the character techniques and what characters to use with each scenario... I can't have fun doing all that. Maybe at a higher level if the game slowly eased me into it I could potentially do that but the fact is the tutorial is unsatisfyingly simple and I'm left unable to enjoy a game I really wanted to have fun with. Ultimately it's the difference of simplicity and complexity and Fat Princess had variety and some complexity but it kept things overall just simple enough. Overwatch has proven too complex and even though it's a fantastic game... I just can't play the damned thing without constantly feeling like a failure because I always get tripped up by the points I mentioned. I miss my old simple game that I wanted a sequel to and really, I bought Overwatch because I thought maybe it could fill that void in my mmo rpg heart but it wasn't what I was looking for.
2/10 not as good as garfield tale of two kitties!!!!!!!!!! (jk)
Odd comparison, right? The big-budget fps Blizzard game versus the old top-down strategy fighting PSN game. Both games have one main thing in common: They are mmo rpgs with a large amount of classes and specific uses for those classes and are known as kings in their respective fields of mmo rpg gameplay in the FPS genre and in the top-down (or whatever it's called) genre.
Fat Princess Review and Summary
Fat Princess, let me remind you all, is one of the best online mmos of the 7th generation consoles and the Play Station Network. I happen to have mastered the game and still to this day go back to it. Why? BECAUSE THEY NEVER MADE A REAL FUCKING SEQUEL ASIDE FROM THAT FAT PRINCESS ADVENTURES WEAKSAUCE BULLSHIT! Fat Princess' developers must've mastered RPG MMOs because they had it down to a perfect, yet immensely simple, science. 6 classes, each of which upgrades to a unique class in itself so technically 12 classes (13 if you count the option to run really fast and have no class). The game was chiefly played online though you could easily massacre the squishy A.I. in offline mode though the A.I would also appear in online mode if there are players missing from the game. Also there were 3 classes called the Pirate, Giant, and Ninja which you could buy as DLC and they were a bit OP but usually I can manage them (except the pirate who is OP as fuck because he can launch bombs and is a ranger/knight while also having 6 hearts holy shit they should have cut down his health and attack power). So yeah the DLC kinda fucked things up but it is still a fantastic game with a wide range of colorful minimalist levels accompanying fancy workshops that produce hats at your bases you can put on. These hats when put on morph you into one of the 12 different classes depending on the kind of hat it is and you can upgrade the workshops during each online game to produce better hats. And something most people haven't mastered is the fact you can switch back and forth between the upgraded version of the hat and the downgraded version of the hat on the fly which is very helpful especially when playing as the mage who is a fire user as his base level and is an ice user at his upgraded level.
Overwatch Review and Summary
Overwatch pretty much is the go-to master FPS right now and for good reason. Has lots of variety in classes and weapons and builds upon existing games while adding immensely unique new elements to the game (with continuing new additions such as Ana alongside frequent nerfing and buffing to improve balance). Why do they nerf and buff so often to improve balance? Because they have developed a complex matrix of interactions between 21 fucking characters it is a miracle they have it as balanced as they already do. Mei is still a weakling but otherwise I would say the characters are all balanced to a point where if you became a pro at all of them, you would stand a good chance against any other pro. The maps are varied and beautiful with unique music and fleshed out detailed environments and the character designs themselves have powerfully unique personalities and are plain beautiful (and have an oddly large amount of 3D-animated porn to prove as much). Everything is fast-paced and chaotic for the most-part even when playing as a slow or stationary character and the maps are very straight-forward end-to-end designs with a few obvious and not-so-obvious alternate paths on them. The abilities are also impressively diverse especially in regard to the character ultimates and... this is where the Compare and Contrast comes into play.
Compare and Contrast
Complexity and Difficulty
Killing felt satisfying in Fat Princess and even if you were a noob you could still wail on the enemy team's A.I. players and you could instantly tell how powerful each player was based on their ranking of King or Duke etc next to their names during each match. It was very fair and I appreciated that it catered to core and noob players. And this, my readers, is where Overwatch's problems start to flare up for me. Overwatch, is a fucking chore to play for me. I had to watch a guide for literally every hero after having tried to play as each one without watching, because those guides were essential to figuring out how to use each one's complex series of abilities. It suffers from what I call "Street Fighter Syndrome" because you have to learn about the abilities beforehand or else you are going to have a bad time against even the most average of players who know you have to learn beforehand how to play. And I get you have to focus time on mastering moves in games early on to improve later except, even with the tutorial and reading the game's explanations the moves are still hard to understand. With Zarya I could not get more than 2 or 3 kills each match yet after watching a video I easily shot up to a 10-12 average per match. Fat Princess had simple controls and though they were unique to each character with immense diversity as it is with Overwatch, you never felt overencumbered with options and special ways to use those options like Overwatch forces you to deal with. I get that it is appreciable to many that there is a strong level of strategem required to be good at Overwatch, but even with Fat Princess no matter how new you were the game it never felt like a hassle to play and it didn't feel like you were a noob unable to so much as scuttle in the world. In Overwatch you also can't read the rank of someone as 'Duke' or 'MLG' like you could while playing a round of Fat Princess and as a result you can't focus on targeting easier players if you are for instance not a great player and instead have to deal with everyone equally without regard to if one of them is possibly too good for you to take down. Overall, Overwatch is a game that's just really complex and flat-out not friendly to people starting out in the genre (like a lot of bullshit videos say). I get the argument that a lot of these characters don't use guns and hard-to-aim weapons but that isn't the issue -the fact you have to learn what characters work in what situations against what characters while also understanding the moves of your character and other characters is ridiculous to expect of players yet is mandatory if you want to so much as stand a chance in Overwatch. Fat Princess made it so even though pros clearly could do better than new or intermediate players, everyone could still get a fair amount of kills and contribute points in their own ways with any class. The only character in Overwatch I can say even a noob can get lots of points on consistently would be Mercy. So yeah, Overwatch is complex and difficult as fuck.
First Person View v Top-Down View
Getting Killed Off-Screen
This part, is no longer a criticism of either game. This is a criticism of the difference between two different design choices which can be used well, or poorly, in the right hands. I don't know about everyone else in the gaming community, but I have always hated knowing I could get killed from behind at any time by someone I cannot see. That creates such an awful paranoia in me and it just makes me angry and feel cheated that I got killed by something I couldn't see. This is the problem I find consistently with FPS games -you get killed from behind and it feels frustratingly unfair. Yeah, you can look back and forth but even then the moment you turn around to check your back you could also get killed from the front and yet again you wouldn't see the player until it is too late. People complain about the Spy in TF2 because he brings this issue to the pinnacle. But for me, every single player in a FPS IS A SPY because at any time, it would not be hard for someone to find the right moment to sneak past and move behind you which happens constantly. To Overwatch's credit the maps are more linear so you don't deal with this problem as much as in other games but it's still there and I still get killed far too often as a result of it. Maybe that speaks more tones about my skill and gaming intuition but that level of 'mystery' or 'gamer's intuition' or whatever you wanna call it which goes into dealing with enemies that could suddenly appear from behind, is just a nightmare I view as an issue with FPS games as a whole. Now let's discuss this problem in the context of a top-down game. Remember the time you got killed by a player you couldn't see when looking at a game from the top-down perspective? It is not possible for that to happen unless they shoot you off-screen in which case, that is rarely an issue and they just have to get lucky in actually hitting you without being able to see you. In Fat Princess you could see where players were easily and if you die it is your fault hands-down except in the case of some glitches or a lucky archer/ranger shooting in your general direction. That is why top-down games can innately seem more fair because at least when you die, you see it coming and know it's the choices and skills you built up which led to this moment.
Aim Difficulty
Part of the appeal of a top-down perspective is it is simple. You move with the left analog and aim with the right analog (unless you choose to invert the analogs) and that's how it is even in a FPS. However, the difference is you never have to account for depth. Distance, is not a hard thing to account for especially on a 2D plane. That is freeing and understandable with enough skill. In 3D oh... God is it the difference between MLG Pro and MLG No. First-person games requiring you to aim are at least twice as difficult to play as aiming in a top-down game because you have to be able to see really small things on screen and do very precise shots in 3D spaces that can often require pixel-perfection far more tedious to master than in a top-down perspective. In top-down you just move the analog in the direction of who you want dead and as long as you're pointed in that direction you can end that player. In first-person you have to move the analog in the direction of a player and then consider how close or far that player is. That is immensely difficult to master and that is not necessarily a bad thing... it's just really hard and makes a game much more stressful as a result unless you just happen to be talented or quick to learn how to aim like that. It works well in a more relaxed game about exploring or building or hacking with weapons but in a game about shooting where you have to aim precisely it makes the game immensely more stressful whereas in a top-down game the same action would be several times easier.
Overall
Fat Princess was the best mmo rpg I ever played and it kept things simple and relaxing yet satisfying and had lots of varied elements to understand (which I admit I didn't go over all of including the resources and point-capturing etc.). Overwatch... it is the best mmo rpg fps I ever played even including Borderlands games but... it's just way too complex and difficult. Both games are immensely varied class-wise and look beautiful (more so Overwatch than Fat Princess) but when it comes down to the mechanics, I don't want an art-house of different mechanics I just want a strong variety that keeps things simple to understand. Overwatch has a lot of varied classes but they're so specific and you have to understand so thoroughly how they work to a point where I just can't sit down and relax while playing the game. Why is one of the most popular FPS games ever so ridiculously convoluted with mechanics to the point where you don't stand a chance unless you know the specific techniques to fighting each of them off? I tried really hard to enjoy the game and it's beautiful and the controls are fun but... if I can't relax and just enjoy myself and must instead be constantly focused on aiming just right ensuring I don't get killed from behind accounting for all the character techniques and what characters to use with each scenario... I can't have fun doing all that. Maybe at a higher level if the game slowly eased me into it I could potentially do that but the fact is the tutorial is unsatisfyingly simple and I'm left unable to enjoy a game I really wanted to have fun with. Ultimately it's the difference of simplicity and complexity and Fat Princess had variety and some complexity but it kept things overall just simple enough. Overwatch has proven too complex and even though it's a fantastic game... I just can't play the damned thing without constantly feeling like a failure because I always get tripped up by the points I mentioned. I miss my old simple game that I wanted a sequel to and really, I bought Overwatch because I thought maybe it could fill that void in my mmo rpg heart but it wasn't what I was looking for.
2/10 not as good as garfield tale of two kitties!!!!!!!!!! (jk)
