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I tried Rocket League... I didn't find it that much fun and the learning curve was a bit too steep. I certainly knew what to do in the game, but I could never get out of my elementary-school soccer habits where I just chased the ball around like an idiot, never in a position to make a play. If I was in a good position, I didn't know what the controls did. As a result, not much fun.

Overwatch I got sucked into immediately. I knew the basic idea; kill the red team... and the rest of the details I picked up as I played. The matchmaking did a very good job of keeping the games winnable but not boring. The variety of heroes has something for everyone; from those that have been playing FPSes since they were 5 (Soldier, McCree, Widowmaker), those that picked up Overwatch as their first competitive FPS at 30 (Winston, Reinhardt, Moira, Mercy...), or those that want something completely different (Doomfist, Sombra, Symmetra). I have made many friends in that game, even met my (ex-) girlfriend via "stay as team" after a good match.

The biggest problem Overwatch has is that they made it appealing to the hard-core gamers as well, so you have to wade through all the people in the community that complain about "no aim, no brain" because they happened to play Aim Hero 13 hours a day and believe that's the only skill in a first-person perspective game that involves killing people. And the balance of the game is such that right now, they're kind of right... people with average aim in other games can absolutely destroy with Hanzo given the large hitbox of his one-shot-kill arrows. You don't need positioning, you don't need teamwork; just get those arrows in the immediate vicinity of the enemy's heads and you win, no matter what your team is doing. They'll probably tone him down a bit in the near future, though.



Rocket League has a pretty serious inflection point on the learning curve where the game suddenly becomes much more fun. Basically once you can control the ball enough where your optimal strategy isn't "punt the ball as far as you can", the game gets much more interesting.

I clocked about 200 hours over 3 years before hitting that point, and since then I've done another 200 over 6 months.

Regardless, I think it's one of the few e-sports that's fun to watch regardless of how skilled you are yourself.


I don't know if "it gets really fun after 200 hours" is really going to work on anyone but the most poop-socking maniacs.


Yeah, I felt completely useless in the beginning. It wasn't fun at all but then it suddenly clicked and I started improving. Now I feel like one with the car and can pull of stuff I would only dream of (air dribbles, ceiling shots etc).

Also, RL has become my favorite esport by far. The problem is that unless you've tried the game you don't realize how crazily good the pro players are. Things that wows me don't impress my non-RL friends at all.




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