Frame Analysis — Overwatch

Alain Galvan
7 min readAug 9, 2020

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Overwatch is a game that focuses on teamwork. As a team you need to work together to wrestle control of a portion of the map from the enemy team by directing aggression and protect teammates as in the Tank role, hitting weak points in the enemy’s defenses in the Damage Role, and improving your team’s performance by healing your team as well as increasing their damage, speed, and keeping them alive when they’re in danger with the support role.

Now I’m not the best player of the game, I certainly don’t put in the hours upon hours a professional streamer would constantly playing the game. Therefore take what I say with a grain of salt. That being said I do enjoy the game and find it pretty engaging, challenging, and fun.

What’s Fun

Overwatch is a shooter, so those familiar with this genre will find themselves right at home here. That being said, this game is much more creative than other shooters with unique weapons and abilities on top of the usual shotgun, sniper, or rifle.

These unique abilities form individual roles that a player could have:

  • Tanks — which could be subdivided into individuals that specialize in Shields (Reinhard, Sigma, Orisa), Protection (Zarya, Dva, Winston), Distraction (Winston, Hammond, Roadhog).
  • Damage — Which can also be subdivided into specialists in Sniping (Widow, Ashe, Hanzo, McCree, Soldier), Demolition (Junkrat, Pharah, Reaper), Flanking (Genji, Tracer, Doomfist, Sombra), or Utility (Torbjorn, Symetra, Mei).
  • Healer — Which again can be subdivided into Ult Protectors (Lucio, Zenyatta) that protect their team in the event of a powerful attack from the enemy, Damage Boosters (Ana, Baptiste) that can help with damage dealing, and Midfight Boosters (Moira, Mercy) where their contribution is enough to tip the scale of a midfight in favor of their team.

There’s more to these individual roles, but the combination of these roles in a team can lead to interesting macroscopic patterns:

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Alain Galvan

https://Alain.xyz | Graphics Software Engineer @ AMD, Previously @ Marmoset.co. Guest lecturer talking about 🛆 Computer Graphics, ✍ tech author.