Overwatch - Open BETA Aftermath

Yesterday was the end of the Overwatch open beta. Thousands (guessing) of players jumped and got what was potentially their first taste of Blizzard's first FPS. And it appears to have gone over well. In order to gently let us newbs get a feel for the game you have a standard training tutorial, and then you have team vs AI. Here you are set with a human team vs a set of AI opponents with a set difficulty. Once you have had your feel of the AI, then you can go for some good old human vs human action.

Now that you are in game, which of the 21 characters do you want to play as? A balanced team is important so you should always have a good mix of assault (Genji, McCree, Pharah, Reaper, Soldier: 76 or Tracer), defense (Bastion, Hanzo, Junkrat, Mei, Torbjörn, or Widowmaker), tank (D.Va, Reinhardt, Roadhog, Winston, or Zarya) and support (Lúcio, Mercy, Symmetra, or Zenyatta). When creating a team the character select screen will tell you what is missing to try and help you balance it out. Good new is you can change characters after death or by returning to a spawn point if you change your mind. Now that you have chosen your roll and character it time to attack! 

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OK, so you may have already known all that, this game has been in production for some time. What you might want to know, if you did not participate in the beta, was it fun? And yes, it was. Matches were generally quickly found, and if they were taking longer then average you would get placed in a skirmish mode. Here you would run around getting a fell for the different maps. This is a great chance to experiment with characters since there is no win / lose in this mode. Just killing time until the teams are balanced and the real game starts. The characters also had some fun interactions with each other. The one that stands out the most of someone asked Reaper "Shouldn't you be dead?" with a response of "Didn't stick". You could also trigger more voices and emote as you leveled up and unlocked them in chests.

The game, at least thus far, looks like it will turn out well. I look forward to getting more time in it then and getting a much better feel to see if it has some nice long term staying power. The only thing I worry about is if they start leaning too hard on real money transactions to unlock chests to gain more skins, sprays, voices, and emotes.