One way to breathe a new life into multiplayer shooters could be removing any guns from healers.
Make them potent, but vulnerable!
Why is it important:
- Players that don’t like shooting, but love teamwork would finally be represented (yes, I’m speaking of your girlfriend!)
- Having to protect healers would benefit more organized teams, rewarding teamwork
- Healers would have a more dynamic gameplay revolving around avoiding damage: stealthy movement, ability to quickly traverse dangerous zones, coordination with fellow teammates are all required to benefit your team as a healer
What might need to be tweaked:
- Healers should be made into the only revivors, and we should either punish death more (which we’d better be careful of if that’s a dynamic game) or give buffs on revival
- Healers should get more movement abilities to increase survivability. They may also get speed boost when running towards teammates (similar to Conduit Savior’s Speed in Apex Legends)
- Team compositions should accommodate for several healers as to not introduce a single point of failure
Overall, I think it could introduce a new dynamic to team arenas and skirmishes, as winning now requires more coordination within a team and better understanding of everyone’s roles.
Sounds like you want OG Mercy from Overwatch, who didn’t work out btw
No, FPS players tend to be the “killer” type of player who play to score and win, they are rarely the “socialite” type of player who are in it for teamwork.
Simply put, this is the wrong audience to implement this idea in, there are gaming communities where this works but FPS just isn’t one of them.
Since so many people played the original overwatch at it’s prime, it was a good way to see what people played and how. The dps queue was sometimes 30 to 40min, while as a healer you got into a game instantly. When Ana dropped, people just played ana and didn’t heal people, because she had a sniper rifle. When moira dropped, people just played her as a dps who could heal herself. Support is very niche already, making it more niche, and only a handful of people would even consider support.
I think the finals did a good job in giving the medium class a healing beam. It’s supper powerful on it’s own, and if your team dies, you can still whip out a very good if not the best gun.
Yeah, Mercy was one of my inspirations.
I feel like one of the reasons FPS scene is like that is exactly because players have no choices left but to pick up a gun and shoot enemies. Without that, you are useless in any classical FPS composition, regardless of the role, which alienates players that want to see other types of gameplay.
Simply put, if you are not a “killer” in an FPS game, you have nothing to do there, and that’s why only those players remain. Something has to be changed inside the genre.
and continuing my thought, overwatch was literally what you wanted in them first years. But it turned out that the main game group was not interested in playing for healers or tanks without damage, and as a result, the bias in choosing these roles was more than 3 times. This increased the waiting time in the queue quite a lot. As a result, everything returned to the option where each role can cause damage.
Mercy so easy only in low ranks.
If you have good move you can do teamkill by mercy under ultimate skill… Especially if your DPS no have damage. In overwatch you should kill by any role, but in healer mode you should don’t die at first, heal you team at second and do damage in third. That’s true less for mercy, because she has damage increase bean and you should change to it for support ultimates for example, but more on Birgit or for new healers.
And with tank too. You should protect your team, know all mechanics and do damage for enemies. For example sigma, you can eat Moira orb and Zarya ultimate skill by bullet protection skill. that is literally black hole. And if tank don’t do that you team in pain. And if you don’t damage targets you team lose.
But Overwatch bad example because that more arcade shooter. Many moves depend by skills, not for headshots. You literally have melee characters without any targeting.