Why This Old Game Being "Ugly" Is a Good Thing

Fans of the video game Overwatch overwhelmingly enjoy the stunning, cinematic, movie-quality maps the developers made. Meanwhile, fans of Team Fortress 2 pick a desolate patch of brown dirt and a featureless blue sky as their crown jewel. Why do two communities playing the exact same objective-based hero shooter want completely opposite things from their arenas? Even if you know nothing about either of these games, this is useful to know if you are interested in designing environments for characters or wonder why you prefer specific environments for specific characters. In this video, we compare Overwatch’s King’s Row with TF2’s Upward to look right at the culprit...one of the biggest trade-offs in multiplayer level design... #TeamFortress2 #Overwatch #videoessay #Overwatch2 #TF2 *FOOTNOTES* - I don’t believe that TF2 is ugly in the subjective sense. I love the art style more than I could ever put into words. When I say ugly, I mean that TF2 lacks the highly saturated, vibrant, and clean (high-poly, new physics/lighting simulation) look we see in many modern titles. When I make my friends that didn't grow up with TF2 play the game, they often describe much of it as looking amateurish or meh. Again, I LOVE TF2's art! - I think it’s pretty clear, but this is not an Overwatch hate video! I am a big fan of Overwatch’s art style. The point of this isn’t that TF2 did something “correctly”. It’s more to say that TF2 and Overwatch handle this problem differently, so they fundamentally work different in the sense of which maps do or don’t work! - I think my explanation of Hydro may be wrong. I spent like an hour trying to actually figure out how it worked and honestly it’s still half lost on me. People say conflicting info online and I haven’t been able to get a game with it to find out myself. If it is wrong, please forgive me. I do think that would reflect my point, though! - I understand that even Upward isn’t perfect for everything I praise it for. As seen in the demoman footage I use, there ARE some spots to hide sticky traps. Also, there is at least one infamous Upward hiding spot to drop down from. My analysis is a simplification. However, consider that on a general scale, these ideas hold up! - When I say these games “buy” legibility, what I mean is that by having detail in levels/maps, games “give up” their legibility, so they need to “buy” it back. "This point ain't gonna cap itself! Get over here!" - Engineer