Overwatch’s Sombra Rework and the Fundamental Nonsense of Multiplayer Shooters

Years ago, on a previous version of this site, in rants now locked behind backups that would need to be converted to a new form, I discussed the travesty that was Tribes: Ascend’s early attempt at game monetization. If I were to boil down what I said at the time, it was that T:A was trying too hard to be something like Team Fortress 2, or what Overwatch was when it launched many years ago: a character-centric multiplayer shooter (though really, with the bland lack of characterization that was the entire Tribes series, it was really just character classes without any sort of charm to them at all).

In many ways, it’s a fundamentally understandable game design decision. They took a set of abilities and bundled them, so that you understood that if you ran into an enemy shooting a mortar, or a rocket launcher, or a sniper rifle, or a stealth pack, you knew what other abilities they had as well–or at the least, you knew what abilities they could not have. If you knew the entire enemy team composition, you knew exactly what abilities they could not be fielding at any given moment. That narrowed down what you needed to respond to by quite a bit!

The problem was that it was horseshit. Entirely unreasonable things were packaged together with no room for negotiation, because it was only–ONLY–the designer’s vision that mattered to the game design. Prior to Ascend, games in the Tribes series left matters of character loadout entirely in the hands of the player, which–again–is an understandable game design decision.

The difference, though, is the resonance between these choices and the underlying nature of a shooter. Your job in a shooter, generally speaking, is to run out there and kill. An unspoken consequence of this is that your job is also to not die. It’s more than just “don’t let the enemy kill you”–the fundamental underlying aesthetic to virtually all shooters is that you are a fragile fleshy meat bag commonly known as a “human being” which, in reality, dies when killed.

This is a lesson that neither Tribes: Ascend nor Overwatch gives the slightest care to learn.

Now granted, in the end, you’re playing a game–while there are games where your entire game is over the first time you die, generally, you can pick yourself back up and keep going. Slightly more realistic is the game style where dying takes you out for an entire round, barring exceptional circumstances. But broadly speaking, even in these circumstances, death is what writers call “non-canon.” Sure, it happened, but it didn’t really happen.

Fundamentally, the core of every multiplayer shooter game is rotten. It encourages you to do things that would get you killed–by allowing you to get killed without consequence, and in fact, it is frequently helpful for you to get killed, as long as you achieved something along the way. And in principle, that’s not wrong–every military in history has sacrificed soldiers to achieve a goal. By extension, the idea that it’s the same person dying over and over, learning from the mistakes of the fallen instead of running in fresh, is only a slight exaggeration on reality.

What is wrong fundamentally is the idea of screwing over your own soldiers, the ones who are trying to achieve your own objectives.

I objected to this in Tribes: Ascend, because the move from “pick any weapon you can carry from this rack” to “you are only permitted this gun if you also carry this” was some douchebag middle manager just deciding that soldiers are going to die, even if they know better. If you would have better survivability and kill more enemies with some non-standard load out… well, just die, and be ineffective, my darling soldier. And also try to win, we haven’t got all day.

Thus we get to the October 2023 Sombra rework in Overwatch. And, yes–I understand why they did it. Arguably, from a certain point of view, they’re not even entirely wrong. But also, they are in fact entirely wrong.

My general bias in Overwatch is that I am (in my own words) a “Mystery Main”–that is, I primarily play the Mystery Heroes game type, in which every death in a round forces you to change characters, and consequently resets your Ultimate Gauge, a full bar of which is necessary for you to use ultimate abilities. Because of my addiction to this game mode, I broadly speaking have about as much experience with every character that has been in the game for a similar length of time, ever since I started playing… what, five years ago? A couple years after the game originally came out.

So while I do not have as much experience in the new characters as people who focus on them… generally speaking, I can divide characters in the game into “how many days worth of solid play do I have in this character?”

It would be unkind and generally false to say that I don’t take the game at all seriously, even if I don’t get to call myself professional or even, arguably, “good enough”. And you can see that there is very real variation in how long I play characters based on how good I am at surviving with them–because in Mystery Heroes, every single death is punishment. So for example Tracer, who is legitimately Hero #1 in the character roster and has been since original release, is in my second-lowest tier of characters, because after nearly two full days worth of play with her, I can’t figure out how to play her to both be useful, but also survive.

And yes, inevitably, surviving means little enough if you aren’t useful. It is, after all, a game. And there is absolutely no question that Sombra has always been a character that lives in that unfortunate corner called “problematically high survivability”, along with several snipers and healers. Characters stuck in this corner are a plague on low-ranked games–players think that because they don’t die while playing them, it means they’re succeeding as a player. Death and losing are the punishments for bad play–but it’s difficult to know whether the loss is your own fault or not. Sombra often survived when she shouldn’t, contributing little, and hence in this lastest rework, her ability to survive has been basically entirely stripped away as a character.

You can see the game logic of it, and you can probably see where my argument here is going, so let me make it a little more difficult for you:

Sombra should never have been in the game, which is what makes her a hero.

Sombra, like several others (most notably Mei, Symmetra, and Brigitte, though you could put a lot of support and technical characters in the same bin) really has no place on a battlefield. She has other ways in which she would be valuable to a war effort, but in a pinch, in order to help succeed when your side is short-handed, she takes up arms. She should not be there. It is suicide, and it is unbelievably courageous for a technically minded person with very little in the way of murder potential to run head-long into danger for the sake of their goals. Even if you (rightly) consider her a villain who does not deserve to achieve her ends, you can’t deny that she has guts.

A developer choice to hamstring a character who should not be there, because she was surviving, is the purest antithesis to a heroic shooter. It is a decision made by people who have forgotten that the avatars populating their world are squishy bags of meat that die if they are killed–or worse, it is the work of a true, sadistic psychopath who is entirely okay with cold blooded and ruthless murder.

And–look, nobody is saying that Activision Blizzard is a moral company. Not… not just in this blog post, I mean, nobody says that, at all. My understanding is most of the good people in Overwatch’s developer roster fled the company around the launch of Overwatch 2, and it’s not too hard to put two and to together on that. But I don’t think this choice was sadistic psychopathy. In all honesty, I think that they were left with a choice between removing Sombra from the game, or keeping a hollow shell of a character that functions a little similarly to the old version but isn’t the same. They’re people who have so little attachment to the world they’re trying to get you to pay money for that they genuinely don’t think about “this character will die more often” as something that should not be canonically true, because in their minds, no deaths are canonical to begin with. And as long as the deaths are not canonical, what’s the difference?

The difference is why. Sombra is hard to kill because she is a heroic character, who–when faced with the very real possibility of death, but also the possibility of failure–chose to risk death rather than risk failure. She faced death not in the way everyone else did–by hoping and praying that other people would have her back. No, she is a two-faced, manipulative backstabber (canonically, that’s not my opinion of her–see her introduction video if you like) and she does not count on anyone else to have her back. She counts on running away; it’s not only the center of her character mechanics, but is the absolute core of the character concept. To remove her canonical ability to get away leaves her with… what character exactly?

Now, granted. I’ve been playing the game and there are people who say, despite my protestations, that they like New Sombra. And I understand entirely–these are people who do not value survivability in a character. My need and appreciation for Sombra’s mechanics comes largely from the mechanics of Mystery Heroes, where you must, absolutely, positively survive in order to contribute. A character with the ability to get into trouble but very little ability to get out of trouble has essentially no survivability, meaning you are either forced to play her entirely outside of her main role as a harasser (that is, attacking the back line and flanks) and keep her where she can be supported, or you… don’t, and just take the deaths. Or, I suppose, you keep harassing from the flanks but with so much caution and paranoia that you can’t really stay in combat long enough to be useful.

Again–all of this centers around the punishing nature of a game mode where death matters. In the main modes of Overwatch, where death is a skinned knee that gets kissed away by your mother, doing damage and then dying is all part of the grind.

Just remember that in that psychotic vision of a supposedly real world, people plaster smiles on their faces and willingly die for nothing. It’s one thing to let those crazies do that as often as they like–and another thing entirely to force someone into that horrific cycle against their will.