I’ve been playing Overwatch for a few weeks now, and last time I spoke of the negative environment in the forums for the game, particularly about character criticisms and the idea of hero rankings. During said article, I took a few stabs at balancing out the character Genji, which as you may have noticed from my highlight videos, is my main character in Overwatch, with the big lug Reinhardt in second place.
Some of the community were instantly miffed of the suggestions about the character, as I expected them to be. It was the whole point of the thing. In reality I don’t think the character needs much in terms of balancing, perhaps just give him some invulnerability during his Swift Strike dash, but that’s out of personal preference and frustration more than anything.
I made it sound during the article that I might be an expert playing the game—something the redditors quickly turned against me in a mocking way that I enjoyed much more than I should, even telling the writer that his comment had made my day, which was true—and while this is obviously not true, I’ve had enough time bashing my head against the wall with Genji to pick up a few tricks, learn from my mistakes and get a firm grip on my play style with this flanking hero. And the same applies to Reinhardt.
I mentioned in another article that I would soon be expanding the content shown at the YouTube channel, and one of the things I’ve decided I’ll do are Overwatch character guides. Those exist in droves right now but most focus on character skills, statistics and defining the character’s role among an Overwatch group, while I’m working on a specific guide, with the tricks and insight obtained from getting my butt handed to me on a platter of increasingly good quality and painfully learning what NOT to do!
Right now I’m collecting video samples to splice together into the guide, with the idea to create the video at the start of next month, a few Genji and Reinhardt videos and possibly expanding to other characters depending on how the videos are received.
To do that I need to finish my audio recording setup, particularly get the damn boom arm and shock mount for the microphone, perhaps get an isolation filter for my Blue Yeti in case suspending the microphone doesn’t stop the Blue Yeti from picking up random noise and vibrations and producing a particular echo that makes me sound like a Dark Souls character. Before my good buddy Timlah told me of the echo I hadn’t noticed it…now I can’t un-hear it! It doesn’t sound bad, but it does sound strange.
If you have any advice on how to take this beautiful triple condenser array microphone and remove those pesky echoing sounds, please let me know in the comments! If it involves sacrificing something to the Elder Gods, not saying I will do it, but I will consider it. Our Eldritch masters deserve respect and reverence.
But that’s not the only thing I’m working on to make those videos as special as possible. I’ve contacted the lovely Bidoodles, who did my Twitch & YouTube art, to do some custom Overwatch artwork to go with the videos. I’m a bit tired of using the old LawfulGeek banner with he Overwatch logo and want something a bit more character-centric from now on, so that when you see the thumbnail you automatically know which character the video is going to be about. Also, I just love Biddy’s art and can’t get enough of it, but don’t tell her that!
And lastly, as soon as the next month rolls in and I get that sweet, sweet loot from doing my job at the job, I’m biting the bullet and subscribing for that quintessential ripoff that is the Adobe Creative Cloud. I’ve tried other editing options and they still fall incredibly short of both the power, accessibility and user-friendliness of the Adobe products. Premier and Audition are two I have my eye on at the moment. Once I have those and have fixed the microphone situation I’m also going to completely change the way I record Let’s Play videos, to make sure the best video and audio quality possible.
As I said in the past, I want to focus on making things with a level of quality we can all be happy with and I’m making sure to do the necessary prep-work for the best outcome for this new venture. The guides are coming, but I’m not going to rush them, don’t want to ruin the effort by rushing.
But once the Overwatch guides start rolling out, I want you to know they are just the start. Boss strategies for different games, secrets to pick up, quest-lines in RPGs I’m playing and hell, I might even do a few video rants to anger a whole new audience in the future.
