silikonebook.blogg.se

Overwatch, meanwhile, tells us Tracer and Soldier 76 are gay in easily-missable comics, in relationships with characters who never get real screentime. We're not just told characters like Loba or Valkyrie are queer-we see their queerness manifest in-game and in cinematics, and their relationships to other cast members evolve in messy ways. In contrast, if you're a fan of a particular Overwatch hero, what you see is pretty much what you get-with maybe a crumb of backstory to mix things up now and again.Īpex's present tense also quietly gives its representation more value. I often half-joke that Apex is my favourite soap opera, letting me follow my favourite characters in plots that grow from season to season. "if you're a fan of a particular Overwatch hero, what you see is pretty much what you get." A willingness to change the status quo and complicate characters does a lot to make them feel like complex people, and not just videogame archetypes.

After two years searching for his creators, Pathfinder found them last year, and Bangalore's once-dead brother Jackson is arriving as new hero Newcastle next season. Personal stories get to move forwards, relationships get room to develop, and new arrivals can dramatically recontextualise existing cast members-whether it's Valk throwing a wrench into Bangalore and Loba's budding relationship, or Ash bringing out a venomous side to chirpy space-mom Horizon.Įven character-defining motivations are often given closure or complicated in new directions. At launch, it only really half-worked-the original cast often feeling too limited by the Blomkamp-esque world of previous games to come into their own-but unlike Overwatch, Apex's world isn't static.Įach season pushes the story forwards in some way, whether it's a character-defining moment or politicians warping cities across space. Released in 2019, Apex was a deliberately post-Overwatch take on Titanfall-an attempt to inject colourful characters into that series' grey military sci-fi universe. What Overwatch lacks is a narrative present, and it's something I think about often in relation to games like Apex Legends. New characters may come now and again, but the world remains much the same as it was six years ago. Characters never grew, and the state of the world-at-large was left a static unknown (something not helped by the fact that Overwatch matches have no bearing on the setting whatsoever).Īs a result, Overwatch has only felt more stagnant as the years go on. But relationships never developed or changed. We got little dialogue chirps between friends or rivals in warm-up rooms, and that little bit of context was fuel for a ravenous audience of fan artists and fanfic writers.