Here’s What It’s Like To Play Overwatch On American Servers

Over the last couple of days I’ve had people asking me: yeah, Overwatch looks cool and all, but aren’t the closed beta servers in America? And Europe?

Yes, yes they are. And understandably that puts a bit of an impost on any game relying on twitch reactions, as first-person shooters often do. But that doesn’t quite tell the whole story.

The trick with Overwatch is that while aim is obviously a huge component of the game, each of the character’s abilities — many of which are not so reliant on aim or instant reactions — play a huge part in how a match plays out.

That makes the game a little more amenable if you’re dealing with the immense distance from, say, my internet connection in Sydney to the United States where Blizzard’s beta servers have gone live.

To show everyone just what the connection was like, I switched my internet profile to the lowest latency possible (it’s something you can do with Internode ADSL2; it gets me 10-15ms to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive servers in Sydney when it’s in this mode) and spent some time in the public matchmaking.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but you should be able to see precisely what the delay is and whether it might be worth spending some quality time with once your Battle.net account gains access to Blizzard’s latest IP.

A couple of notes for people: I’d only just gotten a brand new shock mount yesterday, but it still needs a bit of tweaking before it’s fully established so I wasn’t able to hook my pop filter onto the mount (or the mic stand). Also, I had to slightly tweak the setting on my Blue Yeti for the recording so if you’ve listened to other videos and you’re wondering what the difference in the voice is, that’s why. (Just thought I’d be up front with you all.)

As for the game itself, you’ll be able to see the drop-in drop-out functionality of the beta within the first couple of minutes — it’s a pretty smooth process. And even though there aren’t too many people outside of Blizzard in the beta right now, I was able to get a full game after a minute of searching.


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