I spend most of my videogaming time on Blizzard games, so I've been fortunate enough to make it into most of their alphas or betas in the past several years at a pretty early point. I didn't make the first stage for Overwatch, but made it into the second stage which opened today.
For those that don't know, Overwatch is Blizzard's upcoming team FPS:
us.battle.net/overwatch/en/game/
; based in the world that was going to be their next-gen MMO, Titan, which they finally shut down when it wasn't coming together in true Blizzard style. Overwatch also marks yet another moment in Blizzard's continual amusing ripoff of Games Workshop's history and IP (Green orcs, Marines (Marines)/Eldar (Protoss)/Tyranids (Zerg), etc.), as the term originated with Space Hulk and then was continued in later versions of 40K and Epic. There are 20+ characters in the game right now, with a wide array of roles and abilities.
It's been literally decades since I put any serious time into an FPS, so I'm completely lost, of course. I've been playing a lot of Zenyatta, since he's the kind of support character I enjoy in WoW and he does a surprising amount of DPS. But I've tried Reinhardt, Winston, Pharah, Reaper, Soldier76, and Bastion so far, too (you can switch heroes when you die in a game, which happens often.) Unlike every other Blizzard game to date, they have functioning voice chat built right into it (because of the new engine? Heroes could REALLY benefit from this...) Movement is a combination of WASD and the mouse, so it's kind of disorienting if you're used to using just one or the other. It's pretty fun so far, but as with most betas and especially team game betas, it'd be a lot more entertaining with people that I know involved. They do usually expand the numbers as they try to test server impact, so we'll see.