The continuation of my interview series with Mitch "Uber" Leslie.

You can check out part one of the interview here.

Monte and Doa had mentioned a large driving force in how they conceptualized Overwatch was inspired by the Fighting Game Community’s casters. Does that make sense or resonate with you at all? How did you approach Overwatch as a new game?

So, regarding fighting game commentary, I’ll be honest—I’ve never really been deep in the fighting game community (FGC). I’ve watched a little bit more recently. I enjoy it very thoroughly because I think the word play and the way that a caster like a Tasty Steve, for example—can build momentum and just keep going. That’s why they say they are “spitting bars”, they just keep bringing it back and finding these lines. Just for example, right before the showmatch between USA and Canada at E3 for the Overwatch World Cup, there was Injustice on [stream] and with those two casters, I was just loving it. I was in Flame’s discord at the time and I couldn’t stop saying how sick these [casters] were. Like, how do they come up with these things? It was just so funny. I personally don’t see, with my limited knowledge of the FGC, how Monte and Doa have taken great inspiration from it. I don’t necessarily see any huge similarities between the two. When they talk about how they approach it like the FGC, perhaps it has to do with the preparation, or maybe what heuristic for building up the flow of their cast or the structure of it. I don't know enough about the FGC to say if that personally resonates with me at all, or if I even want to approach that style. In terms of pure word play and entertainment, I don’t know many who do it better [than the FGC]. I really don’t. I don’t even think the best casters in Counter Strike come close to the entertainment factor. I think in terms of polish, in terms of technical skill—perhaps it’s not the same, but I think it’s been one of the hallmarks of the FGC that the commentary is just raw and I appreciate that, and I try to take that same approach with my own style. I try to be fairly raw and try not to put too many filters on it, but it is still a completely different beast. The way I approached Overwatch at first changed a little bit. When I first picked up the game, and Jason and I first said “alright, I’m going to try to stick with play-by-play and you sorta stick with analysis and let’s sort of see how this works,” we tried to make it fairly segmented and go for our own styles. I was pretty god awful when I first started. I consider myself to be quite endemic to Overwatch as well. I mean, just because I’ve casted other games and have a salary doesn’t mean I’m not endemic to Overwatch! [laughs] It was pretty bad to start with thought—but it had to be, it had to be refined. Like every game, I’ve used elements from the experience of casting 5-6 different games and now I’ve tried to bring that all together in Overwatch. For example, for teamfights, I tend to bring out a lot of my League of Legends experience. I was like a teamfight-bot in League of Legends. I was a potato for the whole game; the whole build up, I was crap. Then, once the team fights came in, I was like “OK. Hold my beer. I can do this.”  

Then I bring back in the flow of a rolling game type that has respawns that I learned in Battlefield 4, from countless Battlefield games. I tried to bring that in. I’ve brought the Counter Strike concept of like actually having some time to do analysis and mixing it up and having some time to have peak and troughs in gameplay, because obviously it is round by round. So obviously, you only have one chance to go ham in a round and then you need to bring it back down. And I use that a lot when there is like a 2CP map and there is team fights that occur and you need to give it space. So all these games I’ve tried to bring all of these aspects and elements in. I didn’t think about who I wanted to style it like, I just knew I had to play to my strengths, and try to make sure that my delivery was good. I come from a lot of old school casting guys like Joe Miller and Deman. They were the guys that taught me everything I know essentially and possibly as a result of this, technical ability is the most important thing to me as a caster—just to be able to say what I want to say, but say it properly.

I could throw my toys out the pram and get excited, but no one will know what I’m talking about. A close second to that is being close to my audience. Being able to shape the experience of someone watching Overwatch esports is what makes me so passionate about it. It’s like: I’m there, you’re there. I’m experiencing this and I want you to experience this, not only vicariously, but directly as you see it. I want you to understand why this is so incredible, why these players are such important people, why this is such a fun game. There was never a template for it, it was sort of just my style that I evolved, like some kind of formless organism that adapted over time. I just started to bring styles in from other games and other casters that I’ve heard. If I tried to be just the same as anyone else, I don’t think I’d be half the caster I am, though

What is it like having casting legends like Joe Miller and Deman around at all times? What is it like being able to use their knowledge as a resource?

When I first started here, it was super intimidating because I knew them both from League of Legends. So, it was very, very hard to transition from being starstruck by them constantly to actually have a conversation with them. I think it was Joe who said something along the lines of “Stop being a fanboy and just listen to me.” He was quite blunt with me. [Deman] as a caster is incredibly good, but I worked more under Joe than I did with Deman. I’ve gotten solid advice from Deman before, but I worked mostly under Joe Miller and as the editor and chief at ESL, that's his job to develop us. My first year or so, I was quite heavily under him. Going to ESL, while people might say “Ohh, yeah, the pay isn’t that great,” or “Just because you work at ESL doesn’t mean you’ll be casting the next CS Major,” or whatever, it’s fair enough. Being at ESL has its limitations, but I’ve needed it badly as a developmental tool. I was very rough around the edges. I was lacking a lot of the technique needed. Again, I’m just some rough guy from Australia who just sat and did this for fun and never could have understood that there was a technique that needed to be applied there. So, that's the reason why I’m here today.

You and Jason Kaplan have solidified yourselves as mainstays in Overwatch. Are you both actively building a brand together or is that something that isn’t in the cards just yet?

We set out and started this 2 years ago now; we obviously put our heads together and started producing some content. We just jumped out there and did it. I’d say so. I’d like to think that people have a general idea of what they get when we’re on air. I don’t get what that is— personally, sometimes I don’t really think about it when I look back, because we are super, super different in our styles. We have an understanding, we know where our strengths and weaknesses are and we try and also cover each other when we have to. So, that was always the plan. Obviously Deman casted Overwatch as well, so Jason and I had to work our styles in with him on that. That’s partly why I’ve done so much color [commentary] which ultimately helped me a lot now, because no matter who I cast with, I have a role to play. So the answer the question: yes, but that kind of brand is tricky to build up because we’re not freelancers. We can’t just go around and just cast every online event. Personally, I’d love to really focus and build a brand with Jason, but ultimately,it’s not up to us. There can be external forces that make it a bit hard to stick with the same caster pairing.

Still within that same topic, many seasoned casters mention how Overwatch is one of, if not the, hardest game to cast. What are your thoughts on this sentiment and do you think that this will breed a “new” type of caster specifically to Overwatch akin to like a ZP or Hexagrams?

Yeah, I think it will. I think that’s how people become casters as well. You don’t necessarily become a caster because you like talking about video games in general, you’re normally drawn to a particular game and you start there because you love that game specifically and that is totally fine. I think I was drawn to Call of Duty 4 because I would say I played on “professional teams”, but much like SideShow and how he would explain his TF2 career, I was kind of like the bottom  bandit of my team, as well. So, it was a direct transition from playing Call of Duty to casting it, because I was going to school at the time and I just couldn’t dedicate 40 hours a week to practicing like I used to. I think you will have people come across from other games. I think you’re already starting to see that in Korea, for example, with Achilios and Wolf and Papasmithy. To directly address your question, there definitely will be casters that only come up through Overwatch with a love for Overwatch. They might not ever realize how hard the game is, because they would not have casted anything else.

Something that I’ve mulled over myself a great deal is the difference or lopsidedness of competition. I’ve spoken with people from many places across the globe and they all seem to have a different opinion on this topic. Do you think domination is entertaining from your perspective and do you think the general audience finds it entertaining?

One great example of a person who would still get his rocks off to domination is MonteCristo. He loves well crafted and well executed play; [domination] doesn’t bore him. At TakeTV after casting the third, four map series of Rogue on trashing the opposition, I walked outside and I said to KnOxX, “Jean-Louis, can you make it interesting, mate?” Because, as a caster, you’re only as good as your quality of games to a great degree as well. I said, “For christ's sake, I’m sat on that couch, sweating through my pants, I’m leaving massive sweat marks on this damn couch, while I’m talking about how crisp your Winston is or how AKM’s tracking is godlike.” It felt a little bland to watch these games, they were incredibly one sided. I personally can respect a team that is very good at what they do,but that doesn’t necessarily get me off. What does it for me is a game where people can watch and see just how exciting Overwatch can be. I don’t think one sided stomps are exciting. I don’t get excited for them as well, I think my casting can even sometimes suffer when we have these one sided games, because why in god’s name would I get excited? I can’t even fake it! I’ve never faked it in a cast anyways; I just don’t know how to do that. It would probably come off just really bad; I’m a terrible liar anyway. [Domination] does set a bar and then you can go off your chops when you do see something like that toppled or overturned. Great example was the Atlantic Showdown Semifinals where EnVyUs lost to Rogue after being on a huge winning streak.  

I mean, I was popping off. I blacked out for that. I don’t remember even saying that thing about uNKOE and “putting his headset back on.” I actually don’t remember that at all. I was completely seized up and focused on the games. As I go back over the clip now, it’s a bit horse, it’s a bit shrill—my casting [that is]—but I have to let that be what it is, because it was genuine—it came from inside me. While I love crisp and correct gameplay, it’s not the domination that makes me love casting Overwatch.

We all have a preferred team that we root for, in a completely biased sense. Do you care to spill the beans on who are your favorite team(s) to cast and why?

I think a lot of casters might have some visible bias, but it’s more about how any form of bias is conveyed, or for that matter, not conveyed. I generally enjoyed watching Ninjas in Pyjamas (NiP) play, at least at the moment, because their issues are so open to everyone. For once, our top Reddit analysts are correct with a lot of the issues that are on that team—well, at least some of them are, let's not get too ahead of ourselves here [laughs]. But you can actually see the cogs turning in this particular machine and how their trying to rectify their mistakes.

I’ve had a lot of time over the past year to spend some time with the guys that were NiP. I mean we had Dreamhack and TakeOver, even back when MSI MGA was going to happen, where instead, we just hung out for five days. I’m very interested to see how things go together for them.

I enjoyed watching IDDQD back in the olden days. Andre is a person who, in my opinion, when you speak to him, he does seem quite genuine. I mean, I don’t know him that well, but we’ve had conversations back in the day. Back at the first TakeOver, I spoke to him and had like an Overwatch jacket on and Andre goes like, “Awww man, I want that jacket so much!” And I said to him like, “Ohhh I’ve got a spare. Here, why don’t I mail the spare to you?” And he was just over the moon. “Awww, thank you man, this is soo sick!” And he asked me, “Can you sign it for me?” and I said “Shut up Andre, I’m not going to sign it for you.” And he insisted on me signing it, and I said no; “because in three months, I’m going to want your signature on a jersey and you’re going to give that to me. I’m not signing this. I refuse to sign it.”

And to this day, Andre is always giving me a hard time about it [laughs]. I always enjoyed watching him play; the thing is,I just can’t get behind NRG right now. I just can’t bring myself to do it’s too painful for the moment.

A lot of talk has started to kick up about the metagame and how it has compared to the short history of Overwatch. From a caster’s perspective, how would you like the metagame to be shaped, and is the dive metagame a bit to hectic to track as a caster or do you enjoy how crazy the team fights are?

Dive is fine with me, I think it’s ok. It’s because it becomes a higher stakes game. I feel like when triple tank was being played, a lot of the time, it came down to who could break the other’s Reinhardt shield down first. Maybe is there a Roadhog hook that slips past the shield? Maybe is the Graviton [Surge] available? I mean, it wasn’t bad, but obviously it did devolve pretty quickly into seeing Reaper and Ana and that combination as well.

I didn’t mind it either because I thought it was very much a calculated game style, because you didn’t start a fight from getting a pick out of nowhere. It was really a war of attrition and how you allocated resources over a long period of time. I’m enjoying the Dive metagame right now because I think it’s heavily mechanical. The problem is,what tends to happen is that so many of these teams find a recent degree of parody. A lot of Europe’s Genji's are quite strong and Soldier 76 is just Soldier 76, right? [laughs] He’s only allowed to do what the enemy D.va allows him to do. I find him very vanilla with the way he’s being played right now. Tracer, too— maybe to a lesser degree, but still within that same vein. What really becomes apparent now in this meta is actually how defensive ultimates are used, when they’re used that it takes to force them out, because they’re a direct indicator a lot of the time of the psychological state of the player or the team. For example, we saw it a lot from Movistar Riders at TakeOver 2. We would see Neptuno stand off to the side [as Sombra] and throw his Translocator towards the enemy team, and sometimes the enemy team would just pop Transcendence, expecting Neptuno to ult—but it didn’t happen. The ease at which an ult is forced out is what I find quite curious. I like at least that we have a bit of variety. I mean, we have 2-2-2, we have triple DPS, and that's kind of nice. I think in Korea we’re starting to see a little more variation as well. I think [this meta is] better than triple tank. Triple tank was really hard to cast, at least in Dive if the game isn’t particularly interesting [or] strategically exciting I can try to create some form of excitement over what is generally a chaotic game.

If you could take one thing from a previous game you’ve casted and add it to Overwatch, what would it be and why?

I would say that a little bit deep or more complex economical system like we see in Counter Strike could definitely add an interesting element to Overwatch. The way that manifests, I haven’t thought too far in, but I guess it would be nice to have another way of managing resources. It’s a cool part about Overwatch, but it only really manifest when you look at ultimate charge and for some people, that charges too fast, or too slow. Statistics are a big thing. I know it’s coming, I know [Overwatch] will get there. Some of the observing techniques in Counter Strike (CS), I really like. One thing I had in mind for a while for Overwatch that could create a more cinematic effect could be a “context sensitive camera” for a certain hero. It’s like in CS when someone throws a grenade if you hold control, you can follow the trajectory. Let’s say that Zarya shoots her Graviton Surge, I just want you to hit a key and it just follows the Graviton Surge and then zooms out while it’s active. Or maybe in the case of like an Earth Shatter, the camera skips to an above view. Just context sensitive camera scripts or options you could use.

One problem is that no one can look empirically at the statistics of a player and say “this guy is objectively better than this guy.” Players can’t, in a lot of positions, display their ability outside of a qualitative way. Instead of saying “that looked good” or “that looked bad,” we should be able to say “that was objectively good, percentage wise” with statistics to backup our claims.

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“The whole ecosystem changes when you have access to raw data. It’s not just in the game, it’s not just in the viewer experience, it’s the whole ecosystem and the way it will work—will change.”

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With recent events, I thought it would be interesting to hear someone who uses narratives more than anyone. Do you think there is a space for villains in Overwatch? Not anything outlandish or derogatory, but someone who isn’t afraid to stir the pot?

I think there has to be. Even in a game like Guild Wars 2, which isn’t very deep, there’s this guy called Helseth—he talks so much trash, but he never goes overboard. He knows he wants to make himself adversarial; you can be confrontational, you just can’t go overboard. Someone like winz or an AKM, like they talk so much trash. Winz likes to retweet Kruise’s tweets saying that Rogue “maybe could be in the top 10 if they played in Europe” and stuff like that. You can make a villain, but you have you have to start from the start. You take some of your results and than you feel your way forward. You don’t go from 0 to 100.

Last, but certainly not least,what about Overwatch drew you in and kept you here? What about it stole you away from CS:GO, what about it makes you wake up in the morning and say “I’m going to review Overwatch games for the next 2 hours”?

The game had my attention before I could [even] play it. Before the closed beta, six months before that came out, we were producing content and let’s be honest, it was garbage, right? [laughs] “Hey guys! We're here to talk to you about Tanks in Overwatch!”

It wasn’t even data mining, we just used what ever sort of info we could access from like press packs. We just kind of talked about—I wouldn’t even say it was theorycraft, but conjectured as to what games would look like and what team compositions would be there. Stuff that everyone was thinking and talking about anyway, we just put some footage on it and sat at our desks and talked about it. I don’t necessarily feel it was overly unique content. Even though we did get somewhere with it and now the [YouTube] channel serves as a repository for VODs that Jason and I have done for ESL, so that's kind of nice. There a lot of old school Overwatch stuff on there for people who are interested. We were really into it. The concept really struck me as well. I’d never played arena shooters before—except Unreal Tournament, that was back when I was 12 years old, like “xXxSniperMasterxXx” age, just running around on my Australian dial-up [laughs]. I had never played [them] before. I had a feeling that I loved casting CS, but I didn’t love the game. I didn’t love the experience of playing matchmaking. I thought it was garbage. League of Legends was the same—I loved casting it, but I didn’t love the game.

One important thing for me is not beating everyone in my craft, but living up to my potential, which is sufficient enough to where one day I could be the best. I just sat there thinking like, “This game really reaches out to me and I enjoy it. I haven’t played that many shooters since Call of Duty 4 and a bit of CS, here and there.” So, I’m already interested in the game now— that's a good start. I’ve started to read more into it and look at videos, and look at material, and try and get a feel for the game. I love the [vibrancy] of the universe. There was a huge variety of ways to play the game. What I loved is that you could have a style and you could have an approach and it would all sort of work out. When the game came out, I got into the closed beta. Blizzard must have seen our god-awful channel and threw us a bone, maybe a pity invite to the closed beta. [laughs]

We played it nonstop, we absolutely loved it. For me, I didn’t even realise [Overwatch] would suit my style so well until I actually start casting it, but I like a lot of excitement. For me, it’s really important to convey my excitement in an authentic manner, obviously combining that with proper delivery, and this is a game I could get excited about. At that first Overwatch event at the TakeOver, we were just a bunch of guys looking for friendship, a fun game, and possibly even a career. And we all sort of stuck with it. The game, casting it, it’s the hardest game I’ve casted and I say that after I’ve casted a ton of titles. [Overwatch] is like trying to catch a waterfall with a spoon. There is so much information and you need to be very good at prioritizing information. You need to be very good at picking it out. I love the challenge of that. I love the pace of the game and I like a fairly fast paced game. For example, in World of Tanks, the hardest thing to do was make it remotely exciting or high octane. When these guys are moving at 5km per hour and they can fire every 22 seconds. Like, stick a fork in me. [laughs]

So, that's why. It’s really a combination of those things. It’s a really vibrant game. The concept, while not necessarily unique, has been applied in a unique way. There is a lot of variation and there are a lot of possibilities. I love a game where you can play on the same map,but it always plays out differently. I’m passionate about the game. I wish I had more time to play it.  

To wrap it up with a neat little bow, thank you so much for taking time to come sit and chat with me. It was awesome. As always, the final words for the interview are yours.

Big thank you’s to ESL for helping develop me as a caster as time has gone on. My time with them is coming to an end soon. So, I just wanted to give a lot of love to all the guys, Joe Miller especially [for] helping me develop. Also, Jason Kaplan for putting up with me [laughs]. As we’ve gone on, he has been a good friend as well as a casting partner, which is really important.

And big shout out to everyone who watches Overwatch Esports—everyone who gives feedback and gets on the Competitive subreddit because I know people complain about the viewership being low, but you guys are there first. The support that they’re giving right now is what is going to make us great and keep us going. And that for me is really big, where people love the game as much as I do and we can share that.

Signed, Uber

Mitch "Uber" Leslie

Joseph “Volamel” Franco has followed esports since the MLG’s of 2006. He started out primarily following Starcraft 2, Halo 3, and Super Smash Bros. Melee. He has transitioned from viewer to journalist and writes freelance primarily about Overwatch and League of Legends. If you would like to know more or follow his thoughts on esports you can follow him at @Volamel.

Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment and ESL.