Overwatch 2 now: how does it look to you?
I get the feeling that, outside its own communities, Overwatch has mostly slipped out of the wider conversation.
We've had:
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Blizzard’s various incidents/controversies
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The shift to OW2 and all the confusion/anger around that
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The battle pass / shop pricing / F2P monetization complaints
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Cancellation of PVE mode
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General live-service fatigue
Most of that hasn’t really been “fixed”, but I'm not seeing nearly as much noise about it anymore, good or bad.
My own (slightly biased) view as someone still playing:
As a now free-to-play, live-service game with ongoing updates and "events", I feel like OW2's cosmetic pricing is (unfortunately) pretty standard compared to similar big titles. I'm not saying that's good, I think aggressive monetization is a wider industry problem, but within that landscape, the model itself doesn't feel uniquely outrageous to me if the goal is keeping a big, polished game running long-term.
I also doubt the actual dev team has much control over pricing, so that part lands more on Blizzard/ABK as a company (shocker).
Setting that aside: purely in terms of gameplay, the game currently feels the best it ever has to me. There's a good variety of modes, and things like the new Stadium mode feel very different from the usual Quick Play/Comp loop while still keeping the core of what makes Overwatch fun: the heroes, the readability, how smooth and well-designed everything feels.
What I'd like to hear from you:
Especially if you're not deep in the OW ecosystem anymore (or never were):
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Do you think about Overwatch at all these days?
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Did you drop it because of Blizzard, OW2’s launch, monetization, balance, something else?
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From the outside, does it feel “fine now”, “permanently tainted”, “kind of irrelevant”, or just background noise?
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If you never really played it: is there anything that would actually make you try Overwatch 2 in its current state?
And if you are still playing or following it closely, I'm also interested in how you feel about the state of the game vs peak OW1 / early OW2, especially whether it's earned back any trust or enthusiasm.
Not trying to rehash every incident in detail, just curious how the game and its reputation land for people who aren’t immersed in it every day.
I stopped playing after OW2 launched because I didn't like what they made the game into. OW1 was a much better game, and I'm still kinda salty about the fact that Blizzard just stole that game from me. I did try OW2 again a couple of months ago, but the whole game just felt alien to me. I miss the OW1 golden days.
It also doesn't help that everyone I used to play OW1 with also stopped playing for pretty much the same reason.
I've heard this from a lot of people. For me, purely on gameplay, many OW2 changes (5v5, faster pace, etc.) actually clicked. I'm curious what specifically felt alien vs OW1 for you. Was it mainly 5v5, or did the later disappointments pile up and wipe out anything in its favor?
5v5 is part of why I didn't like OW2. Having only one tank on your team means that you're guaranteed to lose if you have a bad one. I used to love playing tank in the OW1 days because it felt like you could really guide your team to victory, together with your tank buddy. Now you're just on your own and the only thing you can really do is pick a good counter to the enemy tank and hope they don't switch up. It's basic rock paper scissors now. DPS became way too dominant, and they pretty much removed hard CC as well.
It's just not what Overwatch 1 was, and they stole that game from us.
The updated 6v6 mode is fun and feels pretty OW1, but nobody wants to play tank again.
They replaced both 5v5 open queue playlists with a new 6v6 open queue, but with a "max 2 tanks" rule to prevent it from turning into GOATS. This format also gets separate tank balancing than 5v5, with off-tanks functioning closer to how they did in OW1.
This isn't really the case anymore. DPS is arguably the toughest role and has been for a while. The new perks system adds additional mild punishment for counterswapping, gives heroes options for better dealing with their own counters, and even restores some crowd control.
They've been doing Overwatch Classic events where they add a playlist that presents the game mostly as it existed as of a certain OW1 patch (1.0, Moth Meta, GOATS, etc.)
These have been fun, but also very eye opening. Though mechanically identical to their corresponding OW1 patches, these modes don't actually play like OW1 back then, because the community knowledge of how to play Overwatch in general has changed so much.
Probably the most notable example of this is the GOATS meta mode, which really is no longer GOATS as it was 5 years ago. Brigitte is still a major force, but Doomfist now dominates lobbies in a way he didn't before because the playerbase is way better with the character, positioning, and target prioritization than they used to be.
I mean, completely changing how he plays, his moveset, and even how he's classed (tank instead of DPS) may have something to do with this too
The GP was referring to the Overwatch Classic mode where all gameplay is reverted to a specific OW1 patch, leading to DPS Doomfist dominating lobbies.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying, allow me to clarify:
These limited time modes fully revert the map pool, hero selection, abilities, and balancing to the respective OW1 patch. When GOATS Meta is available in Arcade, you get DPS Doomfist exactly as he existed during Brig's reign of terror in 2018. Despite this, the real world balancing of this mode is notably different than it was 7 years ago.
I don't think getting used to playing a wildly different version of Doomfist over the last 3 years has made players better at DPS Doomfist, I think it boils down to the community as a whole just having a more thorough understanding of the game's fundamentals which haven't changed and that allows more players to better utilize DPS Doomfist's kit.
I had, another comment caught me out too. I'm not going to say it's been too long since I played (I'"m enjoying Rivals more currently), but evidently it's been too long for me to contribute significantly to the conversation
Thanks for clarifying :)
OW2 was a product of breaking every promise they ever made to the community. My wife and I loved OW1, being one of the first people on at launch to play the hell out of it. It was a fun way to scratch my competitive itch. But OW2 was promised to everyone as a standalone co-op game. Then it slowly morphed into a compete replacement of OW1 that changed everything that made OW1 fun.
The writing was on the wall when the director left the company, he clearly was holding back this flood of BS and once Kaplan was gone, it was open season on ruining the game in the goal of improving the bottom line.
Jeff Kaplan deserves a lot of blame for how OW2 went down, but none of this was really known publicly at the time it was happening.
I think chasing PvE the way they did was a mistake. It should have been developed as a separate product, with a more ground up rethinking of the game's mechanics and heroes around the needs of a story focused PvE game.
The current team, headed by Aaron Keller, may not be delivering on Kaplan's promises for the game, but I think they've done a good job making Overwatch into something enjoyable again. The perks system and new Stadium mode they've added this year have added some of that variety into the game that was originally promised by PvE. Stadium in particular works those skill tree ideas into something that I think much better fits the game's core identity.
The current team is also much more responsive to community feedback, rapidly rolling out balance changes when needed and providing generally very good communication about the state of the game and where they want to take it going forward.
The OP lists out most of my reasons nicely, as someone who dropped roughly halfway through OW1's lifespan:
Blizzard as a company no longer meeting the scale of "how essential is their product" vs "how awful is it to support them" for me personally.
Community toxicity, something I have zero tolerance for anymore.
Every change I'm aware of that OW2 made is a negative for me.
I'm getting old and disabled enough that playing a FPS competitively (which I'd have to do, I'm not casual when it comes to my hobbies) isn't viable even if I wanted to.
In general, what the community and/or developer team want for balance is at odds with what I'd want, which made the meta less enjoyable over time (I had quit by GOATs but would have loved a meta like that, and I recall being annoyed by the Symmetra rework, role queue, and the idea of a 5v5/1 tank format when my preferred role was tank.)
Really though, I'm done with the company. Otherwise, Hearthstone Battlegrounds surely would have ate up a lot of my time as someone who really wants and can't find a viable multiplayer auto battler that fits my needs, but I was well clear of HS before that came out. Instead, I've experienced several others only to find that they're either ran by people I can't support, or they gatekeep me via timers too aggressive for my APM. There's a lot more I could say if it weren't veering off-topic...
Once Upon a Galaxy just had an expansion, and it's by the same team that made Storybook Brawl. It scratches a lot of the itches for me of characters smacking into one another and numbers going brr.
Thanks, though I'm aware and don't see fit to trust anything from the Storybook Brawl team. While FTX/LSV/Crypto were major negatives from SBB, they weren't the only things going poorly with SBB (balancing, community PR, and other things I've tried to memory hole.) I've seen and in some cases played a few of the attempts to replicate what was good about SBB, but there's always something bad enough to drive me away within a few months. I'd rather not go into it in further detail publicly, but to anyone reading who is familiar with SBB's scene, my alias here is not a coincidence and there's tons I could say privately on the topic.
Instead, nowadays I've been developing my own take on the genre, off and on over the last few years, which started as a "what-if" experiment and ended up grabbing my attention enough to expand massively. I have a functional game with AI and local multiplayer support, but due to various reasons don't have what's needed to take it from a fun project into something I can distribute and feel good about. The premise is "What if the player had RPG-like stats, drafted cards and stat gains, then played their deck War+jRPG-style against random players until only one player had lives remaining", and while the content is definitely there, its lacking in most of the other aspects that make a game worth playing to most (presentation/UI, budget, art, onboarding, social network for the skills I lack, etc.)
Far as recent auto battlers go, I'm probably going to try out Vivid World that released on the 5th. It seems to be focused on co-op relative to Vivid Knight and that might be a fun twist. I'm also aware of Turnbound releasing later this month, but like most inventory/backpack management games its too clicky for me to play comfortably.
Do let me know if something comes of the personal project, and if Vivid World scratches your itch.
I recently switched to full time linux. And I was surprised to hear that Overwatch just works it even has a Gold Rating.
So I redownloaded it and I really liked it. I was a bit confused because when I used to play a lot I would use the teamfinding mechanic ingame. So I do kinda miss that.
But other than that because I'm an Ana one-trick I found it a bit confusing with all of these new heros. Atleast for the first few games.
I still like the game and it's also very fun. I think it would be way more fun if I had people to play with consistently because playing alone kinda sucks and is very demotivating.
I think that is the reason why I had basically a OW2 phase for a few weeks when I would basically play it every evening and then just suddenly stop playing it.
I think for a complete new player it's really hard to get into the game just because there is so so much to learn. With all the heroes all the abilities all the ults etc etc. Also I there are a lot of maps. Which I still get confused about. But luckily there is a system in place where people can pick and ban the maps so i like that. Also the new system of where you ban heroes I think I also really like.
I think overall the game is in a very good state and can be really fun.
I forgot about the "looking for a team" feature again, every now, and then I get reminded of its existence in the past. I don't know why it was removed or even when, since I didn't really use it much, but it was really useful.
Also, I understand that it's difficult for a new player, that's the exact same reason I have not been able to enjoy League of Legends, for example. There's not a middle point between adding new content to make the game feel fresh to your current player base and not make it overwhelming for newcomers. That's a big problem of live-service games in general as well, and something they tried to balance when they locked heroes behind a progression system. I'm fairly certain it was removed because of the critic against it (from already experienced players, mostly).
Btw we have a tildes discord dedicated to those of us with awkward or infrequent gaming schedules (usually due to kids) and no pressure to play / the understanding you may need to leave at any time.
Overwatch working nearly-perfectly on Linux is a relatively new thing, but boy am I glad it finally does. It was the one deal-breaker keeping me back from my yearly attempts at switching to Linux. But as of the beginning of this year, all those issues went away and I'm finally a happy Linux camper.
I really do miss the Looking for Group feature! Its become so much harder to find people to group up with, which is a shame because the game is infinitely better with some friends.
I found Lutris worked flawlessly a couple years ago - d'you mean OW didn't work for you earlier when using Steam exclusively, or did Lutris let you down in a way it didn't for me?
The issue I had specifically was with the game taking ~20 minutes of gameplay time to increase beyond 30fps and stop stuttering as it loaded the DXVK cache. I had a similar issue on Windows as well from ~2021-2024, but it only took about 45 seconds of gameplay to clear. I also got an AMD 6700XT around the time the issue started, so it may have been an AMD glitch.
I'm not sure if I didn't give it enough launches to fully set the cache during my past attempts, but I've only had some minor hiccups with Overwatch this time around, most of them at the very beginning. I also did try it through Steam this go-around as well, and that's also subjectively seemed to help. Though I think its mostly the recent generations of Proton maturing for some combination of Overwatch/my hardware.
Mine routinely took a bit to compile shaders every launch, but following that Flatpak-Lutris matched your Windows experience (framerates smoothing out within one game, often nothing noticable/done by the time I made it past the menu).
My guess would have been to try using Lutris installed through Flatpak, and that might be worth exploring if there are other games that Steam/Proton struggles with day-1 support on in the future, but for now it's more "Congrats on getting everything working!"
Thanks for following up too, even if I took a day or two to be able to read it
Overwatch has been a major part of my life since 2017. I met my now-wife on Overwatch 1! And I spent a few hundred hours scrimming with a team, running/competing in community tournaments, and making countless new friends along the way. So I guess I'm coming at this with a bit of rambling high-level no-life player perspective!
I just recently retired from teamplay two months ago (and thus the game as a whole, since I'm way overdue for a break) due to a combination of burnout and not really liking the current direction of the game. OW1 is certainly the better game to play in my mind, primarily due to the differences in game-play philosophy.
I scrimmed around 4k-4.4k for pretty much the entirety of OW2's lifespan and, with some exaggeration and exceptions, there were really only two metas at the high level:
The lack of meaningful hero and gameplay variety just got quite stale quite quickly, especially as someone that much preferred the slower-paced gameplay philosophy of Overwatch 1. Granted, Overwatch 1 also had a similar problem of stale metas, but I admit to enjoying the Overwatch 1 stale metas more. Double Shield my beloved, I will forever miss you.
They also removed from competitive play every single one of my top three favorite maps during Overwatch 2's lifetime: Hanamura, Hanaoka, and Temple of Anubis. (I've been told I have bad opinions on map types!)
There was also a year-long issue in competitive play where they released deliberately strong new heroes and locked them behind either paying for the battle pass or a battle pass XP gate. Thankfully they saw reason within a few hero releases, though it shouldn't have taken that long.
I still think Overwatch 2 is superior in most every other way aside from gameplay, balancing, and monetization. I love how active the devs have been in the community, especially recently. I love their recent yearly refreshes of the game, adding in things like perks and hero bans. And when they add in a new system, its usually the best in the hero shooter genre (yes I'm calling you out, Marvel Rivals awful hero banning system)! The Overwatch 2 devs consistently deliver lately, and its just shame for me that they're delivering in the wrong direction for my enjoyment. Still, I will always love my time with Overwatch for the friends and now literal family I made along the way.
I'm in a similar boat to you. I had over 1k hours in OW1, most which was during the 2020-22 graveyard era, 1k more in OW2, and scrimmed for a few hundered hours after season 9.
I think I was fortune to have a coach that wanted to focus on fundamentals instead of practicing the meta. Our teamwork was initially quite poor so we would just force Symm comp (before pros picked up on how strong she was). Learning to IGL on that hero was incredibly rewarding. I always loved the teamplay aspect of this game, even with randoms. I do agree the default setup of most OW2 comps is pretty monotonous, the only thing that really changes is the tank and the job of the role is not as varied as it used to be.
I don't know if it's because I'm better at the game or just older/burnt out/whatever, but OW2 definitely doesn't hit the same way as the first game. I remember playing game after game night after night, always wanting to play one more and figure out how to improve. I could play into double shield all day and I still would want to go again, it was figuratively like crack. The same feeling just never came with OW2, even when the metas are "good". I think in its attempt to make the game more appealing to a wider audience it lost a lot of complexity and adversity that made it so addicting for me.
This is more specific to when the game was abandoned, but during that era it really felt like there was a sense of community in the player base that was lost in OW2. There was no reason to play the game other than your enjoyment of it so you'd run into the same people every game and just passively learn to synergize with them. After going f2p, introducing the battle pass system and other live service incentives, the social aspect doesn't feel as alive. The gameplay of OW2 is inherently more selfish, and the most common advice given to new players is to just turn off all comms to avoid experiencing toxicity. After they reintroduced 6v6, I feel like some of that community came back, at higher ranks it's a small community with the same kind of "be happy with what you got" vibe.
Stadium is really fun with friends as a non-serious "competitive" experience, until it becomes grating. I think the mode may eventually have the potential to justify the 2 in Overwatch 2, but as of right now it feels like it's in a live beta test. It really exemplifies what the Overwatch team has always been great at; there are tons of fun abilities and the UI and FX are extremely polished. Unfortunately it shares a lot of the same issues with the OW2 in terms of balance and lack of macro gameplay consideration.
Ultimately it's one of the best feeling and performing fps game engines out there. The movement still feels incredible with some of the most satisfying weapons and abilities in a shooter, and you can hit your frame cap very easily. I imagine it's extremely fun for new players if they can get past the chaos. Even though I despise the meta at the moment and will probably be taking a break for a while, there's no game that scratches the same itch as Overwatch. If anything watching the finals will motivate me to play for a while until the reality of OW2 pub games sets in.
We're in a very similar boat indeed.
I loved playing Sym in the TP comp! I'm on the quiet side by nature but after having my coach drill into me how active I had to comm in TP comp, it became so fun and rewarding! That month of Sigma/Sym/Bastion being the meta comp around the middle of OW2 was probably my favorite OW2 meta off the top of my head -- except the patch where Pharah boop did 50 damage, but that's my bias as a Pharah main.
I really feel like the graveyard years of OW1 were a great period for the community. The jokes about OW being a dead game were annoying at the end, but aside from that, it felt so tight-knit. Reading your comment also made me remember how much I miss the LFG system. One of my duos would always start an LFG group to get a 6-stack going, and it was just so great seeing people hop in and out while trying our best together. So many times in OW2 I've really missed the ability to just find a stack in-game through LFG.
Stadium ironically is what finally shook my belief in the future of OW2. Not through any fault of the mode itself - I think its pretty great - but because of behind the scenes dev team stuff that makes me feel like they're shifting priority away from the main game mode. The Season 18 mid-season patch (Sept 2025) had a change-log with zero developer comments on the main mode balance changes but a paragraph for every single Stadium balance change. Its a minor thing, but when I read those patch notes it really struck me that Stadium had been/would be the main focus in terms of dev attention for the next little while. Couple that with balance changes that are just perk updates while only minorly touching the base kits of heroes and I lost faith that the short-term of OW2 would be fun for me.
I didn't mean to get so negative lol. Because you're right that its such an amazing feeling game and every other shooter I've played really can't compare with the feel (with the possible exception of Apex Legends but that game went downhill long ago). Just reading your final paragraph and thinking about the feel of the game made me want to play a few games just now, but I must resist.
I actually quite like OW2—the gameplay is tight and fast-paced, patches are quick, and they've been experimenting a ton with features like perks and the Stadium mode.
6v6 is even still continuously supported as a mode and OW1 classic reappears as an event from time to time. I quite like 6v6, but classic is kind of a mess—everyone is much better at the game now, so it plays out quite differently despite being a fairly faithful recreation (minus some engine-specific techs like Mercy's OG superjump).
I'm pretty indifferent to the monetization—all heroes are free now so they only sell cosmetics, and I have several good skins for basically all characters so I have no reason to care about the existence of a skin, no matter how expensively priced it is. They could sell them for $2k and I would still be fine because it's keeping the game free. Lootboxes can't be bought anymore so it's arguably a significantly more ethical profit model without relying on gambling addiction.
It's also been revealed in recent years that the game's former director, Jeff Kaplan, was actually responsible for a lot of what went wrong with OW2. Rather than capitalize on their hit GOTY shooter, he wanted to gut it to transition it back to its MMO roots by first forcing it into a coop shooter (which would then be gutted to shift into an MMO). Unsurprisingly, the same things that went wrong during the development of the original MMO happened again and the team was left with a mess. It's only in the previous years with Kotick out of the picture that they've finally recovered and started delivering content at lightning speed.
Random side note: the free battle pass gives you premium currency and it's also extremely easy to complete compared to other live service games. Good stuff, although it would be better if you could progress bought passes at any time.
One thing I will say is worse is the sense of a community. It's in a similar vein to WoW where social interactions still happen all the time, but it's fairly surface-level as you're immediately shuttled off into the next match for maximum engagement and minimal confrontation. Bring back the post game screen!
Honestly once they started switching things up for OW2 I had most of my friends fall off for various reasons and I eventually did as well. The drama at Blizzard didn’t help but it started to feel stale too. Sounds they started improving it with rebalances and new modes but at this point I think Marvel Rivals now kind of fills that space for me. That said hero shooters in general are getting less and less popular among my group and it may well be that we’re just getting older and preferring less twitchy/sweaty games.
For a slightly different take, OW, from the get go, felt like it has safety rails on.
It's ALMOST interesting, but much like HotS (the moba, not SC) while there's a lot of creative ideas, they're balanced in such a way that often feels very boring. So much of blizzard balance feels like they're working backwards from WoW's "you must do X and then Y or else" design.
I have a friend who was(/is?) really into it but I pretty much only ever think about the game when he brings it up (last time was ~6 months ago).
Actually, I heard about the crossover with Nerf in Aug from somewhere else. Skillup's "This Week In Video Games" probably.
I was never into it myself. I haven't been into any online multiplayer games in a very long time.
I played OW1 at launch, but not much more after that. It was incredibly fun while it was still new, and no-one knew the maps or characters well, and you could do silly things like stacking the payload with tanks / turrets / bastion.
The lore seemed good in a TF2 style way, but over time it became pretty clear they weren't doing anything interesting with it. Same with the balance changes, every time I heard about a character being reworked they sounded far less interesting and the mechanics in play became far more narrow.
I might have returned for the PvE mode but since that never materialised... I figure OW2 seems basically an entirely different game, something much closer to competitive shooters like CS:GO or Valorant, and I'm entirely disinterested in those games.
I bought OW1 and sunk a couple hundred hours in, making it to diamond as a Lucio/Zen main. I got a little tired of the competitive scene, the feeling of "worst player loses", and the fact that it was normal to have a sub-50% win rate.
By the time OW1 shut down, I was long gone- COVID brought in a new era of online gaming that saw many new friends get PCs, and I had no desire to advocate for a Blizzard title in lieu of genuinely interesting new studios. I never advocated for OW2, and probably dissuaded a few people when they showed marginal interest.
When Marvel Rivals came out, many people were interested and we played a lot- several friends have high hundreds of hours now and we had many game nights with 8+ player custom matches. I enjoyed it, but didn't get as invested as I had with OW1; just knowing that the same competitive concerns still existed. Those who hadn't played OW sunk their teeth in a lot more and came away with most of the same views.
Now, pretty much everyone has moved on from that too. We have a glut of great games and nobody is willing to suffer through a marginal PvP experience for long. We're all playing ARC raiders this week and have myriad indie titles in discussion for our winter game night rotations.
So, all in all, OW2 just never really registered as more than a blip. Microsoft-Activision-Blizzard is not building anything remarkable, and the goodwill/brand allegiance dried up long ago.
Do you think about Overwatch at all these days?
Occasionally. I enjoy(ed) the lore as well as the game itself back in the day, but when OW2 killed my interest in the gameplay (and the glacial pace at releasing lore to boot) I fell off hard.
Did you drop it because of Blizzard, OW2’s launch, monetization, balance, something else?
OW2 launch. The fact they took OW1's version away was such a middle finger; OW2 may be very similar but that difference is the key for me. Plus, the sheer fact they actually took a game away, even if all we could do on it was vs bots or local multiplayer.
From the outside, does it feel “fine now”, “permanently tainted”, “kind of irrelevant”, or just background noise?
Not permanently tainted; Classic mode was a big step in the right direction. If they just released OW: Classic as a standalone title (and you know, gave it to OW1 purchasers) I'd go back in a heartbeat.
I got embarrassingly into OW in my personal heydey of it, I dropped WoW and pretty much every other game for Overwatch. I even dropped TF2 once custom game modes came out. Plus, even though OW1 lootboxes were pretty easy to get for free I bought a huge amount of them over the years simply because I wasn't spending money on other games, so why not?
My friends and I got really into Overwatch 1 shortly after release but we had already moved on before OW2 was known to be a thing.
For me, there were two main reasons for quitting OW1.
First, Blizzard was really trying to force the competitive scene into existence and it felt like people like my friends and I who just want to play casually were suffering because of it. The constant hero changes and rebalances became a chore to keep up with.
Second, I was really into the lore but it eventually became apparent that Blizzard has no intentions to do anything interesting with it. I thought there was potential for some really neat narrative things and I actually even liked the PVM stuff they released during special events. This of course ended up going nowhere. There were jokes in the fandom that over the course of two years Blizzard moved events in Overwatch forward by about five minutes.
With all the stuff about the culture at Blizzard being exposed and OW2 virtually cancelling or reverting everything that made it OW2 (except the monetization stuff) I don't see myself returning any time soon. It feels like a special kind of presumtuous to take away a game I paid for and replace it with a "better" game that has a more predatory monetization system.
Edit: to answer your first bullet point, I pretty much don't think about OW at all these days. When I see something about it my reaction is typically something like "I wonder how much of a mess it's become now."
Of my time playing multiplayer games, both older and modern, the only title I ever got angry at was Overwatch.
In retrospect, the thing that actually bothered me about the game was that it was so team and teamfight-focused that I could never find the fun in losing - I would always be mad at my team for not coordinating or myself for falling short of my own expectations.
In a game like TF2 or Battlefield the teams were so large that it felt like winning vs losing never really mattered, as long as you had fun. Even in other smaller games that were team-oriented, like Dota 2 or Rainbow Six: Siege, I felt like the game had enough mechanical complexity to chew into that even in a loss I could come away felling good because I learned something or had my own little small victories.
So yeah, I stopped having fun with Overwatch long before the sequel came out. I played a bit of Overwatch 2 and it felt like pretty much the same game. I think the only thing that could bring me back would be if they added a 12v12 mode or some other silly mode that I could feel like I could play the game for fun with.