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:
-
Blizzard’s various incidents/controversies
-
The shift to OW2 and all the confusion/anger around that
-
The battle pass / shop pricing / F2P monetization complaints
-
Cancellation of PVE mode
-
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):
-
Do you think about Overwatch at all these days?
-
Did you drop it because of Blizzard, OW2’s launch, monetization, balance, something else?
-
From the outside, does it feel “fine now”, “permanently tainted”, “kind of irrelevant”, or just background noise?
-
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.
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.
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).
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...
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!