I’ve played maybe 10 hours total of Overwatch 2 and it is incredibly boring (to me). But it seems to get lots of updates often, heavy monetization which sucks. The steam reviews are scalding. It really makes me wonder… is it that bad? Like really? It’s hard to gauge if the game is thriving or on deaath’s door…
It’s a decent game but a terrible one if you are comparing it to the original Overwatch.
Why? I played OW from beta, stopped playing after all the shitty workplace accusations came out, then played again for 10 or so hours last month.
I didn’t play much competitive (in my recent sessions) but the game seemed like it was in a pretty solid place. The only “major” issue I can think of is that the tank role is incredibly important, which creates a bit of a toxic environment where people are scared to play tank because they get flamed if the team gets rolled. But I think the downsides are worth the benefits, with tank being so important it’s become the core that the rest of the game balances around. Healers have more agency and dealing damage/contributing to elims is a vital part of the role. A lot of the frustrating/cheesy aspects of the game have been removed, scattershot, damage-doomfist, mercy 5-man-res, goats, double shield.
Again, I took a long break from the game, but before that I clocked a lot of hours in competitive. Personally the game feels about as balanced and enjoyable as it’s ever been.
Obviously the monetization is gross and that entire side of the game sucks now but that’s an entirely different conversation.
It’s a decent game but a terrible one if you are comparing it to the original Overwatch.
I’m just genuinely curious why/how it’s still getting updates and people are playing it with the way it’s talked about, they make it sound like the worst game ever
Because despite the bitching it still has a very respectable user base, at least purely looking at the Steam stats:
That’s honestly not that good, when games like CS2 are regularly pulling 2million+.
According to 3rd party websites (that may not have accurate estimates), Overwatch 1 had between 600k-1mil peak concurrent players through a lot of 2020/2021. One of those same websites now says that OW2 had about 140k peak players today when combining all players on all platforms. So it would seem there’s been a huge drop in players.
In my opinion, anyone saying OW2 is worse than the original is saying this for personal reasons and not trying to be objective. OW2 is, in my experience, much more balanced than OW1. Many of the more frustrating aspects of the game have been fixed or removed, and most of the characters added since OW1 seem fun to play and not frustrating to play against.
There are very many valid criticisms one can make of Blizzard. The history of being a shitty workplace, the objectively awful decision to make OW2 a sequel, the treatment of Jeff Kaplan by execs, the monetization, and probably more. None of those criticisms (except monetization to a limited degree) have anything to do with whether or not OW2 is a bad game or not.
But I’m speculating since the person you responded to has not elaborated on any of their views.
Ehh I disagree, I played consistently ow1 for years and ow2 just wasn’t as good.
I mainly missed tank synergies. Without it the game just wasn’t the same. The other tank changes were just insane too. And I preferred the full 6v6 experience.
Then they had to go an monetize the shit out of it, when I already paid for the game! The last straw was either paying for new characters or grinding like hell.
It’s… okay?
It’s a bit hard to describe. Overwatch 1 was a bit magical when it came out. It was the WoW of team FPS. Everyone (and their mother) played it. This made it this fascinating thing where your default way of hanging out with friends would be to be on voicechat and chat away while playing OW.
It’s unbalanced and ridiculous cadre of character loadouts also enabled just about everyone to play the game. Do they have amazing reflexes? Give them Genji or Hanzo. Do they have damn awesome aim? Hanzi, Widow, Cassidy (McCree at the time). Do they not have aim worth speaking of? Symmetra, Mercy, Bastion, Reinhardt, lots of options in fact. So you could always talk friends into buying it, and they’d enjoy it!
Now, of course, as such as game ages, players get better and better at exploiting the imbalances, so naturally there’s a bigger pressure on balancing.
But the crucial breaking point IMO came not with OW2, but a long time before that. When this need for more balancing arose, instead of embracing the ridiculous nature of many character loadouts, Blizzard worked against it. In their desire to become the biggest esport, they saw a need to make every character as skill-based as possible, to focus on individual player contributions and individual aim and reflexes. Lots and lots and lots and lots of balance changes slowly pushed the overall core of the game from first being about finding out who you as a player are, then picking a character fitting you, to having to mold yourself into “an FPS player”, because even Torbjörn, Symmetra, Bastion and Pharah need to aim quite a bit now.
And as this progressed, I could see my friends drifting away from the game. The game became effort to play. Not something you can have in the background while spending an evening chatting along on Discord, catching up. And Overwatch was at its core this social thing, so once some drifted off, so did more and more. And eventually, so did I.
Overwatch 2 was merely… how do I say… the end of this chrysalis stage of Overwatch’s life? What emerged from it was the final form of a more esports and twitch-aim-centric game. Gone were the double tanks leading to extremely slow kill times (which in turn meant players who lacked the reflexes to engage in twitch-gunning no longer had the time needed to react to anything), with it gone were the days of cohesive teams where everyone had a singular role, instead you needed to first and foremost be able to fend for and defend yourself, only then would you integrate with the team. Because otherwise you were long dead already.
But this was merely the result of finalizing the change that began all the way back with early post-release OW1 balancing.
IMO, OW1 could have been an absolutely fantastic social lightweight team FPS, if they had embraces the chaos and non-FPS-y nature of much of it. Instead they abolished it. OW2 is but a shadow of this former glory. It’s a decent enough team FPS, but eh, it’s also nothing special any more.
Used to be that 5 out of 6 on the team could be dead but the 6th was a Mercy with her ult charged. She swoops in and pulls off a hail Mary 5 man resurrection that totally wrecks the opposing team.
Or Lucio was able to speed rush an entire team onto point with a well times speed buff.
Those kinds of whacky plays kept even the most skilled players on their toes.
They patched all that out of the game in the first year or two.
This is really well articulated and puts into words the reason I stopped playing. I was one of those non FPS players who really thrived on Sym and Moira and Mercy and I felt welcomed and appreciated when it first came out. I just had fun and that made me want to try to get better and kept me coming back. As they kept retooling things, especially with Sym 3.0, I felt they were deliberately pushing me and people like me out. Instead of having a fun, wild and playful team game for my friends to all have a good time in, it became just another FPS game.
Thanks for the awesome response. What do you recommend as an alternative? Valorant? TF2?
Deadlock? If you need an invite (does anyone still, I genuinely don’t know?) HMU
Your time in this world is one of your most valuable assets. If a game is incredibly boring to you, you should put it down and play something else that you enjoy.
Look at Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Facebook, etc. Consumers cry and complain but they almost never leave. That always leads to perpetually-increasing exploitation.
So yes, its that bad, and no, its not on death’s door.
Nah, they took the fun out of it to sell skins.
