Overwatch 2

There are thousands of voices to echo when it comes to questioning whether this is truly the successor to a game that was played and loved by many. Instead, I’ll simply say that calling this a sequel is a bit of a stretch.

Here’s a list of some things that changed:

  • Matches have shifted from 6 per team (2 Tanks, 2 DPS, 2 Healers if you play role-queue) to 5v5 (1 Tank, 2 DPS, 2 Healers if you play role-queue). With fewer damage-soaking classes the brawls are a lot more fluid and fast-paced.
  • Doomfist is a tank now. They reduced his damage significantly but increased his survivability, or so they say, compared to the other tanks he feels a bit meh. His ult is practically broken as it does virtually no damage.
  • New hero: Sojourn. Want to play Soldier but also a bit of Ashe and some other classes? This is the class for you.
  • Orisa is crazy aggressive now. As with many of the tanks, the idea is to stand back and soak less while your DPS kills the enemy team. You now do the killing while your DPS struggle to even keep up with your healers for damage.
  • New hero: Kiriko. A fun healer that has some cool utility and movement. The one letdown is an introductory video that specifically refers to her kicking some faces but once in-game there is no kick, only a weak punch. There is also one caveat to the hero, more on that below.
  • No more 2CP (Assault maps). No more Paris, Hanamura, Volskaya, Anubis, and Horizon Lunar Colony. I suppose I understand that it messes up the pacing. But then there are also missing maps like Blizzard World, Rialto, Havana, and Numbani. I have a theory, more on that later as well.
  • New game mode push. Convince a big robot to push a barrier for your team instead of the opposing team. It has some fun elements but honestly, the run from spawn is killer and kills the pacing of the game for me.

So far this all sounds like sort of good changes (except for the missing maps) but it still feels like it could have been a simple patch. They’ve changed bigger things in patches in the past, after all. So why is this Overwatch 2 and not Overwatch 1.9? Let’s look at some other changes they’ve introduced:

  • The game is now free-to-play. This is pretty cool, but we all know F2P comes with a catch.
  • Loot boxes don’t exist anymore. Interesting, but how do you unlock the cool skins, emotes, voice lines and icons?
  • Battle pass has been introduced. Everything is gated behind the battle pass. The free unlocks are terrible and for anyone that didn’t own the original Overwatch, the new hero Kiriko is gated at the very end of the battle pass.

So there we have it. After the original promise of never gating content when people bought Overwatch 1, Blizzard needed a way to renege on that promise. This was the compromise for them, call it a sequel, tell everyone it’s free to play, and throw in a battle pass.

Let’s not forget that while adding some maps, Blizzard removed more than twice as many. Apparently, there are some glitches on those maps that need to be fixed (along with the weather system that’s supposed to affect all maps), but I can’t help but feel that some of them will possibly see a return in future seasons’ battle passes, though that might split the community and fracture your player base.

I can understand that the team behind Overwatch were super keen to put out version 2.0 of their game but I don’t think this is anywhere near what they wanted to put out there. Blizzard could have shipped this (ex-battle pass) as an expansion and I’m sure people would have paid for it. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that Overwatch 2 is a greedy cash grab disguised as a sequel.

The only reason most of us haven’t caught on yet is that existing players already have a bunch of the old stuff unlocked and they got early access to the new hero without having to grind out the battle pass. We’re also all happy to have shorter queues with more people playing. I think that slowly but certainly that veneer will wear thin though. It’s already started for me when I look through my characters and realised I haven’t unlocked anything new since launch. Consequently, I’ll go look at the battle pass screen to see whether there’s nothing I’ve unlocked there only to see almost everything gated behind a “Premium” badge apart from a few, very dull, voice lines.

They’ve announced a new hero for the next season, “Ramattra”, another omnic, which looks amazing but this time only premium battle pass members will have access from day 1. The rest of us will have to grind to level 55 before we get to play him.

I suppose I could just pay for a battle pass, but why would I pay for a game I already owned? In retrospect, we should have seen this coming when Overwatch 1 was entirely “disabled” for the launch of Overwatch 2. Time will tell but I personally hope Blizzard fails and loses at this because it sets a shitty precedent for future “sequels”.