Almost 3 years ago now, you probably had ideas and a vision of what OW2 was going to look like in the future. Now that we’re about 17-18 seasons into the game, did OW2 change and become the game you thought it was going to be back then?
For me, sadly, the game is far less than what I imagined.
I imagined we were going to get animated calling cards, icons, sprays, etc. I imagined there was going to be a new and improved progression system with meaningful hero mastery rewards. I imagined there was going to be a new and improved social feature, i.e., a guild system. I imagined there were going to be new and meaningful ranked play rewards.
These are just a few of the things I imagined the PVP side of the game would have by now. If I were to list the expectations I had for the PVE, I’d end up writing a whole book.
It slowly feels like the “2” in the title is deserved, but not quite there yet. There needs to be something that can make up for PvE that will be an actual addition to the game that many players want (not talking about general things like new heroes, new modes etc), idk what it could be, but just something.
I just need to point out that there will have been 10 seasons and not one memorable thing happened in any of them other than continued discourse about 6v6 v 5v5, several balance complaints for basically every hero, and arguments over which hero deserves skins or not.
The game is miserable, the community is bitter. Nobody is really happy, just lying to themselves.
I was at BlizzCon in 2019 when OW2 was announced, I thought we were going to get a full sequel game where I would have to pay the $40 again but that didn’t matter to me so long as I got to play PvE as my favorite heroes, years later and this game is nothing of what it could be and should be.
I was also at BlizzCon in 2014 when OW was announced, such a surreal moment, I couldn’t believe my eyes at all. The message was clear, a future worth fighting for, aspiring to be the best one could be. That was the message, it’s almost gone now because everything costs $20 too much when they already said just weeks ago that it doesn’t fund content or anything, and we didn’t get hardly anything we were promised. 5v5 doesn’t make a sequel nor do new heroes or maps, that’s just OW1 release cadence but with worse gameplay.
I just didn’t expect the devs to be so obstinate about dealing with AntiNade and Snipers, and just kinda being kinda apathetic about equalizing the queue time popularity between roles.
Instead they are chasing after winrates…, when the math doesn’t even make sense. Without much of a sense of why they are even doing it if the math was accurate. Like what’s the purpose?
It’s got damn near nothing to do with hero usage rate variety, i.e. Realistic Balance.
I was thinking about making a post on this exact thing. Lol
“What could the developers add or change to justify the “2”?”
My suggestion was going to be to add one interchangeable ability to every single hero. I think that would be more than enough to justify the 2 in Overwatch’s title.
Yes it was/is.
Back in 2019 I thought to myself: Uh, what’s the point? If PvE is like Archives it won’t be really that good. High replayability? How are you going to do that without just inflating your opponent’s stats?
Turns out PvE is now canceled because it was that bad.
Why 5v5, the game loses so much depth. Well at least it’s easier to balance.
fast forward, 5v5 was just to reduce the queue times, tanking has gotten even worse, the balance has gotten even worse in some cases (counterpick meta) and half the roster had to be reworked, which meant the hero got OP / Broken and sometimes hated even more.
F2P? Are you serious? You’re just doing that to milk the players.
Yep, the assumption was correct, they even monetized the heroes which was an absolute shot in the oven.
I hope they don’t ruin the lore, I hope the new skins are at least explained.
Um yes, the lore team was even too incompetent to create a local timeline and completely destroyed a new character in terms of logic. The skins make absolutely no sense (neither for the hero nor for the story) and exits only because of marketing to be able to promote OW2 as its own new thing.
I saw OW2 as a PvE intensive game where I would come together with fellow PvE tryhards I added on bnet after completing all the archives achievements with. Then we would go through the story and hero missions on the highest difficulties to complete all challenges, achievements, get the top 500 scores, create multiple builds and strats for our mains etc.
Then once the story mode is finished I could watch all the pre and post mission animations like a movie and since I speed ran the story I would screen record it and upload it to YouTube and rack at least 100k views.
Finally if I was bored and laying in bed or on a long trip I would easily just pick up my steam deck and play through hero missions for fun and not be worried about toxicity since we’re players facing AI bots. Plus it wouldn’t go to waste since I would be progressing whatever hero I used for the mission.
I’d hoped for better matchmaking but apart from that? Pretty much. In some ways OW2’s gone further than I imagined it would; I’ve enjoyed healing being nerfed in season nine, even if it has been done in the clumsiest way possible and will probably get walked back over time anyway.
With lower healing around, the game’s closer to the spirit of release OW1 to me, which is cool.
Solo campaign
Group “weekly raid” PvE events (12v1)
Clan system with monthly battles (max 12v12)
Upgradable trees for any PvE instance
Skins unlocked via progress per hero
Souvenirs replaced by global buffs per PvP match
Revamped swap mechanic (Players choose two or three heroes per match they can switch to in spawn)
Now I dunno. It’s definitely not the game I hoped for but I’m glad people are still enjoying it.
Not really, but that’s pretty bad considering how low my expectations were.
When I first heard about OW2, back in 2019, I wasn’t interested in it at all. I didn’t really care to buy what essentially felt like a PvE expansion, so wasn’t planning on getting it since it would have crossplay anyways. I was happy my friends that did want PvE to have something to look forward to, but for me it meant nothing.
Fast forward to 2022, when I find out a few weeks before OW2 goes live that they’re overwriting Overwatch for it, and it’s going free to play. Since I didn’t care about the PvE and OW2 was a PvE focused sequel, I hadn’t been keeping up with OW2 news at all and missed the announcement 90% of the time between the game being announced and the update going live saying that they were getting rid of the ability to play Overwatch.
So my 2019 expectations were “Overwatch 2 is going to be $40 for a bunch of archive missions, and I’m not going to play it.” My 2022 expectations were “if they’re removing Overwatch for this and making it free to play, it’s going to be bad,” and I was mostly worried about microtransactions.
Yet somehow everything kind of got worse than I thought. Since I hadn’t been keeping up with the game, I didn’t expect them to drop a player from each side and ultimately change the game balance (season 1 was not fun to play for me and I attribute a good chunk of that to 5v5.) I didn’t expect them to gate heroes off behind a paywall or grindwall, releasing most heroes in a too powerful state for the paying players, then nerfing them right as the grinders managed to get to them (which I know they’re going back on and that’s a good thing, but it shouldn’t have happened for over a year to begin with.) I didn’t expect for them to remove the ability to play the game I did enjoy playing. I didn’t expect them to cancel the whole raison d’etre of OW2 in the first place (the PvE) meaning all the changes were for nothing. I didn’t expect it to take over half a decade of weekly grinding to unlock everything you’d want for even just a single hero.
I had basically no good expectations for OW2, and yet to this day I am still amazed at how bad a job they did in my opinion.
Resurrected post-2025 edition.
