Hello all,
Now that OW2 has been out for a little while, I believe we can and should make a sane assessment of its state and possible futures.
To ease the readability of this very long piece, you can just read the bold text to get the short version.
Before this entire analysis
I’d like to say that I’m in a bit of a special position because over the course of a few months, I’ve gone up and down the ladder from playing only QP to entering Comp as a Silver player, then falling to Bronze, understanding comp play better, and rising to Gold, Plat, and reaching near Diamond.
Although I never played in the really high tiers, I have a very broad POV of the state of the game, from the bottom to the mid-high players.
Also, I was an almost exclusively Tank/Support player because I wasn’t gonna wait on those DPS queue times, although I did play at least a few hours of QP DPS at some point.
I’m not going to talk about the predatory monetization here, just the gameplay.
First, a quick take on OW1’s status over the years:
- The game got older, content aged and got less interesting
- The balance was always a problem in pretty much every stage of the game
- Blizzard’s reaction to balance problems was always slow, and sometimes obscure
- The game was frustrating with BS abilities or broken characters
- As OW2 was planned, content dried to next to nothing and OW1 was essentially abandoned
and probably a few others, but that’s the biggest ones.
Discounting the problems with aging and playerbases dwindling because that’s every game ever, and the lack of content due to OW2, I’d say that Overwatch always suffered from poor balancing and broken characters, and I want to give what’s apparently a hot take to some, but this will never be fixed.
If you took the best dev team ever and had them work for 10 years over perfectly balancing a game with dozens of characters who will each have their own broken ability, damage, or ult, you still wouldn’t get it balanced.
It’s part of the core design of Overwatch that characters will have broken abilities or damage. That only aggravates the difficulty of balancing it.
To compensate for poorer balancing than in other games, OW had one element that got more and more important over time: shields.
What Shields did to Overwatch
It’s important to specify something: shields aren’t really about protection. They are about time and zoning. Having shields didn’t mean that you took no damage. You can dodge and take no damage. You can hide behind a wall and back attack and take no damage. You can have a Winston or Brig do damage through the shield. But shields allowed your DPS to do damage while theirs couldn’t yet. They allowed you to walk towards the enemy with Rein while taking no damage for a time. They allowed to force the fight into a certain area to avoid the shield.
Shields could of course protect from damage, but they were designed to gain time while you walked in on an attack or defended. We’ve all seen that Rein holding his shield to block a Dva Bomb or survive for a bit longer, but the main point of shields was to block a certain path and force the enemy into a certain combat area, or to gain time as you got to the position you wanted your team to take.
Shields were ultimately an enabler for tactical plays.
The abundance of shields in OW meant that you could protect your team from instant fire and preserve your collective HP, but it also slowed down fights to a grind, and that demanded tactics and go-arounds from the players, which in the higher tiers of comp is well understood, but not so in Silver and below (I consider QP to be around Bronze level).
Shieldwatch and general playerbase level
Shieldwatch was hated by some, and as a (former) QP player, I can totally understand why.
I remember vividly playing OW2 beta and thinking that it was better after returning to OW1 and playing against a double shield comp where all I did was poke shields the entire game.
But at that time I didn’t understand flanking or diving. All I knew to do was to shoot at the enemy by walking down main. Several months later, when I played OW2 for real, I had grown from a QP player to a Plat player and my opinion was the exact opposite.
Tactical plays born from all the zoning and area control was one of the most interesting and important parts of Overwatch 1. Shields helped greatly in that.
Overwatch 2 was strongly redesigned around removing the pressure and zoning based tactical gameplay that shields brought.
What does OW2 offer gameplay-wise compared to OW1?
Lots of tiny tweaks and changes of debatable value such as the supports self-healing and the tanks giving less Ult charge, DPS moving faster…but mainly the removal of one tank, in the name of killing Shieldwatch.
The one tank only change is extremely drastic. Sure, it’s killed Shieldwatch, but at what price?
For Tanks:
Overwatch 1 tanks were designed to have a main and off tank, with the possibility of having two mains or two offs. The main tanks were sturdy, not mobile, and almost all had shields. Sigma even had the luxury of swallowing attacks into his HP. The off tanks were highly mobile (Dva, Ball, Winston) or destructive (Hog, Zarya) and could help dive an attack or rush back to the backline. A Zarya could shoulder a Rein or Winston as main tank with ease and massacre divers as well as push an attack very hard.
The tanks in OW1 could hold a frontline fully, with a main tank holding main, an off tank supporting it or holding a side lane, and the main tank could tap out briefly when his health or shields were too low. The off tank could also clean out the backline of divers while the main tank held front.
Tanks had synergies that made the game deep and interesting, fascinating even. They had an incredible depth in placement, team protection, side tank support/helping your main, they had to each be learned, then be re-learned depending on the tank besides you, and they had to be learned on every map. I only played a few hundreds of hours, but there were maps where I never knew how or where to place myself correctly.
Tanks were not about the HP pool or the shields, they were about the ability to decide on the battle area, and to protect their teammates with all sorts of abilities.
Tanks in Overwatch 2 have lost pretty much everything I just cited.
Of course the tank synergy is gone with one tank, but the rest is too, and that is the cause of the majority of the game’s problems.
The one tank system forces the solo tank to choose between one of two options:
- Duel the other tank
- Let the other tank run free
and that’s it.
The absence of a second tank means that if the solo tank stops defending main, he essentially cedes ground. It also means that the concepts of frontline and backline are pretty much crushed. Any DPS can stroll down the side lane and start hacking at the backline without worry. Reapers, Genjis and Sombras just need to walk in and start immediately attacking the supports.
It means that instead of an interesting team-based mechanic of being the main and trusting your off to support you, push them away, or hold the backline, and trying to play with them, you are left all on your own fighting another tank and his supports/DPS and eating all the damage by yourself.
It means that all the tactical aspects of OW1 about main and side, flanking and shield avoiding, have gone from being 50% of victory or defeat to being less than 10% of it.
It means that since Tanks don’t really hold a frontline anymore and have little to no tactical aspect, they are meant to just duel the other tank or chase squishies.
Which in turn means of course, that the “best tank” isn’t about the map, the counter, the objective, or the synergy, but about eliminating the enemy as fast as possible, which brings us to the Rise of Zarya, as this meta should be known.
The only qualifier for a “good tank” now is that he kills fast. So naturally, the “tank” with the biggest DPS of them all is the one that took over everything.
Technically OWL goes for Winston because dive comps, but it’s for the same reasons.
The removal of one tank has entirely taken away all the tactics, depth, and value of the tank role. I’d suggest at this point renaming them to “Big DPS” because for all intents and purposes, that is what they are.
The best example of this is on King’s Row, which IMO was the greatest map OW ever had by quite a lot and its first point was the absolute test of skill for any tank, in attack or defense. KR between the attacking spawn and first point was a microcosm of Overwatch, where you could play almost every character and get value with pretty much none of them being the bad pick. For Tanks, it was the ultimate test of pressure, zoning, deciding to go deep, take hotel, go top, roll around statue, etc.
Now, you just walk in and duel the other tank like every other map in the game. All the questions and tactical plays are reduced to a shell of what they were.
For DPS:
I honestly haven’t played enough DPS in OW1 or 2 to make an opinion here, but from what I’ve seen everyone seems pretty satisfied with the new game. They were, after all, the ones who dealt damage and now are given a game where you can deal damage faster, with less blockers and less punish from tanks. I guess they’re happy about it.
For supports:
Supports had two jobs in Overwatch 1: survive, and have eyes everywhere.
Whichever support you played, you usually did not have enough damage to carry the game, with the exception of Zenyatta and he was a low mobility, high risk flanker. So your main job was to support every defense and every attack.
Help your DPS finish an enemy, help your tank not die, help their tank die first. Be there to heal, to speed, to run away, to finish off, to discord, to clutch a last second heal before death, to rez, to stun, to boop…
Healing was of course expected from supports, but it was arguably a fairly automatic process, just heal whoever is hurt starting with the most at risk. What defined supports is their ability to read who needed healing and where, and to be in the right place at the right time. You had to be able to both read your own team’s plays and the enemy team’s plays, and to use your abilities to help apply pressure at the right spot while relieving pressure on your own team.
Smelling a reaper or genji ult and waiting on your Beat or Transcendence was just as important as seeing your Ashe in a good position and going to damage boost her. The choice between going to kill their flanking Sombra or stay with your main tank to relieve him was a constant question every support had to answer every game. And every game was different not only based on the support you picked, but on the entirety of your team’s picks and their team’s picks.
Support was arguably the class that demanded the deepest understanding of the game and your surroundings. You had to read the entire game while having a character with either less damage or HP than the others, and to be there wherever needed in attack or defense.
Today, supports have the exact same job. Except there is one thing missing, again due to the absence of the second tank: where is my frontline?
Solo Tank and Martyr Supports
In OW2, supports have basically no protection at all. One tank at best holds a point, not a frontline, so long distance characters will shoot at you the whole game. The lack of a second tank means that you will get dived for free. Of course you can hope that your DPS or Tank will come help, or rely on the other support. Except the DPS never peel (like in OW1). And for the solo tank to help, he’d have to let the other tank run free. So now supports are meant to directly fight DPS players, who have much better firepower, mobility, and damage than them, while STILL having to mind all of their team’s plays and try to accompany them.
I cannot describe the level of frustration and pointlessness of playing support like this.
It’s a complete devolution of the role, and very clearly the reason why we’ve gone from Tank being the most demanded role in OW1 to supports in OW2. Supports are not designed, and were never designed, to diff DPS.
If OW1 DPS wanted to get at supports, they needed to try their luck dealing with an off tank finding them, a DPS duelling them, or a duo of supports helping each other. Now, the lack of a frontline on both teams mean that DPS go even further and rarely face incoming DPS, while the lack of the second tank means that there is no “backline cleanup” at all.
Even getting help from the other support is difficult because in OW1, a DPS or Tank in low health could raise his shields or hide somewhere, but with the much faster movement and constant fire in OW2, supports pretty much have to heal forever and can’t stop to go help the other support getting dived. So divers just dive for free.
Also, in the name of yet again accelerating the game’s pace, supports have had several abilities removed for cc, like Brig’s stun. The stun had great tactical value and did only 5 damage, meaning it was useless in a fight, but great for stopping easy ults or abilities. I’ve stopped my fair share of Reaper ults, Dva missiles and even the rare Earthshatter with a shield bash.
Instead now, the bash does more damage. It still does much less damage than any DPS’s attack, while being an ability on a 5s cooldown. OW2’s Brig went from actual game-changing abilities that could be very strong if you read the game right, to doing more damage, and yet much less than DPS damage.
In OW2, I have witnessed Reapers Wraith in straight down main, with everyone seeing them, and press Q to kill 3 teammates. All the while biting my nails that with OW1 Brig, I’d have been itching for such a poor play to punish it with an instant stun. Instead I had to just watch and meekly mace him from a distance, to no value at all.
Speed and damage, not abilities and plays
This “new design” for OW2 is making support play absolutely horrible. And it goes far beyond removing Shieldwatch. It’s not about too many shields but about having an extra amount of speed so that the game feels faster and has less stuns.
It’s trading tactical plays and tit-for-tat ability counter, for a much more direct, to not say dumb, aim for the head and do more damage game design.
This new game design means that supports are now asked to:
- Heal everyone
- Survive from being attacked all the time by characters with better abilities
- Pay attention to the entire game around them while being constantly dogged
- Get yelled at by teammates who don’t peel and don’t get healed when you’re dead
- Respawn and go back to 1.
This is, and I don’t feel like being nice with it, absurdly terrible. It’s gotten to the point where I have seen genjis just waltz in, deflect, and dash out, 3 times in a row, never getting properly punished, never dying, because no stuns, because supports aren’t supposed to diff DPS except if they got surprised or poorly placed. Because Genji can just do it and risk pretty much nothing. And all the while that he’s there, we’re supposed to heal the other teammates in the front line.
Where the game design begins to break
The state of playing support today is about having to diff divers, while supporting the entire team, while trying to read the playing field, with less HP, less damage, and less mobility than DPS or Big DPS.
No wonder Mercy mains quit in droves. No wonder supports are falling left and right. No wonder I uninstalled Overwatch 2.
This is also extra painful when the DPS players act like it’s a “skill issue” and that supports just need to “get good”. I could diff 95% of the DPS players who say this to supports if we exchange roles. Take Ana and try to land 1 sleep dart every 10-11 seconds while a Genji can just jump all over the place and do a ton of damage and reflect it back at you, and finish you as soon as you have <80 HP. Take any support, save for Brig, and try to kill that Sombra who can flank for free, attack for free, kill for free, and teleport away instantly in case you finally punish her!
I have read and heard and talked quite a bit and supports leaving the game en masse come from people in Diamond as much as people in Bronze.
I am extremely sick of DPS acting like it’s a “skill issue” when in truth, everyone from every skill tier can see the problem. And no, saying “ML7 can sleep dart that diving Genji, if you can’t do it, it’s because you’re bad”. So we all have to be ML7 to have “enough skill”? What a joke. DPS play the game on easy mode while supports play it on hard, that’s the reality of Overwatch 2’s design.
That also explains the abuse of Moiras and Lucios that I’ve noticed, because one can just DPS and fade away, and the other is the most mobile character in the game. But for Mercys, Zens, Brigs, Anas, Baps? Support is far worse than before.
There is no time to read any play, no time to counter, no placement that is good enough, no team play where you can support your team from a relative safety. You just get shot at the whole game because there is no frontline, you get dived all game because there is no backline control, and you are yelled at by teammates for somehow not diffing a Reaper that can do 3 times your damage output.
So to conclude, what is Overwatch 2’s gameplay design?
It resembles Overwatch 1, except for the removal of the complex poking, defense testing, flanking, positioning based, map-savvy, tactical part of Overwatch that two tanks allowed. My opinion is pretty clear at this point: this design is a failure. The removal of one tank damaged so much of the synergies, intelligence of play, placement, and it displaced so many characters out of their original intent.
Tanks lost almost all of the great tactical and team leading value that they had. They are just Big DPS now.
The lack of a second tank means that Tanks defend their team a lot less, and are instead forced into a constant shootout that leaves next to 0 room for zoning or pressure plays.
I imagine that DPS are like peas in a pod with this, but I don’t play DPS enough to know.
Supports just eat dirt and never have a good enough placement, never have time to read the game, and just play a DPS-oriented game while playing a baby character that was designed to support a team in another game. Supports are outright inadequate for this game, and feel like they should be removed entirely in favour of a DPS only game, or drastically reworked.
But moreso than the very apparent failure of game design, what saddens me is that the original cause of it.
Whenever I look at this new game design, whenever I tried to play Overwatch 2, I felt like I was playing a generic FPS with ill conceived Support characters and a mostly symbolic distinction between DPS and Big DPS. Whatever balance between the three roles existed in Overwatch was destroyed.
Worse, a massive amount of what made Overwatch so great and unique was the fascinating tactical aspect of things. Almost every character could be played differently based on map, other teammates, other tank, and playstyle of each. It was an exercise in constant learning and wondering how you could place yourself and set your team in a better position.
I remember watching VODs of my own games for hours. My best game ever was a match so godly I rewatched the entirety of the match from every player’s POV, in my team and theirs.
I remember that in the latter days of OW1, when I was slowly climbing from Silver to Gold and Plat, I was watching my VODs with student-like seriousness, wondering every time, what did I do, did I feed, did I go too far, was I wrong to play that, how come I lived that long, what did my DPS do, could my supports have done better, what should I have done to not die there…
There were questions every game. There was a myriad of ways you could play Overwatch and play it better. It was a game where I had sunk several hundreds of hours and still felt like a noob. From what I’ve seen in QP, in Bronze with those eternal Charging Reins of Feedland, in Silver with the eternal “I got gold elims” Hogs, in Gold with the beginning of actual decent players and later in Plat with real teamplay and people trying to work together, making calls…
Overwatch was a well of unknown depths.
OW2 traded uniqueness and depth for simplicity and speed
In Overwatch 2, I pick tank and shoot. I pick DPS and shoot. I pick support and get shot.
It’s a generic FPS with an Overwatch skin and characters, many of which are much more unbalanced than they were in OW1. It’s about dealing damage as fast as possible with very little room for placement thinking, zoning, or tactics. It’s about giving you a generic FPS experience to appeal to the DPS crowd and people who thought that learning the game is difficult and they just want to take the guy with the big guns and get kills, not learn to flank and play tactically.
It is a game designed with the goal of giving a simpler, more direct, less intelligent Overwatch. A flunk that ruined supports, ruined Tanks, and just tries to be this extremely awkward generic FPS with Overwatch characters.
I uninstalled Overwatch 2 when I realised that all the placement smarts and teamplay mechanics I had been learning for months in OW1 were gone and all I had in front of me was a generic FPS experience with more broken characters than in CoD or TF2.
And I don’t think that this is a “mistake” in the design, I think it is the design.
A dumbed down, FPS-centric imitation of Overwatch.
What can we expect from Overwatch 2’s future?
I’d say there are a few ways they can go:
- Make supports almost as strong as DPS in terms of damage. You go the deep end and supports go from supports to damage characters that can heal. All three roles are consistently damage oriented and the game fully transitions into a generic FPS where aiming skill and reaction speed are the main qualities.
- You buff supports with all sorts of annoying abilities, stuns and the like. They won’t become damage dealers, but will be able to counter divers well enough or support attacks much more strongly, and actually impact the game. Ask anyone these days and they’ll say that if you are a great DPS, you win in comp, if you are a great support with bad DPS, you lose no matter what.
- You bring back the second tank and cancel the changes, making OW2 just like OW1. But you add a new division between tanks to prevent shield abuse. For example you put Sigma, Winston, Rein and Zarya in one group, and when one of them is chosen, the other player can’t pick any of the three others. That removes double shields and Shieldwatch, while letting us have the game work. Or you divide between main and off tanks.
Option 1 takes us to a full-on action game. Option 2 makes supports ultra annoying and rebalance the game somewhat, and can give back some of the tactical aspects of it. Currently supports are very underpowered and have little influence over the game so this could also make them more worthwhile to play. Option 3 is by far the best IMO, because Overwatch 1 was a better designed game and its design should’ve been kept and enhanced, not punctured and thrown aside in favour of a OW/Generic FPS freak child.
Sadly, I don’t think that any of these choices will be taken. Unfortunately, I think that this design of marrying Overwatch and a generic FPS will persist. And I believe that this will only bring Overwatch to bleed out its community.
I don’t believe that “25 million concurrent players” investor-oriented stunt for a second. But even if at one point it were true, everyone can plainly see that it’s dwindled down to barely Overwatch 1 levels in just a few weeks. People won’t stick with a generic FPS doused in Overwatch sauce. Especially since by removing the second tank, all the problems about imbalance, that were the main cause for many players leaving back in the day, will be even more glaring. Sojourn alone has proved that.
I am a simple man who loved Overwatch 1. Despite all its imbalance, flaws, the damned Cassidy flashbangs, the Junkrats and Pharahs, Hogs and all the broken things in it, it was still an amazing game. It’s the only game where I felt like I had played over 500 hours and could play 3 times as much and still learn and enjoy myself in it.
I didn’t write all this essay to prove anything. I am a mere high Plat player at best, missing his favorite game. But I think that this should give some food for thought to those who can’t put the finger on what happened in the transition to Overwatch 2.
We have lost our game for a lesser imitation of it, a watered down, more mindless, and ultimately pointless F2P that was launched mainly to remake the economic model into predatory transactions. I can live with the economic model, I don’t even buy one skin a year and if I felt like it, I’d have the money to pay for 10 a month.
But I don’t want to play this. I want Overwatch. Not Battlewatch of Duty Wars. And I’m pretty sure I can’t be the only one. This game will bleed out users who just loved Overwatch, and it will not gain new players who will be just as annoyed about the broken characters as they would’ve been with OW1. The queue times for non-supports will lengthen until it makes OW’s queues for DPS look small. Eventually, Overwatch 2 will be Overwatch’s actual death.
