Closing in on 50 days without having played Overwatch a single time. For nearly the entire month of June and now over half of July I have not as much as logged in. Last week I actually went ahead and uninstalled.
It’s been surprisingly easy to stay away. Here’s how I’ve done it:
First I found a game I enjoy more than OW (Destiny 2).
Second I found players within that community to run with.
That’s literally it. Nothing else has been required of me to move past Overwatch. The friends I made from OW have barely spoken to me since. It makes it even easier to move on from the game when their sincerity and friendship was apparently so shallow. I tried persuading a few of them to join me in Destiny, but they all suffer from OW Stockholm Syndrome.
Some of you may think this was shortsighted. Afterall, as a console player I had yet to even experience the beta first hand.
Yet only one player I know received the free beta access. All of my old friends succumbed to their captors and purchased the Watch Point Pack despite owning OW1.
Blizzard’s new “pay for access” model is only the tip of the iceberg. The microtransactions will now never stop. Watchpoint is the beginning of a very expensive and tedious end. Furthermore, the hero shooter genre doesn’t bode well with microtransactions. The only conceivable in game purchases will be cosmetics, an aspect of game design that has been free since OW’s inception.
The game is not an MMO, RPG, MOBA or RTS where IRL dollars can actually benefit a player’s experience via upgrades or content. All it can conceivably accomplish is cosmetics.
What I had held onto as hope for the franchise will not even come to fruition this year. As a player rooted in RPGs and Couch Coop FPSs, I was holding onto hope that the PVE might be the salvation of this franchise. But as time has progressed I have lost faith in it being so.
There’s a multitude of reasons why:
There’s no tangible release date.
PVE will most assuredly devolve into a DLC fiasco.
Current PVE (Archives) is half baked and quite terrible when compared to what OW will be competing with (Borderlands, Destiny, TTW, Halo, etc.).
OW doesn’t fit modern PVE standards (it’s not a “Looter Shooter” or “Survival Sandbox”, how will it sustain a player base in an industry that is almost exclusively the aforementioned?).
The gameplay experience offers little to no autonomy (all of the above more or less allow a single player to succeed and carry regardless of what your allies do).
Ultimately there isn’t enough information regarding OW’s PVE. I know I am not the only one out here disappointed by how little has been said, which at times makes me wonder if it will ever happen at all.
The most important aspect to keep in mind is a tangible release date. Until that happens everything is a projection and assumption.
I’d like to think this is my final post on these forums. Maybe in the future I come back to tell you all I’ve been off OW for 6 months or year. Who knows.
What I do know is this franchise is done. It will never return to it’s former glory and boast the charm it once possessed for myself. The removal of the sixth player (a tank) sealed its fate for myself. Asking a balance team who failed to balance this franchise for 6 years to effectively rework the entire roster should dissuade you all from queuing. Boasting minimal content for the past 2 1/2 years should have sealed it’s fate for you all.
I am just another player in the final exodus of OW1.
