My 2023 review of Overwatch 2!

General Discussion
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Positives:

  • lots of heroes and play styles :white_check_mark:
  • lots of maps :white_check_mark:
  • intricate control scheme tweaking :white_check_mark:
  • great performance :white_check_mark:

Negatives:

  • not on Mac or GFN :x:
  • no console mouse and keyboard support :x:
  • no FSR 3 or DLSS :x:

Overall:
9.2/10 - Amazing

(Will do a more detailed write-up later on…)

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9/10? Oh boy. Is that a current score?

This should be good :popcorn:

Edit 9.2/10. Uh… what? :troll:

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Would it be wrong to flag this thread as trolling?

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Overwatch is 10/10
:rage:

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Not technically.

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Hulk took the joke like a champ, so he gets a pass. :grin:

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4 reasons you feel are positive about this game is not enough to give it a 10 out of 10.

Maps
no. (games been out for 7 years) . There should be at least 49 CORE playable maps out by now.

lots of heroes and playstyles
No - most types of playstyles are considered throwing.

Control scheme tweaking - yeah actually I will say this has better controls than most games.

Performance - Absolutely no. They cheeped out on Game Audio and used low quality graphics with lots of SFX clutter which we cannot shut off, in order to save frame-rates.

The big let down is Skill based match making for Quickplay is not working. The player performance DIF is too large now.

The second biggest let down is handling of New accounts and how easy it is for people to Create constant new accounts by way of creating a new account without having to pay money. It means when they ban a player for something. The person comes right back to doing the same offense over and over again. Disrupting the game service.

Third is locking Heroes behind paywalls, even if they are required for the current meta. Which is NOT good.

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8

what about the fact that Pink Mercy didnt return?

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You forgot to mention a particularly vocal criticism you had earlier:

  • Not a good experience on Steam Deck :x:
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I see OP accidentally put a 9 in front of the .2

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Torbjorn still has no bikini skin, nor is he the meta character in every role

-10/10

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Wonder how dlss or fsr would even work with this game. Dont u need a modern graphic card for both?

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FSR is already in it, just not 3.0. It also sucks.

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Positives: Mauga is a cool character, some new hero characterization and personality have been good, namely him, JQ, Ram, Sojourn, and that’s it. Like 5 good skins came out this year, the rest were not good.

Negatives:
Everything since Oct 2022 basically as it all has unnecessary price tags, all new modes for events are recycled deathmatch garbage.

New maps and modes are the worst we’ve gotten, 2cp is looking fine and dandy by comparison at this point. SR system is horrendous now and S9 does nothing to fix it, only allows people to climb forever when they shouldn’t be allowed to. The point of comp is to improve not be given participation trophies.

The 3 new support heroes are awful and all need to be reworked, well the entire support role needs to be reworked or removed at this point.

Performance has been awful across the board and extremely varying. Several fps drop issues in almost every new map. New vfx they promised to reduce has only been quadrupled due to every new hero addition(so 1 major reason for 5v5 is entirely pointless how unsurprising).

5v5 is still in the game, RQ is still in the game.

They monetize female heroes more than males, I know this is going to happen but it’s boring as can be. At least give me male kpop skins and be fair, just try. It isn’t hard. (The Monetization of anything is terrible and unnecessary and needs to go. All devs are on a salary, charging for skins or heroes does not fund new content at all).

The community has too many shills but it’s just because they’re a minority who can’t let go.

The people running OW actually hate OW and only come into work for a paycheck, with no passion, and no care for their players at all.

PvE didn’t happen, probably the biggest crime of all.

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For a 2016 engine, it runs pretty smooth on 2023 computers, yeah.
But Quake 1 has still more FPS on the same benchmark…

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This is considered cheating, no?

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Okay but for a serious review

  • Monetization → Still egregious, mostly because of how outrageous prices are and how anti-player the BP is. Nothing appreciable has changed on this front. You can slowly grind for Coins, and you can unlock heroes for free, but these are bare minimums, not something to praise. They won’t score over a 5 until heroes are out of the BP, but even so, it’s only going to get a 2/10
  • New Heroes → New heroes are cool, but Blizzard continues to struggle with balancing them. I can’t comment on that point too extensively, so I’ll refrain from being overly punitive, but Sojourn, Kiriko, Lifeweaver, Illari, and Mauga have all be contentious, particularly the first & the last. Content flow hasn’t substantially changed here, either, so I’ll be generous and give them a 6/10 here (5 being neutral)
  • New Maps → I really can’t comment much here, but they’ve continued to put out new maps which is good. People seem less than thrilled with the magnitude of the Flashpoint maps, and some of the Push maps remain contentious, but I think it’s safe to give a 7/10 here.
  • New Modes → I know Push was released in 2022, but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem like the needed core improvements to make the mode truly enjoyable have been made so it’s worth mentioning again. Flashpoint also seems hit or miss with the community, though I can’t comment personally. Worth noting here are the seasonal/event modes, which… can’t say those have enticed me at all. I wouldn’t say completely horrible here, but definitely no knockouts. I’ll give a 4/10
  • Events - Speaking of… More frequent? Sure. Worth doing? Not really. I know this is stepping into Monetization & New Modes, but most of the events haven’t been all that exciting & seem to serve as little more than an advertisement for the associated monetized skins. Not saying Blizzard has no wins here, but I don’t think “more” means “better” here. 3/10
  • Cosmetics → Newer top tier skins are… less impressive than previous ones, though still quality. Lots of recolors from what I’ve seen, too, which aren’t really exciting. Newer heroes also seem to be launching with fewer skins, which I find odd. Again, this double dips with Monetization, but it’s tough to appreciate the quality of the good cosmetics (which, TBF, there are plenty) when they’re so heavily price-tagged. That said, the crossover event skins were neat. I’ll say overall, seems more good than bad here, but again not many slam dunks, so I’ll give a 6.5/10
  • Matchmaking → It sounds like the “GM vs Gold” issue has improved as the year went on, but it’s still something that I see brought up pretty often. More notable, though–the leave penalties. Good in concept? Yes, but without addressing the factors that push people to want to leave game (MMR imbalances, backfill, modes they don’t want to play like Push/Flashpoint), they seem… aggressively punitive. I think that’s a step in the right direction but Blizzard really needs to put in a lot more work. Overall, matchmaking still seems to struggle. 4/10
  • Balance/Design → I cannot give Blizzard a good score here as long as 5v5 persists. On top of that, despite their claims that 5v5 would make balancing simpler, it didn’t solve the core issue that Blizzard simply has a dysfunctional balance philosophy which is why balance continues to be a major struggle for them. In particular, they once again are struggling with Tanks (who would’ve thought? if only that was totally predictable), and they continue to be as transparent as mud with data, which I think is essential to share with the community. I think the Hog rework was a win with an asterisk, but very few clear positives to discuss here. 3/10
  • PvE → Ha. Ha ha. HAHAHAHA! The big one! The one why all this ever happened! That amazing PvE we were going to get? It’s amazing how many people have just put this out of mind, but Blizzard straight up said this past year that they were not going to deliver the chief reason for OW2 even existing. Lots goes into why, some of it being out of the dev team’s hands, but bottom line, this was a COLOSSAL failure on Blizzard’s part. Without, OW2 is absolutely little more than a graphics/monetization patch. I could spend thousands of words on this one, but bottom line? 0/10 If I felt like I could give negative points, I would.

Final score? 3.5/10 (not a mathematical average, before anyone checks). Most of the positives come from simply having content flow again; beyond that, 2023 has ranged from “rocky” to “utter disaster” for OW. I do think they’ve made some baseline corrections to stop the title nosediving into the dirt, but they’ve got a lot of work to put in before this game turns it around and sheds “polished turd” status

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As a console player, not m&k on console is a big W

Blizzard should follow the steps of what Ubisoft made to R6S: if a console player uses M&K the game automatically gives latency to that player

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Score updated to 9.7/10 - Near-perfect

(Due to addition of GFN and DLSS 3 support)

:white_check_mark: