Overwatch 2 isn't for the current community

General Discussion
1

I’m trying to put this in the least toxic way possible.

Overwatch community is currently tiny compared to Valorant, R6, Apex, Halo and CoD.

In OCE, my region every gamemode besides Quick Play is practically dead even on evenings. You CANNOT find games. The remaining PC players use VPN to at least find some sort of match whatsoever.

This is the same in Middle East and South Asian servers. Yet Valorant takes 5 seconds to find a game at any time. This was not the case until early 2020 for OW.

Why is this?

Fact is, the players, pros and influencers of yesteryear who have since departed were from other first person shooters.

Overwatch 1 is heavily MOBA-based with a godawful solo-queue experience. why is all the games I mentioned above still way more active than Overwatch? cause you can solo-carry and aren’t tied to teammates to do their job.

Why can’t you solo carry in Overwatch? It’s due to crowd-control, abundance of shields, situational balancing to accommodate only six-stacks. This gameplay suits MMORPGs cause its PvE. Putting this into a PvP environment just makes it “whoever can coordinate wins” therefore steamrolls.

This makes teammates infuriating with toxicity through the roof. this gameplay and balance does NOT work in an FPS

Now for the current community, as I said, the only people still playing to this day are those who have 5+ friends to play with regularly, adore the teamwork aspect of MOBAs. OW1 is more of a MOBA, and look how toxic this community is. plenty of “matchmaking sucks” and “hero is over/underpowered” cause guess what this current community doesn’t enjoy the game

How does Blizzard respond to a declining playerbase? Especially where nobody except those with 5+ friends even enjoy this game. they go with what works

Current OW1, fundamentally doesn’t work in solo-queue. Where the vast majority of players do at least once a week. Blizzard combats this by removing 1 whole tank, turning tanks into brawler DPS with unique CC, DPS able to score more and supports able to defend themselves as well as supply utility instead of only heals.

You want better matchmaking? more balanced matches where skill is everything instead of a literal dice roll? you want every hero to be enjoyed in any situation?

Most likely the answer is yes, therefore OW2 needs to change. It needs to bring back the players that made it popular. It needs to become an FPS.

Want a moba-like FPS experience? go to Paladins, better yet LoL is more popular than ever and would love some more players. The latter’s worldbuilding and characters is probably on par with if not better than Overwatch. There’s also MMORPGs.

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Isn’t Valorant free? A 6 year old game that still costs money is unlikely to maintain a large influx of new players to replace players who stop playing. Free games, even old free games, don’t have that disadvantage.

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I wouldn’t say it’s not for us……but it sure as heck isn’t JUST for us….

There’s giant portions of the gaming community as a whole that they want to play the game….not just the people that already do

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yeah, as someone who can’t get enjoyment out of OW for more than 2 hours yet can play Valorant/Apex for days on end, OW2 may actually bring me back cause its so much more solo-friendly with all the CC, shields gone and more pewpew instead of standing behind shields relying on everyone to push. All whilst the other team is WAY more coordinated most of the time

I LOVE the world and characters of Overwatch to death. but its currently too fundamentally flawed as an FPS

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The quickest way to do that is to actually release content.
Apex is quite literally a F2P and they have been releasing content consistently in a completely optional profit strategy via Battle Pass.

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which they are now. but the decline started way before then. I remember people despising this game’s matchmaking and balancing all the way back in late 2017.

Ironically, this is when OWL became a thing which amplified all the issues with the fundamentals. Pros struggled to stay and its last few seasons declined horribly. Mirror-comps etc.

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Thats exactly what they are doing for OW2 and what im most looking forward to.

They wont do that because for whatever reason they still have hope that one day OW will return to being played sort of like a moba like GOATS or double barrier, when the devs keep telling them otherwise.
The game will never be the way these types expect OW to be.
Yet they still stick around and flood the forums with their balance ideas that are against FPS mechanics again not listening that this game is headed even more in that direction.

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Ironically, it’s only to people who actually get in the beta which is essentially nothing to those who don’t.

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It’s going 5v5 - this is not unknown.

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new characters and lore to talk about? actual mechanics and gameplay videos? all these on the regular?

I can assure you it will release this year with all the hints.

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I don’t think content can be considered content when not everyone can access it.
OW2 can be played by those lucky enough to get in but what about people who don’t get in?
Things to talk about?

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still, releasing this year. and origin stories and cinematics are content regardless being technically “cutscenes”

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You bought a game to play it. Not to watch or read about.
Content aside from actual gameplay is fluff and honestly shouldn’t be considered as such.

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regardless, thats not the reason im making this thread. its not gameplay content obviously but look at it this way

Team Fortress 2 hasn’t had true content in almost a decade, and is still enjoyed by many. in fact, there are still loyal players that don’t complain. OW1 has legions of whiners and toxicity blaming the devs and hating on the game. If OW1 was an actually fundamentally sound FPS, the hate wouldn’t be so prevalent like it currently is. And it isn’t Blizzard, Starcraft 2 and HOTS are quite beloved. much more than OW1.

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Tbf the declining player base comes from content drought, slow and bad balancing and, as much as it pains me, Role Queue.

OW2 is a solution to problems caused by Blizzard itself, they would be pretty much cutting ties with their OG fanbase for the sake of getting a new one but, for starters, said new playerbase is likely to drop the game once the next big hit comes, secondly, they will leave if Blizzard mantains the same mistakes they did with OW1.

Long story short, this whole “F OW1 playerbase” mentality that they seem to be taken is only caused because they themselves lacked the effort/vision to mantain said playerbase.

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TF2 hasn’t gotten anything significant in almost a decade and no one complains. It’s fanbase is still loyal. Same can be said for Starcraft 2, HOTS and Melee cause really, mechanics are sound, they’re flawless fundamentally without the toxic BS

Blizzard only balances badly cause its around six-stacks.

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I mean this is exactly why they should double down on efforts in featuring actual gameplay, not lore or anything else. HOTS in particular had unique gameplay in that it was an objective based MOBA, and they worked on refining that before adding anything lore related to it.

Once they’ve got the core of the game down, then they could actually start building on everything else around it. As far as I know Apex Legends was literally just another battle royale when it released the only thing people know about it is that it’s set on the Titanfall universe.
They refined the gameplay and had a consistent content release all throughout and once they’ve established enough only then they started building the lore.

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Cant speak for most of them since i havent played them however you also have to keep in mind that the game promised content and stopped with Echo. Then announced a sequel that really no one asked for and held back content for said sequel leavign a starved fanbase for years.

I mean, it doesnt really matter for which crowd they balance the game since its still slow as hell… how much did it took for them to deal with moth mercy? Release brig? Double shield is still an issue to this day. Or look at current day when we have just a single balance patch, that stuff just kills interest becuase it makes the game stale, especially if there is a glaring balance disparity where a clear meta exists.

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Speak for yourself. I’m beyond p!ssed off that Blizzard is deciding to release PvP first instead of what I came to this game for, which was the lore material regarding the characters/world. I was promised that when OW2 released, it would be with PvE, and now I’m being told it’s not.

When I first got this game in Winter 2017/18, it was because I understood that, despite being an FPS, it had a lot of lore-rich content that made playing it worth it, on top of the fact that it was accessible to people who didn’t have FPS interests or backgrounds (old Symm immediately coming to mind). And for a while, it did have that. We had comics, we had animation shorts, we had characters that were fun to play even if you weren’t a twitch shooter.

…then the OWL balancing started, and surprise surprise. Look where we are now.

I learned from this game, and from playing DOOM 2016’s multiplayer, the hard way: I despise PvP games, especially PvP shooters. Hell, I have a version of WOTLK, it’s a repack of the original 2005 or whatever version. Made entirely for singleplayer. I get to enjoy the world without any of the people who make it miserable.

I don’t want to play a clone of Valorant/Apex/Paladins/etc., because they’re PvP games. I want the game I was promised when they announced OW2.

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You’re literally barking at the wrong tree.
Overwatch is and always has been a PVP game.