I did not stick around long with Overwatch 2 and recently came back to the game, and back to my favorite character: Reaper. I’m really struggling to understand why Blizzard went with the direction they did for this character in Overwatch 2.
His default skin is okay, but the original was pretty iconic. The metal pieces going down his back, for example, look like they’re essential whereas in Overwatch 2, he just has a couple of small metal pieces that seem like they’re only aesthetic choices. In OW1, his attire is scuffed, scratched and worn and in OW2 he’s extremely polished looking. It’s not terrible, it just doesn’t evoke the same meaning. This leads into issues with his background (and yeah I know, pve is dead, blah blah blah).
In OW1, Reaper got the line “no one left behind” and things that alluded to his physical and mental state with regards to the post-Zurich explosion. OW2 tosses this to say he was Reaper long before Talon, that he blames Moira for all his problems (even though he was asking to be further enhanced), and that he spends his free time stalking his ex-wife? Who moved on? He kind of sucks in a way that’s not fun. I don’t know, it just ruins so much of the appeal of this character to make him so whiny. He takes no responsibility and blames everyone else and is a perpetual victim while doing evil stuff (that will inevitably be retconned into ‘gabe was a good guy all along and actually never killed anyone’ because god forbid the black ops guy do unsavory things). Like they wanted to make him into the Punisher or Batman but instead they made him into someone who … sucks.
Even his voice line interactions in OW2 just lack anything of substance. Moira sounds like a 2D villain and Reyes is her victim while everyone else coddles him for. the. decisions. he. made.
I’ve read all the comics / pdfs, the Heroes Ascendant book, and now the history overview book, and it did not do anything to make me like a character that I previously loved back in OW1. It feels like the books are trying to make me love Reyes by painting him as this incredible hero and I don’t need that. I already liked him a lot. I already understood that he was misunderstood and scapegoated by the powers that be. I already recognized there was more to his story than we were getting.
But at this point I don’t even know what could salvage his characterization going forward. The magic is gone.