Games

It’s a decent game but a terrible one if you are comparing it to the original Overwatch.

It's... okay?

It's a bit hard to describe. Overwatch 1 was a bit magical when it came out. It was the WoW of team FPS. Everyone (and their mother) played it. This made it this fascinating thing where your default way of hanging out with friends would be to be on voicechat and chat away while playing OW.
It's unbalanced and ridiculous cadre of character loadouts also enabled just about everyone to play the game. Do they have amazing reflexes? Give them Genji or Hanzo. Do they have damn awesome aim? Hanzi, Widow, Cassidy (McCree at the time). Do they not have aim worth speaking of? Symmetra, Mercy, Bastion, Reinhardt, lots of options in fact. So you could always talk friends into buying it, and they'd enjoy it!

Now, of course, as such as game ages, players get better and better at exploiting the imbalances, so naturally there's a bigger pressure on balancing.

But the crucial breaking point IMO came not with OW2, but a long time before that. When this need for more balancing arose, instead of embracing the ridiculous nature of many character loadouts, Blizzard worked against it. In their desire to become the biggest esport, they saw a need to make every character as skill-based as possible, to focus on individual player contributions and individual aim and reflexes. Lots and lots and lots and lots of balance changes slowly pushed the overall core of the game from first being about finding out who you as a player are, then picking a character fitting you, to having to mold yourself into "an FPS player", because even Torbjörn, Symmetra, Bastion and Pharah need to aim quite a bit now.

And as this progressed, I could see my friends drifting away from the game. The game became effort to play. Not something you can have in the background while spending an evening chatting along on Discord, catching up. And Overwatch was at its core this social thing, so once some drifted off, so did more and more. And eventually, so did I.

Overwatch 2 was merely... how do I say... the end of this chrysalis stage of Overwatch's life? What emerged from it was the final form of a more esports and twitch-aim-centric game. Gone were the double tanks leading to extremely slow kill times (which in turn meant players who lacked the reflexes to engage in twitch-gunning no longer had the time needed to react to anything), with it gone were the days of cohesive teams where everyone had a singular role, instead you needed to first and foremost be able to fend for and defend yourself, only then would you integrate with the team. Because otherwise you were long dead already.
But this was merely the result of finalizing the change that began all the way back with early post-release OW1 balancing.

IMO, OW1 could have been an absolutely fantastic social lightweight team FPS, if they had embraces the chaos and non-FPS-y nature of much of it. Instead they abolished it. OW2 is but a shadow of this former glory. It's a decent enough team FPS, but eh, it's also nothing special any more.

Your time in this world is one of your most valuable assets. If a game is incredibly boring to you, you should put it down and play something else that you enjoy.

Nah, they took the fun out of it to sell skins.

They started charging for new heroes and made free cosmetics more difficult to obtain while adding other forms of monetization. Overwatch 1 was (somewhat) unique in that if you bought the game you had all the characters. I think this is these are the biggest reasons people are upset. There are other things like the lack of a promised co-op mode and a different format for matches but those are more subjective. It's hard to view Overwatch 2 as anything other than reworking the games monetization with little to no benefit for players. Calling it Overwatch 2 didn't help. It's Overwatch. It's not a new game. It's just a new version. The old version can't be played.

I play Overwatch since OW1's launch. It's competitive/ranked play mode is incomparable to say... CounterStrike 2's level of polish for example. That said, it's crazy fun in Quick Play (unranked), and if you are looking for a hero shooter where the whole hero is entirely different from others, then it's the best free to play hero shooter since all microtransactions available are only cosmetics. No pay to win mechanic available whatsoever.

The bad press is because between OW1 and OW2 they completly trashed the competitive scene, while also overpromising and not delivering at all, a PVE campaign mode. After that, they moved to a semi-pay-to-win model where there where timed exclusive heroes behind a battle pass, after that you could unlock them by grinding, but that model has evolved into a cosmetic-only model. So, no more semi-pay-to-win, only cosmetics.

So, right now, OW2 is closer to OW1's greatness than it has ever been since they trashed it. Not there yet in terms of balance, polish, competitive mode, but it has grown in the amount of modes, heros and maps.

For me, for what I value, OW2 is the best hero shooter. We'll see when I get a hold of Marvel Rivals.

It's not that bad. The vocal minority likes to cry

Typing this in-between matches and after playing for the last 4 hours: It sucks, but I’m still here 😂

Honestly though: If you don’t take super serious, it’s fun to play. Every now and then I’ll buy the battle pass because there’s some character skins I want and when I can get a group of friends to play, we always have a blast together.

People who lose their minds over a Moira who “does too much DPS” or send “tank diff” into the game chat make it annoying to play, and it can get frustrating if you’re a streaming who is trying to rank or something, but just jumping on to have some fun playing in the different roles and getting good at different characters’ kits makes the game remain fun.

I got hooked by the gameplay so even though I'm disgusted by the monetisation I come back almost every day.