Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Overwatch 2 is so close to greatness, but intrusive monetisation and launch problems are weighing it down.
I wasn’t expecting Overwatch 2 to have a smooth launch, but this is just ridiculous. Blizzard Entertainment’s first-person shooter sequel finally launched last week after a three-year-long wait and funnily enough, some of us are still waiting. The game has been rife with bugs and gameplay issues since its release, and it doesn’t end with funny glitches like heroes going permanently bald. More serious problems like half the hero roster being rendered unplayable, account progression getting erased and long queue times to enter the game in the first place are frustrating players still.
I won’t call this a Cyberpunk 2077-level disaster for Blizzard Entertainment, primarily because that game actually built up a decent amount of excitement and optimism leading up to its launch. Overwatch 2 is a sequel that most people, including diehard fans of the original like myself, have been wary of even before its release. Greedy monetisation and poor developer communication hint that there are a lot of problems running under the hood of this sequel, and Blizzard might not have what it takes to come back from such a rough launch.
The good
Hot take: Overwatch 2 is actually a ton of fun. Blizzard created magic in the first game, and no other game has managed to replicate its core appeal successfully all these years later. Jumping back into the sequel after a year of inactivity has reminded me of how much I love this universe, these characters and these environments. Overwatch might not have the deepest well of lore to pull from - the sequel’s now-delayed PvE mode was supposed to fix that - but its characters coast by on their easy charm. New heroes like Kiriko, Sojourn and the Junker Queen have fit in well thus far, with Kiriko already becoming a particular favourite of mine when I'm going Support.
The one thing that made me drop Overwatch in the first place was its sudden lack of new content, and this sequel fixes that. Heroes spout endless voicelines at each other throughout matches that I’ve never heard before, and it’s fun to hear how newer characters interact with the rest of the roster - like Kiriko and D.Va, who consider each other the only capable people in any room. The new maps are a joy to explore and Push is an extremely fun, highly intense addition to the current rotation of game modes. I already prefer it to the base game’s Assault (2CP) maps, though I wish they hadn’t been removed from this sequel entirely. You can even say hi to the friendly Push robot, which is exactly the level of unnecessary detail I love to see.
Seeing a swathe of new players jump onto Overwatch 2 since its free-to-play switch has been a joy. It used to take upwards of 10 minutes to find a match on consoles, and now it takes less than 30 seconds. It’s a lot of fun watching newcomers take their clumsy first steps into the sequel, and while that may be frustrating to veterans just chasing a win, it also brings the nostalgia of launch day Overwatch back in a big way. Everyone’s excited to play the game again! We’re all just figuring out the meta, making mistakes and re-learning our old mains. It’s not exactly like old times, but it’s close enough.
The removal of Tank duos has been an adjustment, but it’s not the drastic change I was expecting. Some significant hero reworks are needed to make it work, however: Doomfist simply does not work as a Tank in his current form. While he might need a buff of some kind, a few other heroes need nerfs. Zarya and Roadhog are practically unkillable in experienced hands, and can singlehandedly mow down an entire team unaided. No game should lean so heavily in one hero’s favour. Support characters need more maneuverability if they’re going to last longer than a minute in skirmishes. A smaller team with a more powerful Tank means that the two Supports go undefended more often, and thus become easy targets. Once the Supports go, the team goes.
The bad
If Overwatch 2 wants to see its ambitious seasonal content drops through, it’s going to have to change in a big way. Right now, it has two big problems that need sorting out: monetisation and gameplay. Much like the suits at ActivisionBlizzard, we’re going to look at the money first. Blizzard has done away with Overwatch’s randomised lootboxes and somehow come up with an even worse system to replace them. We used to level up every few matches with a guaranteed lootbox per level. Lootboxes housed every available cosmetic in the game - from voicelines and emotes to skins of all rarities.
Overwatch 2’s rejiggered player progression system is a significant downgrade that’s hellbent on taking your money. Technically, we can still get old Overwatch 1 cosmetics - it just takes eight months to buy a single Legendary skin because you only get 60 credits per week. To get everything, it would take years. The Battle Pass is the only surefire way to earn anything at all for playing, and you still need to pay for the good stuff. Even then, the good stuff isn’t actually… good. A good chunk of the Battle Pass is filled with really lackluster rewards like sprays and voicelines barely anyone used in the original game, and the skins we do get aren’t very enticing.
It gets worse when you compare Overwatch 2 with its free-to-play peers. Apex Legends and Fortnite’s Battle Passes are nigh-unmissable every season, but Overwatch is arguably working with the best characters to make cosmetics for in the first place. So much potential is wasted here, and so many of the new skins look too much like old skins from past events. Locking new heroes behind the Battle Pass is further proof that Blizzard is desperate to force players into forking out money in every way they can.
In-game store cosmetics are priced egregiously, but the main issue here is player progression. Free-to-play players are not going to stay for the long haul when they’re forced to grind for default skins and common sprays for months on end. That’s not how Overwatch used to work, so why has the sequel chosen not to improve player progression, but make it worse instead?
The ugly
If you don’t care about progression and skins, all that’s left is the game itself - and that isn’t perfect either. After development rolled to a stop on Overwatch 1 for more than a year, players were expecting a sequel bursting at the seams with new content. What they’ve received barely qualifies as a sequel at all. Seeing as it replaced the original game completely and launched in early access, it’s almost like we’re all playing in a very messy Public Test Realm together.
And by messy, I mean messy! At the time of writing this, players are still locked out of their hero roster, and Bastion and Torbjorn have been disabled from gameplay. Some players are accidentally spending money on skins due to a bug, while others are getting all their progress erased on the Career Profile (I’ve definitely played Tracer for more than 10 minutes total, thanks Blizzard). Old skins and cosmetics have either gone missing or been randomly unequipped. This is just a tiny slice of what players old and new are still experiencing after being locked out of the game due to massive login queues during launch.
Setting aside launch woes, how about the removal of multiple Overwatch 1 features for no reason? Post-game voting cards and the ‘On Fire’ system are both puzzlingly absent, and so are Assault maps. Assault (2CP) was by far Overwatch’s most despised game mode and I don’t miss it too much, but it did have a great pool of classic maps like Hanamura and Numbani going for it. A sequel launching with less content than its predecessor is always going to raise eyebrows, but these were iconic maps and core to the game’s identity. We’ve also lost old incentives (like lootboxes and credits) to play certain game modes, along with lore details on skins and the Find-a-Group feature.
Verdict
Overwatch 2 needs to shape up or die. That sounds fairly dramatic, but it’s true - this is a new multiplayer game that has about three weeks to tempt new players before everyone flocks to Call of Duty at the end of the month. Going free-to-play has revived the playerbase, but they’re just going to bounce off the game if it continues to be this frustrating. It’s also hard to tell how long veteran players are going to stick around with such intrusive monetisation and lack of polish keeping this sequel from reaching the same heights as its predecessor.
Blizzard wanted this to be a glorious comeback story, but unless Overwatch 2 shapes up soon, it won’t have much of a story to tell at all.