At this point everything wrong with Overwatch 2 has already been said by both the public and the enthusiast fanbase invested into it. The sequel to the 2016 world hit has not struck the proper chords for me after a couple of days of frustrating launch issues and tepid anticipation to have progression earned from the prior game reflected unto my account. There are things that just do not work with Overwatch 2; the monetization platform is a cynical copy of other, popular games with similar practices. The visual reworking of the cast and maps range from unnecessary and loud, to an outright betrayal of Overwatch’s original, fighting game roots. Progression is reduced to a paltry, limited battle pass with seasonal challenges meant to fill several different meters to get…keychains and voice lines, and maybe a skin for a character you don’t necessarily play. Then there is my own critical look at how Overwatch handles the mechanical design of the game; how the uniqueness of several characters’ kits is reduced to just being ‘things’ that do ‘damage.’
Cassidy (McCree)’s flashbang from the first game is now a magnetic grenade that does damage! Mei’s ability to freeze enemies is now just a freeze beam that slows and does continuous damage! Bastion’s rooted turret ability is gone in favor of a mobile tank that keeps Bastion within the fight parameter — he is currently removed from the game due to the bugs that change produces. Orisa, Sombra, Brigitte and other characters have undergone extensive changes to reduce the defensive elements of their character (specifically the CC / removal of damage shields) in favor of keeping firefights actively engaged with damage, damage, damage. For what it’s worth, there is still some enjoyment that I can get from the game despite the layers of grievances that I have. There has yet to be a game that replicates the obvious MMO-inspirations that Overwatch attempts to wear on its sleeves, or to take those blatant fighting game influences and force them into the shell of a shooter. Do I see myself continuing to play this new future of Overwatch? More than likely but at a far smaller capacity than what I’m doing now. The reason being is that Overwatch still remains one of the few games that live and die by it’s coordination, it’s team synergy and the successes that come from banding together.
The problem with this is that both Overwatch 1 and 2 provided nothing to the player to learn the game properly.
Before I explain let me preface this with how the path of learning the Overwatch loop plays in part with the game’s new approach to monetization, because I feel it’s a significant part to discuss. Originally in the 2016 release of Overwatch (it feels remarkably strange to call the game Overwatch 1), players would spend full price to have every character available in the game and every future character that would release afterwards. For free! While it is always a good thing to offer as much as you can to the player for free, that’s as much as the game would offer to the player when it comes to ‘learning’ how to play. Along with a paltry (and slightly irrelevant) tutorial and training room Blizzard attempts to provide the player with a suite of tools to help them improve their gameplay, but in the end, it feels similar to what fighting games at the time did for players; give them the tools to discover and nothing more than that.
Now it is 2022. Overwatch 2 is a free-to-play game, so NATURALLY that 25+ roster of characters with extremely diverse playstyles are reduced for newcomers — and during the rocky launch, even veterans — with another paltry selection of characters that the developers decided were good entry points to learning.
Learning what? Well judging by the selection of tanks, DPS and support — just the minimum of…shooting someone.
So now we’re back to where we’ve started in 2016, only with a limited roster, the same training room and an even more limited tutorial recycled from the game’s original launch!
These issues aren’t exclusive to Overwatch — nearly every hero shooter available shares a similar bug with teaching the player how to use a class, opting to leave them to their devices to learn them in active environments. In a game that’s practically barren in content to begin with you’d begin to hope that Blizzard would at the minimum provide resources for the user to learn the player, but alas that does not appear to be the case. Yet teaching a new player what to do doesn’t just extend to learning the character — the gameplay loop of OW is not communicated to newcomers at all.
Overwatch’s uniqueness comes down to its loop more than other class-based shooters. Most of your firefights happen exclusively at chokes whether you’re pushing that choke or holding it down. On occasion there are splinter lanes used by certain characters to contest frontal holds and push to the point or payload that needs to be captured but for the sake of discussion, let’s focus more on that choke. My learning experience with the game back in 2016 had mostly been a ‘go with the flow’ experience; playing with my tanks, watching who the other DPS shoots to see if I need to shoot them. Being someone with a whole lot of time playing shooters a lot of that player sense can be translated into mostly everything — being a fast paced hell fest like Quake, Gears of War or even battle royales like Apex and Fortnite.
What separates Overwatch from these games is that these are not different guns that you can swap out whenever you need the proper counter-pick. There is a full sense of commitment to the characters you choose and a swap to counter-pick could potentially mean a missing part in your team composition that could bite you in the future. That’s the meat and potatoes of Overwatch’s playstyle; to answer character decisions on the fly and compensate for the missing elements in your team. It’s why the game added a role queue system years after it’s original launch because there are just some team builds that do not work! That’s perfectly fine and unique to this franchise — the issue is Overwatch 2 doesn’t inform new players of that anymore, while the original 2016 release would receive an update that informed the player that there was a piece missing from their team build — one of the rare instances of the game communicating how the game should be played to avoid frustration, an addition that felt meaningful to communicate game sense to new players or underperforming players.
Returning to the talk about choke-combat; Overwatch 2’s maps are long stretches from point A to point B, whether you’re pushing or attacking/defending. Littered throughout the game are important points of interest where these fights, flanks, and potential turnarounds can occur. You’ll know them when you see them. Communicating the elements of the map from the developer side I’d imagine isn’t an easy task at all. Sometimes developers can put a name of a POI, lane or flank on the map or under your mini map as a means of communicating where you are at all times. This is something Apex, Halo and Valorant do that I find extremely helpful regardless of how general that POI can be. Overwatch 2 does not have explicitly labeled POIs to go by — instead, it utilizes a pinging system that’s been popularized by games like Apex Legends to communicate the map to other players — a simple blip of color on a designated point and the player immediately snaps to it most of the time.
Pinging has become a very important tool for communication in a shooter — the issue here is that Overwatch 2 does not communicate to the player that the pinging system is available in its tutorial. It’s another hidden ‘feature’ that the player discovers through navigating their control settings or accidentally clicking the middle mouse button in game. The tools CAN be there, the process of showing the player to learn the game are partly there in Overwatch 2 but it feels to me that the game doesn’t prioritize that new player experience whatsoever! I feel it cheapens the experience and makes whatever attempt Blizzard gave at reducing the options for the player’s character list as a shallow excuse to justify the new and questionable monetization ideas.
It is not an easy task to communicate to a new player how to play a first-person shooter, and a lot of these issues that Overwatch 2 ran into during their attempt exist in other shooters. Game sense can only come from the trial and error that comes from playing shooters and playing an awful lot of them. Communication should not begin between the player and another player curating the content for teaching the game — communication should begin between the developer and the player. Overwatch 2, again, tries to do this; it tries to give the player the means of self-improvement just as well as any other shooter does, but it remains just as shallow brief. It stings more with Overwatch 2 compared to its competitors because there’s so much from the original game that ATTEMPTED to communicate the game just…gone entirely.
It’s frustrating. It’s frustrating as a fan of the franchise and shooters in general that the approach for newcomers is reduced as another barrier to defend their choices to horribly monetize the game, I’m frustrated to know that Overwatch 2’s idea of a player being ‘prepared’ for the game is playing 100+ matches — SURVIVING the experience of 100+ matches — before they’re deemed ‘competitively’ viable. It’s laughable really, there should be more be done beyond progressing a bar or meeting a playtime accomplishment before they’re in a competitive environment — especially in an environment that’s as vicious and team focused as Overwatch.
It doesn’t affect me , but I fear for the newcomers.
