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It’s a decent game but a terrible one if you are comparing it to the original Overwatch.
Why? I played OW from beta, stopped playing after all the shitty workplace accusations came out, then played again for 10 or so hours last month.
I didn't play much competitive (in my recent sessions) but the game seemed like it was in a pretty solid place. The only "major" issue I can think of is that the tank role is incredibly important, which creates a bit of a toxic environment where people are scared to play tank because they get flamed if the team gets rolled. But I think the downsides are worth the benefits, with tank being so important it's become the core that the rest of the game balances around. Healers have more agency and dealing damage/contributing to elims is a vital part of the role. A lot of the frustrating/cheesy aspects of the game have been removed, scattershot, damage-doomfist, mercy 5-man-res, goats, double shield.
Again, I took a long break from the game, but before that I clocked a lot of hours in competitive. Personally the game feels about as balanced and enjoyable as it's ever been.
Obviously the monetization is gross and that entire side of the game sucks now but that's an entirely different conversation.
It’s a decent game but a terrible one if you are comparing it to the original Overwatch.
I'm just genuinely curious why/how it's still getting updates and people are playing it with the way it's talked about, they make it sound like the worst game ever
Because despite the bitching it still has a very respectable user base, at least purely looking at the Steam stats:
Do we know it's average playerbase back when it was still overwatch?
No pretty sure it was Battle.net exclusive
That's honestly not that good, when games like CS2 are regularly pulling 2million+.
According to 3rd party websites (that may not have accurate estimates), Overwatch 1 had between 600k-1mil peak concurrent players through a lot of 2020/2021. One of those same websites now says that OW2 had about 140k peak players today when combining all players on all platforms. So it would seem there's been a huge drop in players.
Keep in mind that a large portion of players don't have it installed on Steam and use the Battle.net launcher instead (like me).
Right, that's why the collective play amount is ~140k when the steam daily is only ~30k
Ah, if only I could read more than one sentence at a time...
Also, the game is on consoles too with crossplay
CS2 is top of the pile, there is very little that can fairly be compared to it.
I think Overwatch 1 at it's peak could be compared to CS2.
In my opinion, anyone saying OW2 is worse than the original is saying this for personal reasons and not trying to be objective. OW2 is, in my experience, much more balanced than OW1. Many of the more frustrating aspects of the game have been fixed or removed, and most of the characters added since OW1 seem fun to play and not frustrating to play against.
There are very many valid criticisms one can make of Blizzard. The history of being a shitty workplace, the objectively awful decision to make OW2 a sequel, the treatment of Jeff Kaplan by execs, the monetization, and probably more. None of those criticisms (except monetization to a limited degree) have anything to do with whether or not OW2 is a bad game or not.
But I'm speculating since the person you responded to has not elaborated on any of their views.
Ehh I disagree, I played consistently ow1 for years and ow2 just wasn't as good.
I mainly missed tank synergies. Without it the game just wasn't the same. The other tank changes were just insane too. And I preferred the full 6v6 experience.
Then they had to go an monetize the shit out of it, when I already paid for the game! The last straw was either paying for new characters or grinding like hell.
I don't mean to be a dick but without giving actual reasons all you're saying is "I preferred ow1", which is kind of what my original comment was referring to. Tank synergies is definitely something that was lost with ow1, rein/zarya and dive comps were very fun and definitely something I miss. But it was also a major source of balance issues and player frustration.
Two tank team composition was a consistent balance issue and severely restricted the design of tank heroes. Sigma is a really fun and interesting hero, but when he was added overwatch entered a prolonged two shield meta which was incredibly boring. The devs added a cool hero, and he made the game worse. Not only did he make the game worse, but there was no obvious or easy solution, because sigma wasn't the problem, two shields was the problem. In my opinion that exemplifies how bad of an issue the game was facing and justifies the changes made.
There's nothing wrong with preferring ow1 but the person I responded to called it "a terrible game compared to the original" which is just blatantly incorrect in my opinion.
He did give reasons. Can’t you read?
The tank and 6v6/5v5 has been heavily discussed, recently devs made a long devblog about it. I can kinda see where you're coming from, I think, but between balance/queue times/the average player (of which there tends to be more of when you're with 5 others instead of just 4) it seems to me like 1 tank works better in practice even though it struggles when compared to the ideal world+nostalgia goggles.
I was very pleasently ~~surprised~~ not disappointed by the monetization, like uncompleted weekly (battle pass -primary method of profression) challenges carry over, so in theory you can do all weekliesduring the last week if a battle pass. also aren't the new heroes available if you play just a few matches?
I honestly though I would get used to it, like the forced 2-2-2 comps which I initially disliked, but I never did. It just made the game feel like too much more like a pure fps. And it not feeling like that was what made it unique.
In my experience all the que times were fine as 2-2-2 even when queued as duo dps
I agree with you. Even though they're still not the kind of game so would play regularly, Overwatch 1 was extremely annoying to play with all the stuns, freezes and more. Overwatch 2 toned down and removed most of these which made it actually somewhat enjoyable.
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.
Used to be that 5 out of 6 on the team could be dead but the 6th was a Mercy with her ult charged. She swoops in and pulls off a hail Mary 5 man resurrection that totally wrecks the opposing team.
Or Lucio was able to speed rush an entire team onto point with a well times speed buff.
Those kinds of whacky plays kept even the most skilled players on their toes.
They patched all that out of the game in the first year or two.
This is really well articulated and puts into words the reason I stopped playing. I was one of those non FPS players who really thrived on Sym and Moira and Mercy and I felt welcomed and appreciated when it first came out. I just had fun and that made me want to try to get better and kept me coming back. As they kept retooling things, especially with Sym 3.0, I felt they were deliberately pushing me and people like me out. Instead of having a fun, wild and playful team game for my friends to all have a good time in, it became just another FPS game.
Thanks for the awesome response. What do you recommend as an alternative? Valorant? TF2?
Deadlock? If you need an invite (does anyone still, I genuinely don't know?) HMU
I'd like an invite to deadlock!
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.
The same goes for pretty much everything in life, not just games. It might suck in the short term, but just don't put up with friends/partners/jobs you don't like. Make a change
Look at Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Facebook, etc. Consumers cry and complain but they almost never leave. That always leads to perpetually-increasing exploitation.
So yes, its that bad, and no, its not on death's door.
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
I agree. I was a die-hard ow1 fan and quit because of the absolute disgrace that was the transition from OW1 -> OW2. I have every reason to hate OW2 but I don't because it's a fine game and improves on OW1 in every way that is important to me (gameplay and balance).
Yeah, the OW2 launch was a disaster, but saying the game now is worse than OW1 was is just rose tinted glasses
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.