The Overwatch 2 rant

ChatGPT tab window opened for a split second before telling myself: "Fuck no, not before I've written this out".

My ranked adventures in Overwatch 2 continue.

I hate this game more and more. Yes, I know I'm playing it "too much" (pfft... since when is a couple hours a day (at most!) "too much?"), but that may be a reason why I consider this game akin to a religion (though I don't think it has nearly the same magnitude of impact on world order as one of the big 3 - but who knows nowadays).

I find that I am hating this game more and more ever since I decided to play competitive. Last time I took competitive seriously, Overwatch 1 was still around and it no longer is which is a damned shame because I truly believe it was the superior game.

Overwatch 2 is complete chaos. I have years of observations that allows me to state this simple fact: the more shit developers add to appeal to the masses, the worst the game gets for the veterans. Hero passives were a mistake (or I just CANNOT get used to them); splitting hero roles before queuing might have been a mistake (though a fairly creative solution when a meta shakeup was sorely needed); the battle pass thing is frustrating (and I pride myself on NEVER having paid real money for a single battle pass in my entire gaming life) but understandable given the state of the gaming industry in the 2020s.

Before I get into even more of the negative shit, I WILL say that one thing Overwatch seems to be doing very well is collaborating with all sorts of random IPs. A K-pop group one month, an anime series the next, a major car manufacturer (was it Mercedes-Benz? Volkwagen? I forget honestly) one month, and then - suspiciously -, a Transformers collab the very next month after that. Oh god, nope, never mind: Overwatch 2 is selling out to major car manufacturers, probably to increase sales of crap we don't need. Holy shit.

The problem is that this is all done to line investors' pockets - like mine (barely though, I mean come on let's be honest: Microsoft does not give a fuck about gamers like you and me).

It's fucked up.

The whole point of this game (at least in the limited lore that I've read up on) is to ensure the coming-to-be of an utopian future; not a dystopia where human beings are queued up à-la-WoWCarbot (you really need to be a blizz fanboi to get this reference) and churning through games trying to push a rank while the real world crumbles to addictions like the aforementioned gambling (Mystery Heroes anyone?) and speeding.

And this is the crux of the matter; not the serious RL stuff; not my overly-tunnel-visioned opinion on one game; and not even the fact that I lost 3 ranked games in a row despite playing my best: Overwatch going free to play might have made sense at the time, and it made a bunch of people probably a lot richer, but it did so by killing the spirit of the game, and I'm really unhappy about that.

Oh, Halo is still a thing? Why don't we just copy what Halo did with personal shields and ram it into the game - we'll call it a "hero passive" (even though ultimates are already a pretty big passive; they could have done something way more interesting like giving you a passive ability WHEN your ultimate is charged but instead the incredibly lazy developers just opted to copy what Bungie/Microsoft did and put it as a hero passive for all roles).

Let me tell you, devs: giving everyone access to healing destroys any semblance of healing/support for those characters; the DPS going on rampaging sprees might boost engagement for that role, but it kills the queue times for that role, thus actually hurting your bottom line in the long run (not that anyone cares); removing the offtank to make the game more like FPS World of Warcraft (teams of five instead of six) to get WoW addicts hooked on the game was also a pretty fucking shitty move, Blizzard.

Anyway; this turned out a lot longer than I wanted it to be, and I definitely do not have the mental energy to go through what I wrote and fix things more than I have already, so I'm just going to publish this in the hopes that someone, somewhere in time gives a fuck about this stuff and actually helps me make things better instead of criticizing what I have to say. Although, if you want to criticize what I have to say, I will absolutely take that over no feedback at all, which is what Google has done to this blog with its stupid SEO invention.

... but that story has been told/linked to enough on here.

I'll keep giving DotA 2 a try, even though it feels like I'm playing with bots (and the item buying, like LoL, is a huge PITA - thank god I don't have to deal with that in HotS and OW2).

Strangely enough, I rarely feel like I'm playing with bots in Overwatch, which is a positive note to end on.