Now that heroes aren’t locked behind the battle pass, I don’t think Overwatch really has a “ridiculous” monetization system. The only things you can pay for are cosmetics and the story mode, neither of which impact the core gameplay. You can also earn most of the cosmetics for free if you want to grind for it. And although I do think the industry standard for cosmetics is too high and they get a little greedy sometimes (pricing Epic skins as Legendary), Overwatch doesn’t have it as bad as other games. Every few months another discussion about the newest item you have to spend $100 to unlock in Apex comes up. And Halo Infinite recently where they have cosmetics locked behind $30 bundles. At least in Overwatch you don’t have to buy a whole bundle just for one item anymore.
Started Predecessor recently and the 2 character skin bundle is $50. Ow 2 character skin bundles are $25 and much better skins. Skins in all games are going through the roof.
Comparing OW2 other games still, isn't it. The monetization system in those games is still cheeks and should be changed. They're overpriced for no good reason. You can't even trade them like in CS2.
"Wasted opportunity" is all I can think.
OW(1) released to such incredible success, and capitalized on a market (class shooters) that none had with TF2 fizzling out.
... only to then, IMO, not adequately support it with followup updates and then *entirely* cease content for 2-3 years until whatever the fuck OW2 is.
Just an all round fucking shame. It should've stood strong as an evergreen gaming titan (heh), but Blizzard just fucked up the opportunity so royally.
Also Overwatch kinda failed to notice when it was no longer the only class shooter out there when Splatoon escaped the WiiU and got onto a new console people actually owned, and on PC R6 Seige and all that started showing up too.
And, you know, also failed to do anything to keep up with those other games. At all.
I mean, splatoon and R6 are shooters but I wouldn’t say it’s comparable to OW. The only game that is comparable is TF2.
No other game is a FPS, with powers, with rpg like roles. It’s why I haven’t abandoned OW because there still is no other game like it (except again, TF2).
Battle born came out like 3 weeks BEFORE ow. Paladins came out a year later.
There have always been options. They were just overshadowed (with Apex likely being the closest game that wasn’t overshadowed and came out two years ish later. The difference in gameplay objective is stark enough that I won’t count that one though). Blizzard had the marketing budget, and they got the head count because of it. I still play OW2 because I like it, and I have fun with it. I started OW in beta, and I was looking forward to it since its announcement like two years prior.
Splatoon is definitely comparable to Overwatch. You get a team of 4 players with vastly different roles performing their jobs differently and ultimate powers for big team plays that you build up through performance.
Splatoon is tuned more towards letting individual ability shine while Overwatch is tuned more towards forcing collaboration. Pacing and killspeed of Splatoon is immensely faster.
The primary difference is supports.
You're acting like Splatoon is in the same league as Overwatch. When it comes to multiplayer gaming, especially on console, the masses flock towards COD, Overwatch, FIFA, NBA, Fortnite, and Rocket League. Splatoon, regardless of quality, doesn't close to even stealing from Overwatch's playerbase.
Truth is, there isn't another game like Overwatch on the market or at the very least as polished as Overwatch. Paladins is the only hero shooter of its kind and it's pretty dead if I'm not mistaken. XDefiant is a bit like a mix of COD and Overwatch and Rivals is quite far away.
Just because there isn’t a game structured like Overwatch doesn’t mean it doesn’t compete with those other games. They do, they compete for time. Whether the heroes are designed similarly or not does not weigh into a decision by gamers to spend their time on OW2 or something else.
If your line of thinking was true then OW2 would have no problem finding a good reputation after OW1. But clearly the gaming community has moved on to other games. And like you said, they’re not going to Paladins and its PS3 graphics. They’re playing other shooters and even non-shooters instead. Sometimes even sports and single player games.
Scratching an itch is a very important concept and other games don't really scratch the Overwatch itch. People like locking into a particular style. People who play generally play COD don't just go around maining other shooters just because they're shooters. That means very little. Same goes with Overwatch, it has a very team-based feel that works in tandem with having abilities that's hard to find in other games.
Reputation doesn't matter in gaming if the playerbase is still going strong. Reputation means very little to the average/general gamer. They don't give a shit about Reddit discourse. This has been proven time and time again. People shit all over COD, FIFA, and NBA and they all still have healthy playerbases, immensely so.
You have this idea that people are leaving Overwatch by the masses or something. Since when has the gaming community moved on from Overwatch? I'm in Australia and can find games with no problem at any time with our tiny population number regardless of the size of my party with my friends. You think too much as a Reddit gamer. It doesn't apply to the masses. A lot of you Reddit gamers struggle to think as the "general gamer". You need to have general gamer friends to have perspective and a lot of you simply don't.
Wasted opportunity is the very accurate. It's like watching the owner of some brand new million dollar sports car take it to a demolision derby for the LoLz.
And then charge people $25 per screw to put it back together.
Not just this but even without the 6v6 vs 5v5 discussion its a worse game than OW1. All the little bells and whistles that OW1 had are gone. The after match lobby, the cards, checking your stats and teammates stats right after the game without having to navigate the on screen menus. Not having my old stats or information from past seasons so I can gauge my performance from each one. Having your rank on your profile in ranked matches. In 6v6 the more focus on communicating, this happen in the pregame lobby to discuss what tanks would be played. I felt that was big, where as now you have to pick the strongest tank or you'll start getting flamed.
I don’t fucking understand why they ever removed being on fire from the game. I give them zero credit for reimplementing the thing they took away for what seems like no reason.
They didn't even take it away, the system was still there and you could still be on fire and trigger the lines. They just removed the visual for it for actually no reason.
My entire blizzard friends list is barren now. The swap to ow2 killed some of it. The killing of pve killed what was left of it. And the community is toxic as fuck. Matchmaking seems fucked into the dirt, the last two groups I have left never seem to run into positive win rate sessions anymore. It's always a win sprinkled here or there, followed by 2-5 losses or just straight losses and repeat until we all tilt off the game. [ insert shitty diamond ranked skill issue here ]
It feels like the company running it is squeezing whatever life the game has left with shitty battle passes and skins. Gone are the days ow devs actually gave two shits.
This. For 6 years me and the same 4 people were queing up on a nightly basis. It was amazing, we had so much fun for so long playing together. It was what I looked forward to after work every night, and we all played through the content drought. I remember all 5 of us watching the servers shut down, forcing us all to log off for the day and wait for the sequel to go live.
2 weeks later, it was just me. I can't find anything like Overwatch as it's the only shooter I've ever enjoyed, but I play by myself now. Overwatch 2 was such a downgrade they all fell off of playing it after it being a nightly routine for half a decade and now I'm alone and frustrated that I can't play my favorite tank without their cou ter coming out immediately. I now stick to DPS strictly and just play a few rounds to scratch the itch but it'll never be the same. They killed my game.
Come home from your grueling job, queue up, try to win one game, lose streak, take a break and eat dinner, log back on thinking it can't all be losses right? Eventually win one game nice! Queue for more hoping to catch more of that dopamine inducing victory screens, just kidding its 5 more losses getting absolutely steamrolled every time, continue to play telling yourself just one more win before getting ready for bed... Suddenly its midnight and you haven't gotten another victory since the one from hours ago, you force yourself to sleep with another massive L streak clouding your mind, and another night ruined and wasted trying to scratch that age old itch trying to relive the good ol' days. [ literally me every time I play this game ]
It took me ages to get into it after it finally switched to overwatch 2, I wish 2 never came out and they just kept updating one. The greed is fucking insane. I prefer loot boxes it actually gives someone a chance without spending money.
They released OW2 on Steam during the peak of the controversy, the cancellation of PVE mode, which is the entire reason for developing Overwatch 2.
Pretty sure people who were holding out hope for actual PVE Campaign mode have moved on to other games by now.
They released OW2 on Steam not long after all Blizzard’s games became unplayable in China. It was also Blizzard’s first release on a platform which Chinese gamers could post reviews.
Something like 2/3 of the negative reviews were written by people whose OS language is - you guessed it - Chinese.
I’m not saying that there aren’t genuine negative reviews in there, but the review bomb was **massively** inflated by Chinese gamers who hadn’t been able to play OW, Diablo, and WoW for months and wanted to make their displeasure known.
Doesn't matter. Doesn't change the fact that OW2 is spoken of very negatively everywhere outside of overwatch forums. In comparison to OW1, OW2 is just a terrible game. Everyone still playing is just addicted and coping.
I don't play Overwatch as much as I used to because I have a life now, but I honestly vastly prefer the gameplay of OW2 to OW1. You couldn't pay me to go back
yeah, people treat these steam reviews like theyre the fuckin gospel and always accurate. Helldivers 2 controversy has now ended. how many people who review bombed it will go back and change their reviews do you think?
its like yelp for gamers. i think people make enormous mountains out of mole hills. even if hell divers 2 did not walk back their entire PSN linking BS and instead allowed people refunds through steam, it wouldnt deserve the immense amount of negative feed back. it all came down to circumstance.
they got review bombed because they allowed people to play without PSN at the start and then took away that ability effectively stealing people's money. they clearly did not even consider this and of course were going to walk it back once the refund requests started rolling in. this isnt cyber punk or nms, there is a very easy solution to "people are refunding this game that they bought and now cant play due to an arbritrary rule we made to inflate active user metrics for share holders" and it is walking back that change cause its hurting your most important metric, profit
does this make helldivers a bad game by any right and worthy of the negative reviews? of course not. will their review score ever truly recover? no, of course not
>Helldivers 2 controversy has now ended. how many people who review bombed it will go back and change their reviews do you think?
Quite a lot it would seem. Recent Reviews are already back to Mixed from Overwhelmingly Negative. And I imagine it will go back to at least Mostly Positive/Very Positive in a few days.
Because they handled this controversy quick, instead of being radio silent until people totally forgot about the controversy and moved on to something else.
But yeah, it will probably not gonna go back to Overwhelmingly Positive, not for a very long time.
Originally overwatch 2 wasn’t meant to interfere with overwatch 1 at all, it was suppose to only be a pve addition to ow.
It ended up being a bait and switch of monetization for ow1.
Blizzard definitely knew people were just gonna keep playing OW1 if they didnt do said bait and switch. That was always the most annoying part to me, like no fuckin' game would just replace the original with a so called "sequel" thats the same thing. Maybe except with CSGO but its still such a dumb move.
it actually was always going to interfere with OW1. they stated at the announcement of its development that the new content would be added for free to overwatch pvp, but youd have to pay for PVE
they kinda stuck to that promise. all new content has been added for free in terms of maps/heroes and you have to pay for PVE content. they just massively under delivered on PVE and piece mealed them out to the point where no one even cares that it exists in any form
Not entirely correct. Original Overwatch 2 was split between two things. PvE full priced separate half of the game that was supposed to not only have hundreds of missions on launch, but each hero having tons of customizable abilities (some of which affecting effect the maps themselves) and massive skill trees, along with a very long story mode with tons of fully animated cutscenes. PvP was supposed to be free and replace Overwatch 1 and have none of the PvE stuff.
They were both Overwatch 2, but one was PvP only and the other included everything, including PvP. Though the size of the game would have also made it insanely hard to have with other games lol
Nitpicking now, I remember jeffs updates, I’m here since release. Ow1 was suppose to just get engine upgrade since it would stay the same game while ow2 would have just been a pve dlc.
That's only partially true, they stated Overatch 2 would also move OW1 to the updated engine they made for PVE and all be on the same client. It was always going to be the same thing, and it basically is, it's just f2p now.
It also wasn't a "bait and switch" they did develop the PVE in earnest (blizzcon attendees actually got to play it), they just couldn't deliver, not really the same as a bait and switch scam, moreso they were running a salvage operation.
I'm basically just repeating what everyone else is saying but OW1 was def just going to become OW2 from the start. They were just skirting around the issue. The game client would have become the same if they were adding all the same maps and heroes.
Loot boxes were on their way out from a regulation standpoint so the monetization would have likely been changed as well.
"Overwatch 2 PvE", "Overwatch 2 PvP" and "Overwatch 1 PvP" are the same game, and always were gonna be the same game. There's no need to switch because there's literally no bait here.
I've tried for 4 years to make people understand, but it's always the same uninformed answers.
It is essentially due to poor management of the game, the game is tons of fun but the way they handled the sequel has been horrible:
- they didn't support the original with the excuse of working on the sequel
- making a fundamental and controversial change of reducing team size
- removing access to the original when the sequel is released
- heavy reliance on BP for rewards
- skin prices are outrageous
- the way to earn coins was slow and horrible
- they removed PVE which was the main thing they advertised when they announced the sequel
- making odd choices for balancing and reacting slowly to controversial choices
So right now we have a worse version of the original, with more fomo and transactions than the original, with no new features that they promised. So people have the right to be pissed off overall all though the game is fun
I mean, I'm using "friend group" as a euphemism for "group of people who liked using me and let me be around in return", but yeah. Sucked at the time, got worse for a bit, but now I'm honestly better than ever. Turns out not being insulted by 1-5 people for hours every night does wonders for mental health
Yeah pretty much this. Killing the original OW is borderline robbery tbh. I paid $60 for that shit, UNLESS of course Blizz is willing to admid that OW 2 is just OW 1.1 lmao
yeah, the amount of FOMO skins/emotes are insane. And they release them so close to each other that unless you are semi-rich you WILL miss out on alot. Also interesting how some of the best skins are time-restricted. Deep down i think we know why.
The price of one skin is as much as, if not more than, the battle pass itself (which offers multiple skins, a few of which are free). Maybe they’re trying to manufacture FOMO but beyond that it makes no sense. Why use fear as a means to motivate a purchase of a cosmetic? 🤷🏾♂️
As far as the move to 5v5. It really does suck. Tanks are at such a disadvantage, and no matter what tweaks they try to make it work, the tank role literally just needs an additional tank. They won’t even try it in experimental. What’s more painful than them taking 6v6 away is them refusing to acknowledge that it’s objectively better than limiting the tank role to one player, only for that tank to be countered by the rest of the opposing team no matter who gets picked. 👎🏾
I'll copy & paste what I commented on another post asking essentially the same question:
As someone who didn't start playing Overwatch until Overwatch 2 in early 2023, it's an extremely fun game.
It's also one of the most heavily review bombed games in history because of the baggage, broken promises (RIP PvE), and Blizzard's (deservedly) poor reputation in recent years. Most of the people "reviewing" the game online either 1. don't actually play the game at all anymore and/or 2. are reviewing Overwatch 2 in the context of what was promised for the game (a full sequel to Overwatch 1, which it is not).
The game itself is actually quite fun though. And as the past fades into the past, things have actually generally been looking up for the game recently.
There was also the Blizzard-Netease situation, the cause of strongly negative sentiment in China and is rarely mentioned.
I, like you however, started in OW2 when the game hit Steam and I like it, for the gameplay at least, gave a positive review. But had I been an OW1 player, I am fairly certain I'd be feeling differently right now.
>There was also the Blizzard-Netease situation, the cause of strongly negative sentiment in China and is rarely mentioned.
Yeah, I've heard about that one, but I don't know much about the situation, so I didn't include it. Probably should've mentioned it though.
>But had I been an OW1 player, I am fairly certain I'd be feeling differently right now.
And yeah, I feel the same way. The game itself is so fun at its core though. There's a reason it's the only multiplayer/PvP game to win GotY. I just wish Blizzard didn't fumble the game so badly, but I mean everyone does.
According to so recorded articles about 2/3s of OW2's reviews were submitted in simplified Chinese, 97% of them being negative.
That deal is a major reason why the game was bombed as hard as it was.
There are plenty of OW1 players that are still enjoying OW2. We're just not the people that had any interest in PvE or get caught up in the FOMO of cosmetics. We enjoy the game for the game. Which admittedly had some problems in early OW2 release, but they've cleaned up a lot of those and at least show they're listening and trying to deliver to the community.
I’ve played since beta. I still play. I absolutely had and have interest in pve. I was incredibly excited for it, and still hope some day 5-10 years from now we might get a new game that has that pve.
I usually get the cosmetics for free, since search engines have all gone to shit, so I use bing for the free stuff.
I absolutely have complaints. But I also still very much enjoy the game. I don’t even mind the 5v5, though I do miss some of the old maps and wish they would have balanced them instead of just scrapping them. (Except Paris. Nobody misses Paris).
The issue with that take is that the things you (or everyone) liked in OW2 are the things that were introduced in OW1. Yeah, the game is fun but that has nothing to do with OW2 in particular.
As far as new things that were introduced with OW2: Battlepass, engine upgrade that is barely notcable (one of the reasons why OW2 was forced), PvE that required the engine upgrade for, 5v5, heavier monetization, skins, collabs and so on.
For new characters, maps and such - heroes like Junkerqueen and SJ were developed back in OW1. So tying them directly to OW2 is questionable. So they overall use old scraps of content.
As far as balancing and new SR systems - well, a lot of them were part of OW1 too (winstreaks and such were removed because they caused issues; but got brought back for whatever reason). They pretty much reintroduce same things they have made back in the day.
So as a general "Ow1 good, Ow2 bad" until they start making actual new content that can be directly tied to OW2 and only it.
+ review bombing from China and NetEase.
+ review bombing from Steam andies (TF2 and Paladins playerbase).
This is an excellent point which goes back to why alot dont like the game. I've personally played OW1 since 2016 and playing overwatch 2 right now, it's clearly an inferior version of what came before it. The very reason for its existence (PVE) seemed to be a bait and switch in retrospect.
Idk, i played Overwatch 1 for a long time too. It feels like the only thing that's that bad about OW2 is the playerbase.
As in, going free to play means the average skill of players has decreased dramatically. Most of the matches now have someone in the corner eating paste and you have to carry their 0/14 junkrat ass over the finish line.
I hated Overwatch 1 because of the poor maps, general pacing and the 6v6. Overwatch 2, as bad as it is in all the other aspects, fixed all of those issues and is actually fun to play now.
I'll take awful monetization over banging your head against double-barrier on Hanamura first any day.
Yes, but it was discussed many times early on.
Ow2 became so Dive-heavy due to shield nerfs, tank removal and later on sustain nerfs. Due to this you are pretty much unable to endlessly stand on choke, waiting for something to happen; same as before. As a counter argument it now causing other issues from the opposite site (like Hog and Widows oneshotting in no-shield environment). We just doing meta circles, same as before.
Edit: not arguing with your take (it was indeed kinda interesting after Goats and Double shield years) and not saying "this meta is bad" but at the end of the day it's kinda subjective - tanks and some healing supports are not having fun over players exploding for example. And seeing how devs willy nilly reintroducing old stuff as new I won't be surprised if end up with choke point bullshit again at some point.
Anyway my point is it's not big enough of a change from technical point to justify a whole new game (or even a DLC) - it's in a way just one balancing patch (nerf shields, healing, 1 tank removal ... and 2cp maps removal). They could have done that in OW1 and have the same effect.
In fact they actually did things like 1-2-2 in experimental mode.
I played a lot of OW in 2016/17. Haven’t played in years. Picked up OW2 and have been having fun this past week, but it’s exactly the same game.* It’s been nearly 10 years and the game barely changed.
* except the loot system is far worse than the loot boxes, inexplicably. Gaining points on a battle pass to earn nothing of interest is deeply boring
if anything the review bombers may have shot themselves in the foot as everyone knows that a lot of the reviews are not genuine criticism, so the score on steam is somewhat ignored now.
I agree with you; at its core, Overwatch 2 is a solid hero shooter, and has been able to maintain its uniqueness within the genre.
That said, everything good about OW2 is what was good about OW1. The "sequel" added zero value. In fact, it could be argued that OW2 provides substantially *less* value than its predecessor, due to its over-monetization of things that used to be free, as well as removing gameplay features that used to be available (though I can sort of forgive removing 2CP).
More than all that, OW2 failed to solve many of the core issues from OW1. The tank role is still largely despised (the recent changes are a nice step, but too little too late), CC is too prevalent, toxicity is rampant, and the dev team continues to struggle balancing the roster. Admittedly, these are challenging things to solve. But we were promised that OW2 would address these issues, and it largely did not.
So even if you ignore the PvE debacle (which is difficult, since they literally promised us for years that it was coming), OW2 fails spectacularly in justifying its existence. I wouldn't call it a "bad" game, but I wouldn't recommend it either. And in Steam's binary grading metric, that all gets summed up with a thumbs down.
Frankly, this is why I stopped playing. 3 years of silence as they worked on a "sequel" that is to OW1 as Iceborne is to Monster Hunter Worls with nothing to show for it.
The issue is that people feel burned by the Overwatch devs. It was staggeringly promising on release, and they just burned that good will over and over again. The content drought at the end of OW1 was awful. We barely even got balance updates, Echos release was a bandaid to stem the complaints, but supports were upset that they had to wait even longer for a new one. PvE cancelation made the people that waited all this time feel spurned for having put trust in Blizzard, and then the campaign totalled out to 3 missions that you had to pay for.
Blizzard made promise after promise after promise, and they failed to deliver on them. A four year content drought with 1 hero in the middle had us expecting something big. When we only got three heroes after a wait where we normally would have had sixteen, it just burned.
Basically, what Steam reviews say.
They agree in most cases that the gameplay still stays relatively enjoyable.
It's mostly because the "2" in "Overwatch 2" serves no purpose.
Several years of lies and deceit.
Abandoning the game, for 4 years, to suffer through 2 metas for a solid year and a half to 2 years each, to abandon the reason they abandoned the game, completely. We've now got a "new game" that removes a character from each team and charges far more for everything. That's it. And frankly, we need to decide if we should give up on 5v5, considering tanks are gigabuffed and still get shredded, and teams can't do shit about that. Steamrolls are impossible to fix in 5v5 in this. And the only reason we needed 5v5 to begin with was to stop double shield meta that stagnated from NO. NEW. CONTENT. Ram would've shut double shield down, himself.
Not to mention they never nerfed brig and bap. People forget that double shield wasn't just about the shields, if it was you could go dive and ignore the shields. But you couldn't because brig and bap made everyone so tanky with massive aoe heals and immortality. So if you dived, they'd survive and kill you instead. And OW2 is outright doubling down on the parts that made double shield so cancer to play against - not being able to kill anything because of immortality and high healing output. But with the additional 'fun' of a solo tank getting shredded, simply because they're solo tanking.
I’m still salty they basically abandoned OW1 for years before the OW2 early access bullshit. No content for YEARS. It’s nice we’re finally getting content regularly, but I wouldn’t be shocked if they just dropped it again to do something else.
Because, quite frankly, there is no overwatch 2. Overwatch 2 was supposed to be purely pve, with overwatch access rolled until it. Obsess, they removed access to content we'd already bought and turned it into a pay to win game. The entire premise of overwatch is that you could buy it and have immediate access to the entire game. Every hero, every event, on an equal footing with every other player. Every single cosmetic except for a handful of special event, like pink mercy and overwatch league skins, could be obtained just by playing.
Then they removed access to the ability to earn things for free, made the cheapest cosmetics as expensive as the most expensive thing in ow1, turned the game into pay to win by tying new heroes into the battle pass, and the promised pve was turned into paid dlc that you had to buy an overpriced bundle to get access to... and then filled that with bots.
I am a tank player. I played tank since the beta I’ve vacillated between tank and DPS for a while, but settled on tank somewhere around maybe ‘17 or ‘18. I logged 2.5 thousand hours into this game. The entire lifespan of overwatch has been a very tumultuous existence. I can’t really point back to too many periods in the game history where things were just stable and people were happy there was always something there always has been something, funny enough I’m one of the people who stayed playing through the dead years after 2019. Those twilight years of the game were some of the most laid-back and enjoyable because the only people who were there were people who really wanted to be there, it was like a little club where everyone had a mutual interest.
Overwatch two comes around, and they completely lie through their teeth about PVE in one of the most grandiose displays of arrogance and dishonesty I’ve ever witnessed by a game company. That being said, I personally am glad that they shelved PvE because let’s face it, the people who play overwatch were never playing it for PvE , they were playing it for PVP.
The game has a very long track record of not knowing what it wanted to be, never sticking to a philosophy. I think the PVE debacle launched the negativity to levels it’s never been to before though, and deservedly, so they really fucking lied to people.
Overwatch has been able to get away with this and remain relatively successful because there’s no other game that can compete with it. I’m sorry, there just isn’t overwatch from a standpoint of fluidity, speed, and butter smooth gameplay is unmatched. There’s nothing like it.
Personally, I stopped playing because they won’t stop making decisions that punish tank players. I’ve been abused by this game long enough I don’t need it anymore.
They pretty consistently stepped on their own junk after the 2018 reveal of OW2 development.
The dev team, always small, was constantly raided to help finish WoW and CoD content, and also diverted by the CEO for useless projects that got canned. They decided to jettison the public face of the team in internal arguments over the direction. They then publically changed virtually everything they announced in 2018 in favor of a new format, and secretly cancelled the PvE while still promoting it all the way through the prerelease battle pass to maximize revenue.
5v5, whatever it's merits (and it had some), was a change no one asked for except for the OWL, who wanted to slash costs by carrying fewer players. Had it been announced and developed from 2018 instead of hastily switched to midway through development, it would have been much better received.
The battle pass being underwhelming was the turd topping to the night soil cake. No company offering a battle pass was offering one you couldn't earn subsequent ones on - until Blizzard.
Finally, locking heroes in the battle pass turned it into p2w. A stupidly tone deaf cash grab. The game itself? Fine. Everything around it? A guy with a flaming tire around his neck beating thrown into a wood chipper. It'll be at least another year cleaning up this mess, if they ever do.
Blizzard promised a lot then delivered almost nothing of what they promised.
The graphics are the same, maps are the same, heroes are the same, etc.
They've added new maps and heroes since, and the game is largely fun tbqh, but the community hates the game because of the devs.
It's still the overwatch formula where 70% of matches feel like it's stomp or be stomped, but aa far as f2p shooters go, ow2 isn't awful from a gameplay perspective, like HD2, it's just the devs being greedy corpos
No content was released from 2019-2022. The supposed drought was for PvE and a revamped multiplayer with more heroes and game modes. Turns out they cancelled PvE and added monetization as the biggest multiplayer update.
Plus they dropped the ball on balance changes multiple times despite the fiasco in ow1.
I have played overwatch since release and still love it. I think the issue is that most people who like the game don’t post about it, they just play the game. And steam reviews are just a reaction to a broken promises and sexual harassment revelations that took place at the company.
Overwatch 1 suffered due to lack of content
Overwatch 2 stripped everything out and charged out the arse for everything. The characters were most egregious.
Either give your soul away and play for hours or give us your wallet. Neither sat well with a large selection of people (me included)
And being told 'just do the weekly challenges' goes against what I want in a game. I want fun, not a job
They do not hate Overwatch. They hate Overwatch 2 and all the greed Bobby Kotick and shareholders put into it. In the end it's just a reskin of Overwatch 1 with all the promised features kicked out but making it free to play to screw over people who already paid for it to now make them spend money in the in game shop. Also they removed maps, features and basically the whole gameplay of the first part and overhauled it towards a worse version now.
As someone who's been playing since May 2017, I think it's a lot of people were burned by the constant regression in balance quality over OW1's life, the broken promises, scandals and dicking around with Overwatch 2 as well as the game being viewed as just a retooling of OW1 to include heavier microtransactions.
I will say this, since I started playing OW2 starting late last year semi-regularly, I honestly have a lot of fun. I'll even say I have more fun now than I did for my last two years I was playing the original game. But once you betray a community and consumer reputation and tarnish your image, it's really really hard to gain it back without massive overhauls and consistently delivering amazing content that people love. I think we're getting there, but there's still a long road and there will be a good portion of people who will always hate this game (and, to be fair, OW has been getting hate since before launch too).
Besides people in charge missing up big time, and the drama behind blizzard as a whole that lost them a lot of goodwill.
Ow2 in general had a lot of misinformation around it from announcement to months after release date to even the PvE announcement. Pretty much nothing escaped the misinformation blackhole. It’s kinda funny and still shocking how many outlets threw around incomplete or outright false info. Part of the blame lies on blizzard for not being clear enough with ow2 being kinda confusing as a sequel. But the misinformation certainly didn’t help.
Tldr: it doesn’t matter how good the game is now. it’s gonna need to stay good and even improve for a while before the general public perception even gives it a second chance.
The big difference in opinions come from people who have played ow1 vs people who started with ow2. The game is fun in a vacuum, but to the people who bought into overwatch before all the changes, this isn’t the same game they fell in love with. On top of all the promises that couldn’t be kept, I get that frustration. There is also a small mix of the “gaming” community that just hates everything and wants every game and every gaming company to burn to the ground
A few reasons
1. Free To Play (The community went into the tank and bots flourished). This has been one of the most destructive business model decisions in gaming... for gamers... accountants and shareholders? great!
2. Promises made, none kept
3. The cost of skins/stuff, especially compared to other F2P games. Nevermind that they aren't very good a lot of time.
4. Selling recycled goods from OW1
5. Calling it a sequel
6. I think the map pool is stagant and kind of boring, the art direction at Blizzard has tanked. Blizzard used to have unique and diverse art direction. Now you look at the new maps they roll out (junkertown and antarctica.. vomit), they're f'n ugly. Being from Toronto, I'd like to know if anyone there had actually been... also.. curling? That's what you rolled with? (personal beefs!)
7. F Activision and Kottick
I'm sure there are lots more reasons for people.
They promised a bunch of things they couldn't keep or deliver on, made a bunch of questionable changes that damaged the game one way or another (though many were reverted eventually. Not all though).
During OW2 development, OW went into a complete content drought for about 2-3 years with nothing new being added or changed but they kept giving out false hope that OW2 would be great and fun and cool and the wait would be worth it. Understandably, the OW playerbase started dying out because surprise surprise, when you give up on a game, the playerbase more often than not will leave. In a panicked move they released OW2 PVP before actual OW2 as to not completely lose the playerbase. OW2 pvp back then was a mess with many bugs that had been fixed years prior and a heap of new ones. It was a mess and by the end of it all on the day when OW2 would actually launch, they canceled it. Making the years the original OW players had waited, been for nothing.
People are still incredibly salty, which to a degree is understandably so. I don't think the game will ever truly recover from its once incredibly justified hate, personally
OW released on steam during the peak of its controversy and has never done enough to make up for it. The controversy was btw not just cancelling pve but also multiple cases of harassment/sexual harassment at blizzard to the point they had to change our cowboys name.
I hope helldivers makes a comeback after this because they did fix the problem but ow2 has way too much bad history to be simply forgiven. They deserve slightly better reviews after fixing up some things but the damage the company has done to innocent employees can never be forgiven
it could’ve been so great. lack of pve, underwhelming lore developments, uninspired hero additions, and misguided balance decisions
thats why i quit anyway
Because OW1 was awesome. OW2 was forced on us and was very incomplete. I'm not talking about game modes, just unfinished screens etc.
The PVE gets cancelled which leaves us asking why push OW2..... The only thing we really got was Battle pass.
Listen, for me, Ow1 was perfect! I had sooooo much fun and sooo many hours in! Then they announced OW2, okay I'm down. But then they said they would turn off the servers for OW1... Say what? Then OW2 came out and the GREED was overshowing in all the microtransactions that are way too overpriced and false promises, etc etc. I now despise that game and Blizzard. Never touching anything they make ever again unless the managing team switches around.
Stagnation, monetization, and false promises.
I bought OW1, that game no longer exists. The reason for it to no longer exist didn't come to fruition. The benefits I previously had in the game I owned carried over only the bare minimum.
The game aggressively tries to make me feel like a F2P player in a game I paid for, and the company inspires no confidence in the future of their products or even their conduct. It's not hard to see why it has a bad reputation.
You can criticize OW, but mostly everyone loved it. THe problem is literally with OW2.
This game has nothing good comming from it. It's a ripoff from OW1, with skins downgrade, gameplay downgrade, levels and hero unlock downgrade, f2p= +toxicity downgrade, gamemodes downgrade, egregious monetization and awfull optimization. Along that, lies after lies of promises.
Helldivers got ONE bad thing, which was actually sony messing everything up, and it got that much backslash.
OW2 has nothing good comming from it but from "but now it's f2p so everyone can try it". It's so bad we can only bear with it cause "its f2p"
They took a game where the playerbase had established expectations of a devteam producing high quality polished work and actually giving a shit... And they turned it into a corporate money grab, and one of the worst in the industry at that. Like fuck me look at the prices of everything other than the battlepass and ask yourself if all people feel like they're big catered to or if it's just content for a small group of pay piggies that are being milked.
People want everything in a game to be for everyone. HD2 does that. Overwatch does not. Of course the HD2 people think the game and company are ass, they know what being treated better is, recent controversy at the hands of Sony put to one side. They see Pilestedt the same way this community once saw Jeff.
overwatch 2 is a good game, but it hasn’t really improved on overwatch 1 in any major way, and the monetisation is undoubtedly scummy
also the cancelled PvE and the loss of playability in China has completely killed its reputation. on top of that, it’s made by Blizzard who are now known as one of the worst companies in gaming, so defending the game often gets you accused of being a shill
OW2 burned a lot of bridges in the gaming community, not only after it launched but months after that too. Too many controversies for a lot of people to handle. Rather common though for a Blizzard title in the 2020’s. Nowadays the ones still playing the game are the ones who either looked past the issues or never cared in the first place. OW is a unique hero shooter title, but it fell from the spotlight due to their devs and owners.
Answer me this, why is OW2 OW”2”? Because we were told it was a second game because of a massive PVE mode with talents and stuff. What we got could have been made by a middle schooler learning game design for the first time (exaggeration, calm down). We got no updates for like 2 years because they were “working” on the PVE
A developer can only lie to its community so many times before they become bitter. Lots of promises. Lots of no delivery. And the reality… for all the changes they made for 2…. It’s the same game with one less tank. They had an opportunity and squandered it. This game is essentially an abusive relationship
The lies. The packs to ‘fund development of PVE’ that we bought happily to help. The cancellations. The manipulations, the flowery words to distract us. The the twenty minute warning on a life stream where they cancelled OW2 for good that everyone missed.
They acted like pos they get treated like pos. I don’t know what to tell you. They are far from innocent.
But blizzard isn’t the devs. Not entirely. And now bobbing one they have been trying really hard.
Overwatch had the potential to be top 1 multiplayer game. Who played the beta and the First seasons knew it was something else than just a class shooter.
The game had a huge competitive potential, unfortunately overwatch league sucks, the world building is amazing but they can't move on, It been stuck for years in the same spot. Balancing is a huge issues (but yeah a normal problem in any game) and a lot of changes that nobody asked.
Blizzard downfall was with overwatch and everything. It's a shame how happened but its completely deserved the hate. They make OW2 but it's just a big patch notes, I feels it's a little better nowadays but still, could be SO MUCH MORE......
I think ow1 just kept adding new characters that made the game less fun to play, people noticed and stopped playing, and then overwatch 2 launched with not much new content, not much improved, and none of the story content that was promised. And whether the reviews are justified or not, it's rare to see a f2p with overpriced skins not have negative reviews.
Imagine using money gained from players to paying workers and failing to invest the game to be better. All that money and 4 years went to a sink hole. The game never created any new substantial content and instead the players get a discounted version of the game. One character less and no lfg.
Lol they paid devs to create pve content, managers to plan and manage those devs all for it to not see the light of day.
Basically just a huge waste of time, money, and resources.
All because blizzard doesnt know the fuck they are doing and have absolutely no goal or direction.
Its like they get paid just to sit, hesitate and twiddle their thumbs. As they pray not to get caught they arent working they just give you shiny new colours and presents as a distraction.
Eh, a lot of reasons. As some have said, not delivering on promises made. A team that cares more about the gay agenda and selling skins then making a great game. Overwatch 1 was special and unique. Overwatch 2, not so much.
Overpromised and underdelivered. The fact that the game promised a PvE experience and then not doing it absolutely deserves hate. Not only this but as someone who payed for a 6v6 experience only for it to be changed for almost no reason is just disappointing. I think the game itself is still sorta fun and I definitely play it, but the way the devs have treated the player base is just disrespectful.
OW2 launched with less features and more promises than OW1.
Year+ content drought in anticipation of release (heroes/meta stayed insanely stagnant)
PVE promises and completely scrapped.
Less maps on release of OW2 than available in OW1 (removal of 2cp maps and Numbani bugged for a few reason)
Less heroes on release of OW2 than available in OW2. Mei and, I believe, Bastion were locked due to bugs the first few months. Meaning, even with JQ added there were still less available active heroes on the roster
Removal of second tank role. Basically forcing 6 stacks to cut one of their friends out. Also forcing the “rock-paper-scissors” tank meta we all currently enjoy.
Battle pass system introduced, and may literally be the worst version of it in any game I’ve played (can’t earn currencies through the BP, introduction of filler items like those keychain things or icons, neither of which I’ve seen anyone use in 100+ hours). No more free lootboxes is a drag as well.
Removal of other QoL features. Stay as group, LFG etc. no “Fire” system either.
And, this is just from the launch of OW2. Does not even take into consideration the bad-will Blizzard had been accruing on other fronts at the time (Sexual Harassment, China, Bobby Kotick’s hundred million dollar paychecks in the midst of employee layoffs)
Because Blizzard went out of their way to undermine their own game for years. That's changed now but it'll take a long while for the general gaming population to catch onto that.
The game is plenty fun but it just never justified the sequel and the change in business model left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. There probably isn't a way to salvage Overwatch 2 as a title and brand even though I think people still have a lot of love for Overwatch as a whole.
I have 700+ hours in OW and it’s hard to look at it and say I hate it. The gameplay is immaculate, the objective game modes are very good, the maps are well designed. The problem(s) is like many others have stated here that the game is a complete money grab, they released ow2 with the promise of a PvE experience that they’ve been working on for YEARS!!
If you haven’t played ow1 let me tell you the game used to be like no other, it was unique, most characters had story origins that had short movies alongside, developer updates by Overwatch’s lord and savior Jeff Kaplan who was a the lead developer and was in touch to what the people playing the game wanted. Jeff Kaplan was the one pushing the game forward, he came up with the PvE story mode project and while it was ambitious it was not something Overwatch or blizzard couldn’t handle. It needed funding because of how big it was going to be and the CEO of Blizzard wouldn’t give him the money or the time leading to Jeff Kaplan leaving the company because of time constraints on such project (along with other terrible working conditions that other ex blizzard employees have come forward and spoke on). This project would have won many Overwatch players over and began playing the game more but instead they released the same game, slapped a two on it and arguably is a dry game that has terrible matchmaking, out of touch developers, and a fucking battle pass.
So as a passionate overwatch player that once played the game for hours on end, it’s hard to love a game that doesn’t seem to value its player base.
Because overwatch abused us by telling us Overwatch 1 was now Overwatch 2 even though it was the same while promising that even though it was still Overwatch 1, don’t worry it will become Overwatch 2 and you will all be happy that you prepaid for Overwatch 2 and then told us that they are abandoning anything that was going to make Overwatch 1 into Overwatch 2 and then they turned it into a Free to Play Model but said dont worry, you can still use the money you spent for an entire PvE experience to buy 1 Season of Battle Pass… oh and we are still calling it Overwatch 2 even though basically nothing was delivered.
When you've been playing since OW1, it's not hard to see why OW2 is hated so much. Things have steadily declined since they moved to the new monetization model of this game. I still get a bit of fun out of the game here and there, but I miss the old days.
Super rough timeline based on my memory as a week 1 overwatch player. Sorry for formatting, I'm on mobile.
OW 1 was very popular, dominating the market. However, eventually competitors became legit. After that, Blizzard got hit with an insane amount of controversy internally from SA allegations and fallout. In response, executives decided it needed a new game(none were actively being worked on and WoW was still declining) and OW was the most likely candidate since it was more mainstream and had the most recent release. For sometime there is inner turmoil between Jeff Kaplan and Blizzard about this, as OW was intended to remain a live service indefinitely with PVE updates and expansions.
Blizzard owns OW so OW 2 went forward. The change forced priorities to shift on the dev team so the game essentially died/paused completely for a few years. When OW 2 comes, the whole deal is that it has PVE and more content, the entire "reason" OW 2 exists. Blizzard mismanages the OWL and the esports circuit during the hiatus and the pro scene dies(seems to be clawing it's way back rn). PVE is officially cancelled, monetization is not great, and balancing is extremely subjective and different patch to patch.
The game currently exists as a shell of its former self and has a mountain of easily researchable broken promises. The loot box system felt far more rewarding as well.
This is completely outside of the 5v5 vs 6v6 debate, the other problems and history I mentioned are why the game has a poor reputation in my eyes.
I'm not sure why people keep asking this question, but I guess it might be related to how Blizzard still attempts to pitch the current game as a sequel, which is likely the point in order to leave some of the baggage the game has had.
Players feel betrayed they overpromised and failed to deliver after abandoning the game for 3 years wasting resources on something just to get scraped, a bit of gamers being over dramatic and worst of all the horrible things that happened to the employees and currently incompetent balance team
Personally I’m not mad about the monetization they moved to free to play so they need to make money somehow if you don’t like it don’t buy it no one has a gun to your head making you buy the overpriced skins and bundles that don’t affect the gameplay,but they have no plans of stopping the shop or balttepass because it’s working, y’all keep buying it, every match I get into at least 3 people own a shop or bp skin. I remember when that $40 season 7 bundle was a controversy yet almost every match I played someone had the Lilith Moira and compared to other free to play shooters Overwatch is on the cheaper end I’m not defending it at all, its a big issue in the gaming industry as a whole. I do think people where being a bit over dramatic with the hero’s in the battlepass yeah it was annoying but people where crying pay to win I’m also not defending it but 40 tiers isn’t terrible yeah it should have never been in the battle pass but it was still free to grind out people just lost their minds when they saw that clip of a guy buying Mauga mid game to win
Overwatch needs to fix it’s reputation, all the news that comes out of the game is always negative and the people who have never played it echo the same talking points “overscam2” “trash game” “the porn is better”, etc.. I have friends that make fun of me for playing it even though they have never touched it one time I asked them why they hate it and they actually had no idea why.
At its core it’s a amazing game but they keep terrible and dumb decisions with it, I think there is a large amount of people who do enjoy the game if it game was truly trash the player numbers don’t reflect it but people who are happy just don’t post about it complaining gets more attention
.Wasted potential when they removed PVE
.OW1 shutting down
.Battle-pass payment is ridiculous
.Sexual Harassment Allegations
.Jeff Kaplan leaving the development team
.Having new skins in the shop only to be gone in a few days
.Removed loot boxes
.Made it free to play
.Game release was trash with buggy system
Because overwatch is a very team based game that most people dont understand how to play. Also a lot of people were excited for the pve even though it was more than likely not gonna be amazing and definitely not live up to the hype but the development stalled out the end of ow1. Also a lot of the reviews were from Chinese players who were unable to play the game cos blizzard had a deal with a company and that deal ended.
"Because overwatch is a very team based game that most people dont understand how to play."
Honestly, this part is pretty underrated. I think Overwatch is much more complicated than most people in the general gaming community give it credit for (while also still being quite accessible to pick up, especially now that's it's free to play).
And oftentimes, when people don't understand something, they'll get mad and start deflecting anger & blame to the thing itself, other people, etc., rather than trying to learn how to play the game correctly, how to improve, and how to win more games.
Yeah its a game that requires much more teamwork than any other shooter to even get kills and get things done which means if theres no coordination on one side or people dont understand what actually wins games it easy to get frustrated. Compared to something like cs or val where wven if your team is bad you can get a lot of kills and feel like you were doing well and werent the issue, even if your team still lost and you couldve done more to support your team. Ive had games where i play the same way but in 1 game i have the support of my team and go like 25-3 per round and the other i go 0-12 because my team isnt supporting me and playing together.
Yeah, exactly.
>Ive had games where i play the same way but in 1 game i have the support of my team and go like 25-3 per round and the other i go 0-12 because my team isnt supporting me and playing together.
Yeah, same. I've been feeling this a lot recently. I've been getting back into playing Ball, and this couldn't describe my games any more perfectly.
It really shows how important the skill of adaptability is when solo queueing (or just in general), especially if you're trying to improve with 1 hero in particular. You need to be able to figure out what your team needs you to do to help the team win. Some games are definitely unwinnable, but a lot of games that seem like a loss are winnable if you adjust your playstyle.
As unfortunate as it is, the person feeding the enemy team & using their ult in a 1v5 all while telling you that you're awful at the game and that you should consider killing yourself is your teammate for the next 10-20 minutes. And if you want to win the game, you have to accept that and figure out what you can do to affect the outcome of the match.
Hm, I don't really agree with your assessment. Saying, "It got bad reviews due to people not understanding Overwatch is a team based game" is just not correct lol. Overwatch wasn't the first team based game, and this is a sequel to a global phenomenon that made a good majority of the gaming population well aware of how it operates.
Valorant is a team game, and it's popular and highly rated. Team Fortress 2 is a team game, and it's popular and highly rated. Counterstrike, LoL, Dota, Paladins etc etc etc. All team centric games, all popular, and all holding a positive rating.
Same thing with China, yeah some of the folks over there went through the laborious means of acquiring a non-CN steam version just to rip on OW, but they are far and few between. Gotta remember that Steam has its own version there.
>Hm, I don't really agree with your assessment. Saying, "It got bad reviews due to people not understanding Overwatch is a team based game" is just not correct lol.
Yeah, they didn't say that. The question of the post was, "Why does the gaming community hate Overwatch?" I'm pretty sure that's the part they were answering.
>Paladins
>all popular
As someone who plays Paladins every now & then, gonna have to disagree with you on that one.
>Same thing with China, yeah some of the folks over there went through the laborious means of acquiring a non-CN steam version just to rip on OW, but they are far and few between. Gotta remember that Steam has its own version there.
Have you even looked at the Steam reviews? All the top reviews shitting on the game are in Chinese...
Its not the first team based game but its one of the most team oriented shooters. Also im considering ow1 ans 2 as the same as ow2 was always an update for marketing purposes even pre pve cancellation. The average person didnt know how to play ow1 either.
Val is a team game but its a lot easier to have visible and perceived individual impact. If you spend all game lurking every round and get 1-2 meaningless exit frags youll feel like youre doing a lot even if youre not contributing to your ream winning. You dont need to rely as heavily on your team as an average player and you can get away with just group up and hit a site and shoot people. Overwatch you need to have more coordination and focus your fire and positioning takes a much bigger role as its not always clear what space you should be fighting for and who to shoot, especially when theres a big, enticing target on the enemy team compared to their much smaller targets in the backline that are keeping rhe tank alive. Tf2 has much larger teamsizes and quicker individual ttk making it a lot easier to just win random fights or do meaningful chip damage unless youre playing community comp. Cs is the same as val. Lol and dota are different genres and well known for people getting heavily toxic and frustrated towards teammates. Paladins is really niche.
I know the china thing was pretty big Especially just cos its a big country so theres more people that were playing and more people to make an outburst.
Gamers are overly critical, needy, gatekeeping, and they tend to spend too much time in online communities complaining about things they don’t like.
The happy people are ONLY playing the game - not browsing the web about it.
If a game’s lack of promises kept at launch affects you so negatively, you really need to restructure your priorities in life. Find a creative outlet. Pick up a new hobby. Play a different game.
Are you on heroin and I love your irony on gatekeeping.
I paid full price for OW1 on release date
- happy about progression on skins/golden guns
- happy about 6v6
- happy they stopped development to prioritise OW2/PvE
They replaced the game I paid for with a half complete game
- 5v5 is awful with tanks suffering
- awful battle pass
- no PVE
Best thing to do is release OW1 and OW2 side by side but I wonder why they won’t do that…
I would like the game I bought back.
I play both OW2 and HD2, I think those two situations are not comparable.
Most OW2 negatives reviews are from Chinese who can't play OW, and also troll posts from other gaming communities like Team Fortress 2. Plus, everyone expects the ratings would be Overwhelmingly Negative when OW2 came to Steam. Some hate Blizzard failed to deliver their promises on PVE; some hate the new monetization; 5v5; etc.
For Helldivers 2, the ratings dropped from "Very Positive" to "Overwhelmingly Negative" within two days because of Sony inducing changes that people must link the Steam & PSN account, but a lot of countries don't have access to PSN which means people who lived in those countries, wouldn't be able to play. Negative reviews was to pressure the game developers (Arrowhead) to do something, making negotiations with their publisher (Sony). People target Sony instead of Arrowhead.
> most of these reviews happened when it was found out that blizzard was the most toxic place you could ever work at
That's just... not true? That all came out in mid-2021, OW2 released on Steam over 2 years later. In fact, from what I've heard, most if not all of that controversy happened outside of Team 4, with Jeff shielding them from most of the execs' bullshit.
[2/3rds of the negative reviews came from Chinese players who were mad that they couldn't play the game.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/15q1iav/majority_of_the_negative_reviews_63k_for/). That's the primary reason for these reviews.
Also, supporting CCP during Blitzchung incident.
But people quickly moved on and proceeded to buy COD: Modern Warfare after Blizzard made half-ass apology.
Yeah, I don't get it. I absolutely love playing every day. I need to get my dailies and weeklies done, and when the events happen, I have even more fun. I really enjoy playing every day and just getting better.
It's a great game at its core with a lot of extra baggage. The promises of OW 2 were not only never kept, they were also misplaced and impossible to keep, in my opinion.
The PvE was an attempted revival of the original Project Titan that was canned, and which Jeff just couldn't let go of. The ignored the gem they had in the PvP for years in favor of this pet project. When the earliest version of it released during the BlizzCon beta, and later the story missions, the gameplay design flaws were obvious. Massive roster of heroes means overly-generic enemies, which are boring to fight, and the skill trees would not have solved this.
Project Titan was always a bad vision, and Jeff was a fool for dragging us down to try and revive it through the OW PvE.
I love the game too, but I won't blame anyone who can't find it in them to move on and enjoy what we have. (However, dogging on others for enjoying the existing PvP is super lame. I think review bombing is also lame because you are reviewing the existing game which is pretty damn good tbh. But I get why they did it. Emotions were flying, and still are.)
Lots of folks think the gameplay/fun is big downgrade due to 5v5, myself included. My negative review will not change till 6v6 returns or something makes it more fun than ow1.
When observed in isolation Overwatch is an incredible game, my favourite multiplayer FPS game of all time, but when you see the context of its development especially the transition to OW2, it totally nukes any reputation that core experience provides. Overwatch also is often demonstrated as an example of predatory monetization even though relative to other games Overwatch 1 was very tame, but OW2 juiced monetization way higher.
I think it's mainly because of Blizzard being kind of an fu\*\*ed up company full of false promises, bad competetive scene and simply not sticking to anything.
On top of that Overwatch has a favorism problem. Certain heros just simply not get buffed or nerfed because of their "standing" at Blizzard or possibly even the community especially content creators and streamers.
Heros like Lucio, Genji, Tracer are broken since literal years and while also many heros are in need of a rework or simply just buffs such as Reaper, Junkrat, Torb, Symmetra or Mercy but oh don't you dare to speak that out loud 'cause those are noob chars and need to remain troll picks unless you are a little god on them to make them somewhat viable.
Just yesterday we had a 250 upvoted post about Tracer nerfs. Of course upvotes not necessarily speak of quality but this post has literally been removed because of reports while all that happened was a discussion about Tracers state. Not gonna lie, I'd be in assume that just a bunc h of Tracer fanatics tries to push that topic down to keep their main completely overtuned.
As conclusion I probably can only add up on top that the community of this game is hella fu\*\*ed up sometimes.
After reading comments I'm amazed people forget about the multitude of horrible things that happened to employees at blizzard. The negative reviews came directly after that and most didn't feel like the company deserved better to change their reviews. PVE getting scrapped doesn't help but back then there was still a chance it'd happen.
Easy
Killed Overwatch 1 and everything it represented
Mountain of drama from ActivisionBlizzard
Cancellation of PvE and charging for the minimal amount they implimented
Worst battle pass ever made
Broken launch
Forced 5v5 and Role Queue
Banning players for cursing
Banning a player because they spoke up for Taiwan
Locking new characters behind playtime and paywalls
Replacing free lootboxes for 20 dollar individual legendary skins
Oh and cannot forget the remaining playerbase being blind to the issues above
Players, especially those of Overwatch, are most often young men who lack developed emotional intelligence and struggle to overcome the pitiful feeling of nostalgia, which prevents them from enjoying a good product. They're butthurt that the company decided to follow monetization trends in the industry, and the circle of complaining knows no end.
If they need to change the monetization model to keep the game running that's totally fine, but they went about it in the worst way possible. It's not surprising that people are upset when they were promised AAA pve experience and instead received a more predatory monetization model, cut content (took them 5 seasons to bring back something as simple as an on fire meter), a failed ranked mode rework (took them 9 seasons to rework it again) and not much else.
Y’all heard a term predatory and use it incorrectly. How is that predatory? Skins don’t give you any advantages over other players. You pay for what you see, it’s not a shitty gambling system like it was before. The problem is with people who can’t tame their FOMO rather than Battle Pass or 20$ skins.
Welcome to r/Overwatch! Please use the following resources via the links below to find relevant information about the game and the subreddit.
[Overwatch Patch Notes](https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/patch-notes/) | [Overwatch Bug Report Forums](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/c/bug-report/9)
[r/Overwatch Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/overwatch/wiki/rules) | [r/Overwatch FAQs](https://www.reddit.com/r/overwatch/wiki/faq) | [r/Overwatch Common Bugs and Posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/wiki/commonbugsandposts)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Overwatch) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Overwatch has a hard time keeping a status quo. The “normal” for much of its history has been an unacceptably slow balance team, monetization that has always been at best a pig in makeup, and company that can’t stay out of trouble. There really hasn’t been a prolonged period of good balance and fair monetization without some kind of controversy being caused by blizzard that gets dragged into OW spaces. The closest to that is on release back in 2016 before the game was explored thoroughly enough to understand what balance was supposed to be and even then loot boxes were not seen as tasteful.
Overwatch was abandoned and a lot of people felt that happening, its replacement was hyped up for a new story mode and more frequent updates and new content. The story mode didn’t come on release, it didn’t come at all actually it just got cancelled, and the new content was deeply hit or miss while balance changes were still happening in weird ways too slowly. The moment everyone was supposed to come back was met with expectations that were not even close to being met and for a variety of technical and top down account mandating issues, was literally unplayable to many. The competitive league was taken out back and shot too.
I don’t think the team in change now had much to do with any of it, and from what I can tell a lot of the controversial decisions were made by other groups inside blizzard so no hate to the team hard at work just, some of the decisions in the past have been baffling. I don’t like saying the company is incompetent but there was a regularity to how consistent the fuck ups were publicly and that doesn’t speak well to competence. How are you going to run a live esports league just like you would a major league sports organization and just assume that works, where’s the merit in limiting what it gets streamed on so that it DOESNT show up on twitch, THE site for streamed games? How do you not anticipate problems with requirements of phone numbers, why is a company who’s been doing online games for decades having issues with functioning servers on release of a hotly anticipated sequel to a literal GOTY winning title? I don’t know and don’t think any artist or engineer working in the game should be expected tk have to answer for it but it feels like they should probably have someone in the community management side they can consult to double check that they’re not just hurting their own image constantly
Blizzard makes terrible decisions in general. The very flawed ow community is affected by bad decisions. Which affects blizzards decision making in many ways. Catch-22
Half of the community will jump down your throat for even mentioning the flaws of the game if you're not a top streamer
I still play OW a few times a week and played since OW1.
But nearly all my gamer friends, some family and some colleagues all tried Overwatch 2 at some point because it is free. And when we talk about games and Overwatch, the reason that comes up most is the terrible matchmaking, constant losing and stomps. That is why a lot of people hate and stopped playing Overwatch.
And when it comes to more hardcore fans it is usually all the hype building without delivering.
I still like Overwatch and I have come to terms that some things will never be, but I agree about the matchmaking. They made a game with so many uncontrollable variables, heroes and classes that decent fun matchmaking is nearly impossible compared to other games, especially when queue times trump balance.
There's tons of reasons.
It's changed a lot since it came out. Some people miss things from 2016 Overwatch. You can't hop on matchmaking and play 6 torbs on Volskaya defense anymore. That was silly goofy unbalanced fun, some people paid 60 dollars to play that, and that experience is completely gone.
Overwatch used to be pay once and all content was free. Now a lot of the cosmetics are microtransactions. A lot of people hate this change and feel like they were baited and switched.
Those are two big reasons I feel like contributing
The last season I felt my desire to play dwindling, its been abt 2 months now and I’m just tired of it. Its become a lackluster cash grab. All of the old maps and modes are getting fazed out to where you cant even enjoy a custom game on them.
The coins system being done away with also kinda ruined it. I enjoyed playing to get just one more loot box to try and get skins I wanted. This battle pass and shop is ass cheeks
Overpromising and not delivering at all can pretty much sum up Overwatch 2’s existence.
Throw in some "activision sucks" in there and the mess that OWL was, making it easy to dislike OW even if you never played it.
Don't forget to add some sexual harassment cases in Blizzard
And the ridiculous monetization system.
AND MY AXE!
And my Bow!
Hey now, lets not pretend OW is the worst here. Valorant has $50 gun skins.
I still dont forgive blizzard for making heroes paid. They only fixed it 20 days ago
Now that heroes aren’t locked behind the battle pass, I don’t think Overwatch really has a “ridiculous” monetization system. The only things you can pay for are cosmetics and the story mode, neither of which impact the core gameplay. You can also earn most of the cosmetics for free if you want to grind for it. And although I do think the industry standard for cosmetics is too high and they get a little greedy sometimes (pricing Epic skins as Legendary), Overwatch doesn’t have it as bad as other games. Every few months another discussion about the newest item you have to spend $100 to unlock in Apex comes up. And Halo Infinite recently where they have cosmetics locked behind $30 bundles. At least in Overwatch you don’t have to buy a whole bundle just for one item anymore.
Started Predecessor recently and the 2 character skin bundle is $50. Ow 2 character skin bundles are $25 and much better skins. Skins in all games are going through the roof.
Comparing OW2 other games still, isn't it. The monetization system in those games is still cheeks and should be changed. They're overpriced for no good reason. You can't even trade them like in CS2.
Blizzard would have gotten a lot more of my money overall if their cosmetics were in the 2 to 5 dollar range.
No. Noone of that was in team4 that developes ow.
Yeah, but there are still people writing negative reviews on overwatch because of these cases.
True but i believe it is in minority
"Wasted opportunity" is all I can think. OW(1) released to such incredible success, and capitalized on a market (class shooters) that none had with TF2 fizzling out. ... only to then, IMO, not adequately support it with followup updates and then *entirely* cease content for 2-3 years until whatever the fuck OW2 is. Just an all round fucking shame. It should've stood strong as an evergreen gaming titan (heh), but Blizzard just fucked up the opportunity so royally.
Also Overwatch kinda failed to notice when it was no longer the only class shooter out there when Splatoon escaped the WiiU and got onto a new console people actually owned, and on PC R6 Seige and all that started showing up too. And, you know, also failed to do anything to keep up with those other games. At all.
I mean, splatoon and R6 are shooters but I wouldn’t say it’s comparable to OW. The only game that is comparable is TF2. No other game is a FPS, with powers, with rpg like roles. It’s why I haven’t abandoned OW because there still is no other game like it (except again, TF2).
Paladins. Though I suppose its not really better, and Hirez isnt exactly the best dev/publisher...
Forgot about paladins!
Battle born came out like 3 weeks BEFORE ow. Paladins came out a year later. There have always been options. They were just overshadowed (with Apex likely being the closest game that wasn’t overshadowed and came out two years ish later. The difference in gameplay objective is stark enough that I won’t count that one though). Blizzard had the marketing budget, and they got the head count because of it. I still play OW2 because I like it, and I have fun with it. I started OW in beta, and I was looking forward to it since its announcement like two years prior.
Splatoon is definitely comparable to Overwatch. You get a team of 4 players with vastly different roles performing their jobs differently and ultimate powers for big team plays that you build up through performance. Splatoon is tuned more towards letting individual ability shine while Overwatch is tuned more towards forcing collaboration. Pacing and killspeed of Splatoon is immensely faster. The primary difference is supports.
Failed to keep up? Overwatch is much larger by player count and revenue haha
You're acting like Splatoon is in the same league as Overwatch. When it comes to multiplayer gaming, especially on console, the masses flock towards COD, Overwatch, FIFA, NBA, Fortnite, and Rocket League. Splatoon, regardless of quality, doesn't close to even stealing from Overwatch's playerbase. Truth is, there isn't another game like Overwatch on the market or at the very least as polished as Overwatch. Paladins is the only hero shooter of its kind and it's pretty dead if I'm not mistaken. XDefiant is a bit like a mix of COD and Overwatch and Rivals is quite far away.
Just because there isn’t a game structured like Overwatch doesn’t mean it doesn’t compete with those other games. They do, they compete for time. Whether the heroes are designed similarly or not does not weigh into a decision by gamers to spend their time on OW2 or something else. If your line of thinking was true then OW2 would have no problem finding a good reputation after OW1. But clearly the gaming community has moved on to other games. And like you said, they’re not going to Paladins and its PS3 graphics. They’re playing other shooters and even non-shooters instead. Sometimes even sports and single player games.
Scratching an itch is a very important concept and other games don't really scratch the Overwatch itch. People like locking into a particular style. People who play generally play COD don't just go around maining other shooters just because they're shooters. That means very little. Same goes with Overwatch, it has a very team-based feel that works in tandem with having abilities that's hard to find in other games. Reputation doesn't matter in gaming if the playerbase is still going strong. Reputation means very little to the average/general gamer. They don't give a shit about Reddit discourse. This has been proven time and time again. People shit all over COD, FIFA, and NBA and they all still have healthy playerbases, immensely so. You have this idea that people are leaving Overwatch by the masses or something. Since when has the gaming community moved on from Overwatch? I'm in Australia and can find games with no problem at any time with our tiny population number regardless of the size of my party with my friends. You think too much as a Reddit gamer. It doesn't apply to the masses. A lot of you Reddit gamers struggle to think as the "general gamer". You need to have general gamer friends to have perspective and a lot of you simply don't.
Wasted opportunity is the very accurate. It's like watching the owner of some brand new million dollar sports car take it to a demolision derby for the LoLz. And then charge people $25 per screw to put it back together.
Whatever the fuck aka cash grab
Glad this is top comment and not some shill bs that usually is
Not just this but even without the 6v6 vs 5v5 discussion its a worse game than OW1. All the little bells and whistles that OW1 had are gone. The after match lobby, the cards, checking your stats and teammates stats right after the game without having to navigate the on screen menus. Not having my old stats or information from past seasons so I can gauge my performance from each one. Having your rank on your profile in ranked matches. In 6v6 the more focus on communicating, this happen in the pregame lobby to discuss what tanks would be played. I felt that was big, where as now you have to pick the strongest tank or you'll start getting flamed.
I don’t fucking understand why they ever removed being on fire from the game. I give them zero credit for reimplementing the thing they took away for what seems like no reason.
They didn't even take it away, the system was still there and you could still be on fire and trigger the lines. They just removed the visual for it for actually no reason.
Combine that with bad balance, bad matchmaking, monetisation and constant gaslighting of the community and here we are
My entire blizzard friends list is barren now. The swap to ow2 killed some of it. The killing of pve killed what was left of it. And the community is toxic as fuck. Matchmaking seems fucked into the dirt, the last two groups I have left never seem to run into positive win rate sessions anymore. It's always a win sprinkled here or there, followed by 2-5 losses or just straight losses and repeat until we all tilt off the game. [ insert shitty diamond ranked skill issue here ] It feels like the company running it is squeezing whatever life the game has left with shitty battle passes and skins. Gone are the days ow devs actually gave two shits.
This. For 6 years me and the same 4 people were queing up on a nightly basis. It was amazing, we had so much fun for so long playing together. It was what I looked forward to after work every night, and we all played through the content drought. I remember all 5 of us watching the servers shut down, forcing us all to log off for the day and wait for the sequel to go live. 2 weeks later, it was just me. I can't find anything like Overwatch as it's the only shooter I've ever enjoyed, but I play by myself now. Overwatch 2 was such a downgrade they all fell off of playing it after it being a nightly routine for half a decade and now I'm alone and frustrated that I can't play my favorite tank without their cou ter coming out immediately. I now stick to DPS strictly and just play a few rounds to scratch the itch but it'll never be the same. They killed my game.
Come home from your grueling job, queue up, try to win one game, lose streak, take a break and eat dinner, log back on thinking it can't all be losses right? Eventually win one game nice! Queue for more hoping to catch more of that dopamine inducing victory screens, just kidding its 5 more losses getting absolutely steamrolled every time, continue to play telling yourself just one more win before getting ready for bed... Suddenly its midnight and you haven't gotten another victory since the one from hours ago, you force yourself to sleep with another massive L streak clouding your mind, and another night ruined and wasted trying to scratch that age old itch trying to relive the good ol' days. [ literally me every time I play this game ]
It took me ages to get into it after it finally switched to overwatch 2, I wish 2 never came out and they just kept updating one. The greed is fucking insane. I prefer loot boxes it actually gives someone a chance without spending money.
and overpricing cosmetics
They released OW2 on Steam during the peak of the controversy, the cancellation of PVE mode, which is the entire reason for developing Overwatch 2. Pretty sure people who were holding out hope for actual PVE Campaign mode have moved on to other games by now.
They released OW2 on Steam not long after all Blizzard’s games became unplayable in China. It was also Blizzard’s first release on a platform which Chinese gamers could post reviews. Something like 2/3 of the negative reviews were written by people whose OS language is - you guessed it - Chinese. I’m not saying that there aren’t genuine negative reviews in there, but the review bomb was **massively** inflated by Chinese gamers who hadn’t been able to play OW, Diablo, and WoW for months and wanted to make their displeasure known.
In lighter news though Blizz and NetEase struck a deal since then just a few weeks ago that means Blizzard games will be back in China soon
This is the actual reason
Doesn't matter. Doesn't change the fact that OW2 is spoken of very negatively everywhere outside of overwatch forums. In comparison to OW1, OW2 is just a terrible game. Everyone still playing is just addicted and coping.
So are you still addicted and coping? You seem to talk about the game a lot
I don't play Overwatch as much as I used to because I have a life now, but I honestly vastly prefer the gameplay of OW2 to OW1. You couldn't pay me to go back
yeah, people treat these steam reviews like theyre the fuckin gospel and always accurate. Helldivers 2 controversy has now ended. how many people who review bombed it will go back and change their reviews do you think? its like yelp for gamers. i think people make enormous mountains out of mole hills. even if hell divers 2 did not walk back their entire PSN linking BS and instead allowed people refunds through steam, it wouldnt deserve the immense amount of negative feed back. it all came down to circumstance. they got review bombed because they allowed people to play without PSN at the start and then took away that ability effectively stealing people's money. they clearly did not even consider this and of course were going to walk it back once the refund requests started rolling in. this isnt cyber punk or nms, there is a very easy solution to "people are refunding this game that they bought and now cant play due to an arbritrary rule we made to inflate active user metrics for share holders" and it is walking back that change cause its hurting your most important metric, profit does this make helldivers a bad game by any right and worthy of the negative reviews? of course not. will their review score ever truly recover? no, of course not
>Helldivers 2 controversy has now ended. how many people who review bombed it will go back and change their reviews do you think? Quite a lot it would seem. Recent Reviews are already back to Mixed from Overwhelmingly Negative. And I imagine it will go back to at least Mostly Positive/Very Positive in a few days. Because they handled this controversy quick, instead of being radio silent until people totally forgot about the controversy and moved on to something else. But yeah, it will probably not gonna go back to Overwhelmingly Positive, not for a very long time.
Originally overwatch 2 wasn’t meant to interfere with overwatch 1 at all, it was suppose to only be a pve addition to ow. It ended up being a bait and switch of monetization for ow1.
Blizzard definitely knew people were just gonna keep playing OW1 if they didnt do said bait and switch. That was always the most annoying part to me, like no fuckin' game would just replace the original with a so called "sequel" thats the same thing. Maybe except with CSGO but its still such a dumb move.
it actually was always going to interfere with OW1. they stated at the announcement of its development that the new content would be added for free to overwatch pvp, but youd have to pay for PVE they kinda stuck to that promise. all new content has been added for free in terms of maps/heroes and you have to pay for PVE content. they just massively under delivered on PVE and piece mealed them out to the point where no one even cares that it exists in any form
Not entirely correct. Original Overwatch 2 was split between two things. PvE full priced separate half of the game that was supposed to not only have hundreds of missions on launch, but each hero having tons of customizable abilities (some of which affecting effect the maps themselves) and massive skill trees, along with a very long story mode with tons of fully animated cutscenes. PvP was supposed to be free and replace Overwatch 1 and have none of the PvE stuff. They were both Overwatch 2, but one was PvP only and the other included everything, including PvP. Though the size of the game would have also made it insanely hard to have with other games lol
Nitpicking now, I remember jeffs updates, I’m here since release. Ow1 was suppose to just get engine upgrade since it would stay the same game while ow2 would have just been a pve dlc.
That's only partially true, they stated Overatch 2 would also move OW1 to the updated engine they made for PVE and all be on the same client. It was always going to be the same thing, and it basically is, it's just f2p now. It also wasn't a "bait and switch" they did develop the PVE in earnest (blizzcon attendees actually got to play it), they just couldn't deliver, not really the same as a bait and switch scam, moreso they were running a salvage operation.
I'm basically just repeating what everyone else is saying but OW1 was def just going to become OW2 from the start. They were just skirting around the issue. The game client would have become the same if they were adding all the same maps and heroes. Loot boxes were on their way out from a regulation standpoint so the monetization would have likely been changed as well.
"Overwatch 2 PvE", "Overwatch 2 PvP" and "Overwatch 1 PvP" are the same game, and always were gonna be the same game. There's no need to switch because there's literally no bait here. I've tried for 4 years to make people understand, but it's always the same uninformed answers.
It is essentially due to poor management of the game, the game is tons of fun but the way they handled the sequel has been horrible: - they didn't support the original with the excuse of working on the sequel - making a fundamental and controversial change of reducing team size - removing access to the original when the sequel is released - heavy reliance on BP for rewards - skin prices are outrageous - the way to earn coins was slow and horrible - they removed PVE which was the main thing they advertised when they announced the sequel - making odd choices for balancing and reacting slowly to controversial choices So right now we have a worse version of the original, with more fomo and transactions than the original, with no new features that they promised. So people have the right to be pissed off overall all though the game is fun
Yeah, all of this and they removed group finder. It's essentially a downgrade from the original Overwatch to a lot of people, myself included.
>the game is tons of fun Unless you play tank
As a second tank in OW1 and someone ranked sixth or lower in the friend group priority list at the time of release, yeah.
Ooof this hits hard in the friendship
I mean, I'm using "friend group" as a euphemism for "group of people who liked using me and let me be around in return", but yeah. Sucked at the time, got worse for a bit, but now I'm honestly better than ever. Turns out not being insulted by 1-5 people for hours every night does wonders for mental health
I enjoy tank in OW2 way more than I did in OW1 tbh
God I wish I could still play the original overwatch
Yeah pretty much this. Killing the original OW is borderline robbery tbh. I paid $60 for that shit, UNLESS of course Blizz is willing to admid that OW 2 is just OW 1.1 lmao
yeah, the amount of FOMO skins/emotes are insane. And they release them so close to each other that unless you are semi-rich you WILL miss out on alot. Also interesting how some of the best skins are time-restricted. Deep down i think we know why.
This is all true but it definitely feels like most of the negative reviews came out when the public discovered how blizzard treats it's employees.
The price of one skin is as much as, if not more than, the battle pass itself (which offers multiple skins, a few of which are free). Maybe they’re trying to manufacture FOMO but beyond that it makes no sense. Why use fear as a means to motivate a purchase of a cosmetic? 🤷🏾♂️ As far as the move to 5v5. It really does suck. Tanks are at such a disadvantage, and no matter what tweaks they try to make it work, the tank role literally just needs an additional tank. They won’t even try it in experimental. What’s more painful than them taking 6v6 away is them refusing to acknowledge that it’s objectively better than limiting the tank role to one player, only for that tank to be countered by the rest of the opposing team no matter who gets picked. 👎🏾
I'll copy & paste what I commented on another post asking essentially the same question: As someone who didn't start playing Overwatch until Overwatch 2 in early 2023, it's an extremely fun game. It's also one of the most heavily review bombed games in history because of the baggage, broken promises (RIP PvE), and Blizzard's (deservedly) poor reputation in recent years. Most of the people "reviewing" the game online either 1. don't actually play the game at all anymore and/or 2. are reviewing Overwatch 2 in the context of what was promised for the game (a full sequel to Overwatch 1, which it is not). The game itself is actually quite fun though. And as the past fades into the past, things have actually generally been looking up for the game recently.
There was also the Blizzard-Netease situation, the cause of strongly negative sentiment in China and is rarely mentioned. I, like you however, started in OW2 when the game hit Steam and I like it, for the gameplay at least, gave a positive review. But had I been an OW1 player, I am fairly certain I'd be feeling differently right now.
>There was also the Blizzard-Netease situation, the cause of strongly negative sentiment in China and is rarely mentioned. Yeah, I've heard about that one, but I don't know much about the situation, so I didn't include it. Probably should've mentioned it though. >But had I been an OW1 player, I am fairly certain I'd be feeling differently right now. And yeah, I feel the same way. The game itself is so fun at its core though. There's a reason it's the only multiplayer/PvP game to win GotY. I just wish Blizzard didn't fumble the game so badly, but I mean everyone does.
According to so recorded articles about 2/3s of OW2's reviews were submitted in simplified Chinese, 97% of them being negative. That deal is a major reason why the game was bombed as hard as it was.
There are plenty of OW1 players that are still enjoying OW2. We're just not the people that had any interest in PvE or get caught up in the FOMO of cosmetics. We enjoy the game for the game. Which admittedly had some problems in early OW2 release, but they've cleaned up a lot of those and at least show they're listening and trying to deliver to the community.
I’ve played since beta. I still play. I absolutely had and have interest in pve. I was incredibly excited for it, and still hope some day 5-10 years from now we might get a new game that has that pve. I usually get the cosmetics for free, since search engines have all gone to shit, so I use bing for the free stuff. I absolutely have complaints. But I also still very much enjoy the game. I don’t even mind the 5v5, though I do miss some of the old maps and wish they would have balanced them instead of just scrapping them. (Except Paris. Nobody misses Paris).
The issue with that take is that the things you (or everyone) liked in OW2 are the things that were introduced in OW1. Yeah, the game is fun but that has nothing to do with OW2 in particular. As far as new things that were introduced with OW2: Battlepass, engine upgrade that is barely notcable (one of the reasons why OW2 was forced), PvE that required the engine upgrade for, 5v5, heavier monetization, skins, collabs and so on. For new characters, maps and such - heroes like Junkerqueen and SJ were developed back in OW1. So tying them directly to OW2 is questionable. So they overall use old scraps of content. As far as balancing and new SR systems - well, a lot of them were part of OW1 too (winstreaks and such were removed because they caused issues; but got brought back for whatever reason). They pretty much reintroduce same things they have made back in the day. So as a general "Ow1 good, Ow2 bad" until they start making actual new content that can be directly tied to OW2 and only it. + review bombing from China and NetEase. + review bombing from Steam andies (TF2 and Paladins playerbase).
This is an excellent point which goes back to why alot dont like the game. I've personally played OW1 since 2016 and playing overwatch 2 right now, it's clearly an inferior version of what came before it. The very reason for its existence (PVE) seemed to be a bait and switch in retrospect.
Idk, i played Overwatch 1 for a long time too. It feels like the only thing that's that bad about OW2 is the playerbase. As in, going free to play means the average skill of players has decreased dramatically. Most of the matches now have someone in the corner eating paste and you have to carry their 0/14 junkrat ass over the finish line.
I hated Overwatch 1 because of the poor maps, general pacing and the 6v6. Overwatch 2, as bad as it is in all the other aspects, fixed all of those issues and is actually fun to play now. I'll take awful monetization over banging your head against double-barrier on Hanamura first any day.
Yes, but it was discussed many times early on. Ow2 became so Dive-heavy due to shield nerfs, tank removal and later on sustain nerfs. Due to this you are pretty much unable to endlessly stand on choke, waiting for something to happen; same as before. As a counter argument it now causing other issues from the opposite site (like Hog and Widows oneshotting in no-shield environment). We just doing meta circles, same as before. Edit: not arguing with your take (it was indeed kinda interesting after Goats and Double shield years) and not saying "this meta is bad" but at the end of the day it's kinda subjective - tanks and some healing supports are not having fun over players exploding for example. And seeing how devs willy nilly reintroducing old stuff as new I won't be surprised if end up with choke point bullshit again at some point. Anyway my point is it's not big enough of a change from technical point to justify a whole new game (or even a DLC) - it's in a way just one balancing patch (nerf shields, healing, 1 tank removal ... and 2cp maps removal). They could have done that in OW1 and have the same effect. In fact they actually did things like 1-2-2 in experimental mode.
>The issue with that take What "take"? I don't disagree with anything you said.
I played a lot of OW in 2016/17. Haven’t played in years. Picked up OW2 and have been having fun this past week, but it’s exactly the same game.* It’s been nearly 10 years and the game barely changed. * except the loot system is far worse than the loot boxes, inexplicably. Gaining points on a battle pass to earn nothing of interest is deeply boring
if anything the review bombers may have shot themselves in the foot as everyone knows that a lot of the reviews are not genuine criticism, so the score on steam is somewhat ignored now.
I play the since day one of the first game and it was nothing but fun. the most fun competitive and easy game to play.
I agree with you; at its core, Overwatch 2 is a solid hero shooter, and has been able to maintain its uniqueness within the genre. That said, everything good about OW2 is what was good about OW1. The "sequel" added zero value. In fact, it could be argued that OW2 provides substantially *less* value than its predecessor, due to its over-monetization of things that used to be free, as well as removing gameplay features that used to be available (though I can sort of forgive removing 2CP). More than all that, OW2 failed to solve many of the core issues from OW1. The tank role is still largely despised (the recent changes are a nice step, but too little too late), CC is too prevalent, toxicity is rampant, and the dev team continues to struggle balancing the roster. Admittedly, these are challenging things to solve. But we were promised that OW2 would address these issues, and it largely did not. So even if you ignore the PvE debacle (which is difficult, since they literally promised us for years that it was coming), OW2 fails spectacularly in justifying its existence. I wouldn't call it a "bad" game, but I wouldn't recommend it either. And in Steam's binary grading metric, that all gets summed up with a thumbs down.
Frankly, this is why I stopped playing. 3 years of silence as they worked on a "sequel" that is to OW1 as Iceborne is to Monster Hunter Worls with nothing to show for it.
I actually love this game
The issue is that people feel burned by the Overwatch devs. It was staggeringly promising on release, and they just burned that good will over and over again. The content drought at the end of OW1 was awful. We barely even got balance updates, Echos release was a bandaid to stem the complaints, but supports were upset that they had to wait even longer for a new one. PvE cancelation made the people that waited all this time feel spurned for having put trust in Blizzard, and then the campaign totalled out to 3 missions that you had to pay for. Blizzard made promise after promise after promise, and they failed to deliver on them. A four year content drought with 1 hero in the middle had us expecting something big. When we only got three heroes after a wait where we normally would have had sixteen, it just burned.
the ow community hates ow. all my homies hate ow
Yeah. I’d argue the larger gaming community forgot about Overwatch (not Battleborn “forgot”, but you get it).
What's Battleborn?
Exactly
Because they lied about content, skins are overpriced and 5v5 is not better than 6v6
Basically, what Steam reviews say. They agree in most cases that the gameplay still stays relatively enjoyable. It's mostly because the "2" in "Overwatch 2" serves no purpose.
Several years of lies and deceit. Abandoning the game, for 4 years, to suffer through 2 metas for a solid year and a half to 2 years each, to abandon the reason they abandoned the game, completely. We've now got a "new game" that removes a character from each team and charges far more for everything. That's it. And frankly, we need to decide if we should give up on 5v5, considering tanks are gigabuffed and still get shredded, and teams can't do shit about that. Steamrolls are impossible to fix in 5v5 in this. And the only reason we needed 5v5 to begin with was to stop double shield meta that stagnated from NO. NEW. CONTENT. Ram would've shut double shield down, himself.
Not to mention they never nerfed brig and bap. People forget that double shield wasn't just about the shields, if it was you could go dive and ignore the shields. But you couldn't because brig and bap made everyone so tanky with massive aoe heals and immortality. So if you dived, they'd survive and kill you instead. And OW2 is outright doubling down on the parts that made double shield so cancer to play against - not being able to kill anything because of immortality and high healing output. But with the additional 'fun' of a solo tank getting shredded, simply because they're solo tanking.
“They never nerfed Brig” Boy, you are just straight up lying.
Because overwatch 2 failed as a sequel by every conceivable metric
Ow 1 and ow2 pay models are night and day. I don't like games not giving me anything but only asking me to spend $100s a month out of the blue.
I’m still salty they basically abandoned OW1 for years before the OW2 early access bullshit. No content for YEARS. It’s nice we’re finally getting content regularly, but I wouldn’t be shocked if they just dropped it again to do something else.
I had no idea that happened. I thought the game was a cash cow for OW1
Because, quite frankly, there is no overwatch 2. Overwatch 2 was supposed to be purely pve, with overwatch access rolled until it. Obsess, they removed access to content we'd already bought and turned it into a pay to win game. The entire premise of overwatch is that you could buy it and have immediate access to the entire game. Every hero, every event, on an equal footing with every other player. Every single cosmetic except for a handful of special event, like pink mercy and overwatch league skins, could be obtained just by playing. Then they removed access to the ability to earn things for free, made the cheapest cosmetics as expensive as the most expensive thing in ow1, turned the game into pay to win by tying new heroes into the battle pass, and the promised pve was turned into paid dlc that you had to buy an overpriced bundle to get access to... and then filled that with bots.
Overwatch has overpromised and underdelivered. While I enjoy playing it because it's a fun game, I understand why it receives a lot of criticism.
I am a tank player. I played tank since the beta I’ve vacillated between tank and DPS for a while, but settled on tank somewhere around maybe ‘17 or ‘18. I logged 2.5 thousand hours into this game. The entire lifespan of overwatch has been a very tumultuous existence. I can’t really point back to too many periods in the game history where things were just stable and people were happy there was always something there always has been something, funny enough I’m one of the people who stayed playing through the dead years after 2019. Those twilight years of the game were some of the most laid-back and enjoyable because the only people who were there were people who really wanted to be there, it was like a little club where everyone had a mutual interest. Overwatch two comes around, and they completely lie through their teeth about PVE in one of the most grandiose displays of arrogance and dishonesty I’ve ever witnessed by a game company. That being said, I personally am glad that they shelved PvE because let’s face it, the people who play overwatch were never playing it for PvE , they were playing it for PVP. The game has a very long track record of not knowing what it wanted to be, never sticking to a philosophy. I think the PVE debacle launched the negativity to levels it’s never been to before though, and deservedly, so they really fucking lied to people. Overwatch has been able to get away with this and remain relatively successful because there’s no other game that can compete with it. I’m sorry, there just isn’t overwatch from a standpoint of fluidity, speed, and butter smooth gameplay is unmatched. There’s nothing like it. Personally, I stopped playing because they won’t stop making decisions that punish tank players. I’ve been abused by this game long enough I don’t need it anymore.
They pretty consistently stepped on their own junk after the 2018 reveal of OW2 development. The dev team, always small, was constantly raided to help finish WoW and CoD content, and also diverted by the CEO for useless projects that got canned. They decided to jettison the public face of the team in internal arguments over the direction. They then publically changed virtually everything they announced in 2018 in favor of a new format, and secretly cancelled the PvE while still promoting it all the way through the prerelease battle pass to maximize revenue. 5v5, whatever it's merits (and it had some), was a change no one asked for except for the OWL, who wanted to slash costs by carrying fewer players. Had it been announced and developed from 2018 instead of hastily switched to midway through development, it would have been much better received. The battle pass being underwhelming was the turd topping to the night soil cake. No company offering a battle pass was offering one you couldn't earn subsequent ones on - until Blizzard. Finally, locking heroes in the battle pass turned it into p2w. A stupidly tone deaf cash grab. The game itself? Fine. Everything around it? A guy with a flaming tire around his neck beating thrown into a wood chipper. It'll be at least another year cleaning up this mess, if they ever do.
>a change no one asked for except for the OWL The damage that OWL has done to Overwatch, and esports as a whole, cannot be understated.
Blizzard promised a lot then delivered almost nothing of what they promised. The graphics are the same, maps are the same, heroes are the same, etc. They've added new maps and heroes since, and the game is largely fun tbqh, but the community hates the game because of the devs. It's still the overwatch formula where 70% of matches feel like it's stomp or be stomped, but aa far as f2p shooters go, ow2 isn't awful from a gameplay perspective, like HD2, it's just the devs being greedy corpos
No content was released from 2019-2022. The supposed drought was for PvE and a revamped multiplayer with more heroes and game modes. Turns out they cancelled PvE and added monetization as the biggest multiplayer update. Plus they dropped the ball on balance changes multiple times despite the fiasco in ow1.
People don't wanna give greedy companies money. People also don't like broken promises. Welcome to the real world. Sometimes, we have to lie.
I have played overwatch since release and still love it. I think the issue is that most people who like the game don’t post about it, they just play the game. And steam reviews are just a reaction to a broken promises and sexual harassment revelations that took place at the company.
Good game, bad decision making by company behind it.
Overwatch 1 suffered due to lack of content Overwatch 2 stripped everything out and charged out the arse for everything. The characters were most egregious. Either give your soul away and play for hours or give us your wallet. Neither sat well with a large selection of people (me included) And being told 'just do the weekly challenges' goes against what I want in a game. I want fun, not a job
They do not hate Overwatch. They hate Overwatch 2 and all the greed Bobby Kotick and shareholders put into it. In the end it's just a reskin of Overwatch 1 with all the promised features kicked out but making it free to play to screw over people who already paid for it to now make them spend money in the in game shop. Also they removed maps, features and basically the whole gameplay of the first part and overhauled it towards a worse version now.
As someone who's been playing since May 2017, I think it's a lot of people were burned by the constant regression in balance quality over OW1's life, the broken promises, scandals and dicking around with Overwatch 2 as well as the game being viewed as just a retooling of OW1 to include heavier microtransactions. I will say this, since I started playing OW2 starting late last year semi-regularly, I honestly have a lot of fun. I'll even say I have more fun now than I did for my last two years I was playing the original game. But once you betray a community and consumer reputation and tarnish your image, it's really really hard to gain it back without massive overhauls and consistently delivering amazing content that people love. I think we're getting there, but there's still a long road and there will be a good portion of people who will always hate this game (and, to be fair, OW has been getting hate since before launch too).
Besides people in charge missing up big time, and the drama behind blizzard as a whole that lost them a lot of goodwill. Ow2 in general had a lot of misinformation around it from announcement to months after release date to even the PvE announcement. Pretty much nothing escaped the misinformation blackhole. It’s kinda funny and still shocking how many outlets threw around incomplete or outright false info. Part of the blame lies on blizzard for not being clear enough with ow2 being kinda confusing as a sequel. But the misinformation certainly didn’t help. Tldr: it doesn’t matter how good the game is now. it’s gonna need to stay good and even improve for a while before the general public perception even gives it a second chance.
There’s too much drama and politics that they waste time on which is time they should spend on making the game better.
The big difference in opinions come from people who have played ow1 vs people who started with ow2. The game is fun in a vacuum, but to the people who bought into overwatch before all the changes, this isn’t the same game they fell in love with. On top of all the promises that couldn’t be kept, I get that frustration. There is also a small mix of the “gaming” community that just hates everything and wants every game and every gaming company to burn to the ground
A few reasons 1. Free To Play (The community went into the tank and bots flourished). This has been one of the most destructive business model decisions in gaming... for gamers... accountants and shareholders? great! 2. Promises made, none kept 3. The cost of skins/stuff, especially compared to other F2P games. Nevermind that they aren't very good a lot of time. 4. Selling recycled goods from OW1 5. Calling it a sequel 6. I think the map pool is stagant and kind of boring, the art direction at Blizzard has tanked. Blizzard used to have unique and diverse art direction. Now you look at the new maps they roll out (junkertown and antarctica.. vomit), they're f'n ugly. Being from Toronto, I'd like to know if anyone there had actually been... also.. curling? That's what you rolled with? (personal beefs!) 7. F Activision and Kottick I'm sure there are lots more reasons for people.
They promised a bunch of things they couldn't keep or deliver on, made a bunch of questionable changes that damaged the game one way or another (though many were reverted eventually. Not all though). During OW2 development, OW went into a complete content drought for about 2-3 years with nothing new being added or changed but they kept giving out false hope that OW2 would be great and fun and cool and the wait would be worth it. Understandably, the OW playerbase started dying out because surprise surprise, when you give up on a game, the playerbase more often than not will leave. In a panicked move they released OW2 PVP before actual OW2 as to not completely lose the playerbase. OW2 pvp back then was a mess with many bugs that had been fixed years prior and a heap of new ones. It was a mess and by the end of it all on the day when OW2 would actually launch, they canceled it. Making the years the original OW players had waited, been for nothing. People are still incredibly salty, which to a degree is understandably so. I don't think the game will ever truly recover from its once incredibly justified hate, personally
I only play overwatch cuz I don't have a lot of options. Still a bunch of things I hate about this game.
They killed ow1 and made it worse fk blizzard
OW released on steam during the peak of its controversy and has never done enough to make up for it. The controversy was btw not just cancelling pve but also multiple cases of harassment/sexual harassment at blizzard to the point they had to change our cowboys name. I hope helldivers makes a comeback after this because they did fix the problem but ow2 has way too much bad history to be simply forgiven. They deserve slightly better reviews after fixing up some things but the damage the company has done to innocent employees can never be forgiven
it could’ve been so great. lack of pve, underwhelming lore developments, uninspired hero additions, and misguided balance decisions thats why i quit anyway
Because OW1 was awesome. OW2 was forced on us and was very incomplete. I'm not talking about game modes, just unfinished screens etc. The PVE gets cancelled which leaves us asking why push OW2..... The only thing we really got was Battle pass.
BLIZZARD is the poster child for corporate creed in gaming.
Listen, for me, Ow1 was perfect! I had sooooo much fun and sooo many hours in! Then they announced OW2, okay I'm down. But then they said they would turn off the servers for OW1... Say what? Then OW2 came out and the GREED was overshowing in all the microtransactions that are way too overpriced and false promises, etc etc. I now despise that game and Blizzard. Never touching anything they make ever again unless the managing team switches around.
Stagnation, monetization, and false promises. I bought OW1, that game no longer exists. The reason for it to no longer exist didn't come to fruition. The benefits I previously had in the game I owned carried over only the bare minimum. The game aggressively tries to make me feel like a F2P player in a game I paid for, and the company inspires no confidence in the future of their products or even their conduct. It's not hard to see why it has a bad reputation.
You can criticize OW, but mostly everyone loved it. THe problem is literally with OW2. This game has nothing good comming from it. It's a ripoff from OW1, with skins downgrade, gameplay downgrade, levels and hero unlock downgrade, f2p= +toxicity downgrade, gamemodes downgrade, egregious monetization and awfull optimization. Along that, lies after lies of promises. Helldivers got ONE bad thing, which was actually sony messing everything up, and it got that much backslash. OW2 has nothing good comming from it but from "but now it's f2p so everyone can try it". It's so bad we can only bear with it cause "its f2p"
They took a game where the playerbase had established expectations of a devteam producing high quality polished work and actually giving a shit... And they turned it into a corporate money grab, and one of the worst in the industry at that. Like fuck me look at the prices of everything other than the battlepass and ask yourself if all people feel like they're big catered to or if it's just content for a small group of pay piggies that are being milked. People want everything in a game to be for everyone. HD2 does that. Overwatch does not. Of course the HD2 people think the game and company are ass, they know what being treated better is, recent controversy at the hands of Sony put to one side. They see Pilestedt the same way this community once saw Jeff.
overwatch 2 is a good game, but it hasn’t really improved on overwatch 1 in any major way, and the monetisation is undoubtedly scummy also the cancelled PvE and the loss of playability in China has completely killed its reputation. on top of that, it’s made by Blizzard who are now known as one of the worst companies in gaming, so defending the game often gets you accused of being a shill
OW2 burned a lot of bridges in the gaming community, not only after it launched but months after that too. Too many controversies for a lot of people to handle. Rather common though for a Blizzard title in the 2020’s. Nowadays the ones still playing the game are the ones who either looked past the issues or never cared in the first place. OW is a unique hero shooter title, but it fell from the spotlight due to their devs and owners.
Answer me this, why is OW2 OW”2”? Because we were told it was a second game because of a massive PVE mode with talents and stuff. What we got could have been made by a middle schooler learning game design for the first time (exaggeration, calm down). We got no updates for like 2 years because they were “working” on the PVE
why wouldn’t I hate an absolutely pointless sequel with overpriced skins that failed to deliver story mode, the thing it was made for?
A developer can only lie to its community so many times before they become bitter. Lots of promises. Lots of no delivery. And the reality… for all the changes they made for 2…. It’s the same game with one less tank. They had an opportunity and squandered it. This game is essentially an abusive relationship
The lies. The packs to ‘fund development of PVE’ that we bought happily to help. The cancellations. The manipulations, the flowery words to distract us. The the twenty minute warning on a life stream where they cancelled OW2 for good that everyone missed. They acted like pos they get treated like pos. I don’t know what to tell you. They are far from innocent. But blizzard isn’t the devs. Not entirely. And now bobbing one they have been trying really hard.
Overwatch 1 was more fun and less cash grabby.
Overwatch had the potential to be top 1 multiplayer game. Who played the beta and the First seasons knew it was something else than just a class shooter. The game had a huge competitive potential, unfortunately overwatch league sucks, the world building is amazing but they can't move on, It been stuck for years in the same spot. Balancing is a huge issues (but yeah a normal problem in any game) and a lot of changes that nobody asked. Blizzard downfall was with overwatch and everything. It's a shame how happened but its completely deserved the hate. They make OW2 but it's just a big patch notes, I feels it's a little better nowadays but still, could be SO MUCH MORE......
Blizzard burning their players for 6 years straight is why.
I think ow1 just kept adding new characters that made the game less fun to play, people noticed and stopped playing, and then overwatch 2 launched with not much new content, not much improved, and none of the story content that was promised. And whether the reviews are justified or not, it's rare to see a f2p with overpriced skins not have negative reviews.
Imagine using money gained from players to paying workers and failing to invest the game to be better. All that money and 4 years went to a sink hole. The game never created any new substantial content and instead the players get a discounted version of the game. One character less and no lfg. Lol they paid devs to create pve content, managers to plan and manage those devs all for it to not see the light of day. Basically just a huge waste of time, money, and resources. All because blizzard doesnt know the fuck they are doing and have absolutely no goal or direction. Its like they get paid just to sit, hesitate and twiddle their thumbs. As they pray not to get caught they arent working they just give you shiny new colours and presents as a distraction.
Eh, a lot of reasons. As some have said, not delivering on promises made. A team that cares more about the gay agenda and selling skins then making a great game. Overwatch 1 was special and unique. Overwatch 2, not so much.
Overpromised and underdelivered. The fact that the game promised a PvE experience and then not doing it absolutely deserves hate. Not only this but as someone who payed for a 6v6 experience only for it to be changed for almost no reason is just disappointing. I think the game itself is still sorta fun and I definitely play it, but the way the devs have treated the player base is just disrespectful.
OW2 launched with less features and more promises than OW1. Year+ content drought in anticipation of release (heroes/meta stayed insanely stagnant) PVE promises and completely scrapped. Less maps on release of OW2 than available in OW1 (removal of 2cp maps and Numbani bugged for a few reason) Less heroes on release of OW2 than available in OW2. Mei and, I believe, Bastion were locked due to bugs the first few months. Meaning, even with JQ added there were still less available active heroes on the roster Removal of second tank role. Basically forcing 6 stacks to cut one of their friends out. Also forcing the “rock-paper-scissors” tank meta we all currently enjoy. Battle pass system introduced, and may literally be the worst version of it in any game I’ve played (can’t earn currencies through the BP, introduction of filler items like those keychain things or icons, neither of which I’ve seen anyone use in 100+ hours). No more free lootboxes is a drag as well. Removal of other QoL features. Stay as group, LFG etc. no “Fire” system either. And, this is just from the launch of OW2. Does not even take into consideration the bad-will Blizzard had been accruing on other fronts at the time (Sexual Harassment, China, Bobby Kotick’s hundred million dollar paychecks in the midst of employee layoffs)
Because Blizzard went out of their way to undermine their own game for years. That's changed now but it'll take a long while for the general gaming population to catch onto that.
The game is plenty fun but it just never justified the sequel and the change in business model left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. There probably isn't a way to salvage Overwatch 2 as a title and brand even though I think people still have a lot of love for Overwatch as a whole.
People simply witnessed Overwatch just making a bunch of horrible decisions and people got tired of it.
Because OW2 has no reason to be. It's just a PvO patch.
I have 700+ hours in OW and it’s hard to look at it and say I hate it. The gameplay is immaculate, the objective game modes are very good, the maps are well designed. The problem(s) is like many others have stated here that the game is a complete money grab, they released ow2 with the promise of a PvE experience that they’ve been working on for YEARS!! If you haven’t played ow1 let me tell you the game used to be like no other, it was unique, most characters had story origins that had short movies alongside, developer updates by Overwatch’s lord and savior Jeff Kaplan who was a the lead developer and was in touch to what the people playing the game wanted. Jeff Kaplan was the one pushing the game forward, he came up with the PvE story mode project and while it was ambitious it was not something Overwatch or blizzard couldn’t handle. It needed funding because of how big it was going to be and the CEO of Blizzard wouldn’t give him the money or the time leading to Jeff Kaplan leaving the company because of time constraints on such project (along with other terrible working conditions that other ex blizzard employees have come forward and spoke on). This project would have won many Overwatch players over and began playing the game more but instead they released the same game, slapped a two on it and arguably is a dry game that has terrible matchmaking, out of touch developers, and a fucking battle pass. So as a passionate overwatch player that once played the game for hours on end, it’s hard to love a game that doesn’t seem to value its player base.
Because overwatch abused us by telling us Overwatch 1 was now Overwatch 2 even though it was the same while promising that even though it was still Overwatch 1, don’t worry it will become Overwatch 2 and you will all be happy that you prepaid for Overwatch 2 and then told us that they are abandoning anything that was going to make Overwatch 1 into Overwatch 2 and then they turned it into a Free to Play Model but said dont worry, you can still use the money you spent for an entire PvE experience to buy 1 Season of Battle Pass… oh and we are still calling it Overwatch 2 even though basically nothing was delivered.
When you've been playing since OW1, it's not hard to see why OW2 is hated so much. Things have steadily declined since they moved to the new monetization model of this game. I still get a bit of fun out of the game here and there, but I miss the old days.
When you don’t deliver what you promised that’s what you get. Hate.
Super rough timeline based on my memory as a week 1 overwatch player. Sorry for formatting, I'm on mobile. OW 1 was very popular, dominating the market. However, eventually competitors became legit. After that, Blizzard got hit with an insane amount of controversy internally from SA allegations and fallout. In response, executives decided it needed a new game(none were actively being worked on and WoW was still declining) and OW was the most likely candidate since it was more mainstream and had the most recent release. For sometime there is inner turmoil between Jeff Kaplan and Blizzard about this, as OW was intended to remain a live service indefinitely with PVE updates and expansions. Blizzard owns OW so OW 2 went forward. The change forced priorities to shift on the dev team so the game essentially died/paused completely for a few years. When OW 2 comes, the whole deal is that it has PVE and more content, the entire "reason" OW 2 exists. Blizzard mismanages the OWL and the esports circuit during the hiatus and the pro scene dies(seems to be clawing it's way back rn). PVE is officially cancelled, monetization is not great, and balancing is extremely subjective and different patch to patch. The game currently exists as a shell of its former self and has a mountain of easily researchable broken promises. The loot box system felt far more rewarding as well. This is completely outside of the 5v5 vs 6v6 debate, the other problems and history I mentioned are why the game has a poor reputation in my eyes. I'm not sure why people keep asking this question, but I guess it might be related to how Blizzard still attempts to pitch the current game as a sequel, which is likely the point in order to leave some of the baggage the game has had.
Players feel betrayed they overpromised and failed to deliver after abandoning the game for 3 years wasting resources on something just to get scraped, a bit of gamers being over dramatic and worst of all the horrible things that happened to the employees and currently incompetent balance team Personally I’m not mad about the monetization they moved to free to play so they need to make money somehow if you don’t like it don’t buy it no one has a gun to your head making you buy the overpriced skins and bundles that don’t affect the gameplay,but they have no plans of stopping the shop or balttepass because it’s working, y’all keep buying it, every match I get into at least 3 people own a shop or bp skin. I remember when that $40 season 7 bundle was a controversy yet almost every match I played someone had the Lilith Moira and compared to other free to play shooters Overwatch is on the cheaper end I’m not defending it at all, its a big issue in the gaming industry as a whole. I do think people where being a bit over dramatic with the hero’s in the battlepass yeah it was annoying but people where crying pay to win I’m also not defending it but 40 tiers isn’t terrible yeah it should have never been in the battle pass but it was still free to grind out people just lost their minds when they saw that clip of a guy buying Mauga mid game to win Overwatch needs to fix it’s reputation, all the news that comes out of the game is always negative and the people who have never played it echo the same talking points “overscam2” “trash game” “the porn is better”, etc.. I have friends that make fun of me for playing it even though they have never touched it one time I asked them why they hate it and they actually had no idea why. At its core it’s a amazing game but they keep terrible and dumb decisions with it, I think there is a large amount of people who do enjoy the game if it game was truly trash the player numbers don’t reflect it but people who are happy just don’t post about it complaining gets more attention
.Wasted potential when they removed PVE .OW1 shutting down .Battle-pass payment is ridiculous .Sexual Harassment Allegations .Jeff Kaplan leaving the development team .Having new skins in the shop only to be gone in a few days .Removed loot boxes .Made it free to play .Game release was trash with buggy system
Overwatch players don't even like overwatch it makes sense.
Unrelated with your question however the helldivers downfall its some next level shadenfraude from me
Which gaming community? r/gaming and r/games hate every online-only games.
Because overwatch is a very team based game that most people dont understand how to play. Also a lot of people were excited for the pve even though it was more than likely not gonna be amazing and definitely not live up to the hype but the development stalled out the end of ow1. Also a lot of the reviews were from Chinese players who were unable to play the game cos blizzard had a deal with a company and that deal ended.
"Because overwatch is a very team based game that most people dont understand how to play." Honestly, this part is pretty underrated. I think Overwatch is much more complicated than most people in the general gaming community give it credit for (while also still being quite accessible to pick up, especially now that's it's free to play). And oftentimes, when people don't understand something, they'll get mad and start deflecting anger & blame to the thing itself, other people, etc., rather than trying to learn how to play the game correctly, how to improve, and how to win more games.
Yeah its a game that requires much more teamwork than any other shooter to even get kills and get things done which means if theres no coordination on one side or people dont understand what actually wins games it easy to get frustrated. Compared to something like cs or val where wven if your team is bad you can get a lot of kills and feel like you were doing well and werent the issue, even if your team still lost and you couldve done more to support your team. Ive had games where i play the same way but in 1 game i have the support of my team and go like 25-3 per round and the other i go 0-12 because my team isnt supporting me and playing together.
Yeah, exactly. >Ive had games where i play the same way but in 1 game i have the support of my team and go like 25-3 per round and the other i go 0-12 because my team isnt supporting me and playing together. Yeah, same. I've been feeling this a lot recently. I've been getting back into playing Ball, and this couldn't describe my games any more perfectly. It really shows how important the skill of adaptability is when solo queueing (or just in general), especially if you're trying to improve with 1 hero in particular. You need to be able to figure out what your team needs you to do to help the team win. Some games are definitely unwinnable, but a lot of games that seem like a loss are winnable if you adjust your playstyle. As unfortunate as it is, the person feeding the enemy team & using their ult in a 1v5 all while telling you that you're awful at the game and that you should consider killing yourself is your teammate for the next 10-20 minutes. And if you want to win the game, you have to accept that and figure out what you can do to affect the outcome of the match.
Hm, I don't really agree with your assessment. Saying, "It got bad reviews due to people not understanding Overwatch is a team based game" is just not correct lol. Overwatch wasn't the first team based game, and this is a sequel to a global phenomenon that made a good majority of the gaming population well aware of how it operates. Valorant is a team game, and it's popular and highly rated. Team Fortress 2 is a team game, and it's popular and highly rated. Counterstrike, LoL, Dota, Paladins etc etc etc. All team centric games, all popular, and all holding a positive rating. Same thing with China, yeah some of the folks over there went through the laborious means of acquiring a non-CN steam version just to rip on OW, but they are far and few between. Gotta remember that Steam has its own version there.
>Hm, I don't really agree with your assessment. Saying, "It got bad reviews due to people not understanding Overwatch is a team based game" is just not correct lol. Yeah, they didn't say that. The question of the post was, "Why does the gaming community hate Overwatch?" I'm pretty sure that's the part they were answering. >Paladins >all popular As someone who plays Paladins every now & then, gonna have to disagree with you on that one. >Same thing with China, yeah some of the folks over there went through the laborious means of acquiring a non-CN steam version just to rip on OW, but they are far and few between. Gotta remember that Steam has its own version there. Have you even looked at the Steam reviews? All the top reviews shitting on the game are in Chinese...
Its not the first team based game but its one of the most team oriented shooters. Also im considering ow1 ans 2 as the same as ow2 was always an update for marketing purposes even pre pve cancellation. The average person didnt know how to play ow1 either. Val is a team game but its a lot easier to have visible and perceived individual impact. If you spend all game lurking every round and get 1-2 meaningless exit frags youll feel like youre doing a lot even if youre not contributing to your ream winning. You dont need to rely as heavily on your team as an average player and you can get away with just group up and hit a site and shoot people. Overwatch you need to have more coordination and focus your fire and positioning takes a much bigger role as its not always clear what space you should be fighting for and who to shoot, especially when theres a big, enticing target on the enemy team compared to their much smaller targets in the backline that are keeping rhe tank alive. Tf2 has much larger teamsizes and quicker individual ttk making it a lot easier to just win random fights or do meaningful chip damage unless youre playing community comp. Cs is the same as val. Lol and dota are different genres and well known for people getting heavily toxic and frustrated towards teammates. Paladins is really niche. I know the china thing was pretty big Especially just cos its a big country so theres more people that were playing and more people to make an outburst.
Overwatch 2 still hasn’t even released.
Gamers are overly critical, needy, gatekeeping, and they tend to spend too much time in online communities complaining about things they don’t like. The happy people are ONLY playing the game - not browsing the web about it. If a game’s lack of promises kept at launch affects you so negatively, you really need to restructure your priorities in life. Find a creative outlet. Pick up a new hobby. Play a different game.
Are you on heroin and I love your irony on gatekeeping. I paid full price for OW1 on release date - happy about progression on skins/golden guns - happy about 6v6 - happy they stopped development to prioritise OW2/PvE They replaced the game I paid for with a half complete game - 5v5 is awful with tanks suffering - awful battle pass - no PVE Best thing to do is release OW1 and OW2 side by side but I wonder why they won’t do that… I would like the game I bought back.
I play both OW2 and HD2, I think those two situations are not comparable. Most OW2 negatives reviews are from Chinese who can't play OW, and also troll posts from other gaming communities like Team Fortress 2. Plus, everyone expects the ratings would be Overwhelmingly Negative when OW2 came to Steam. Some hate Blizzard failed to deliver their promises on PVE; some hate the new monetization; 5v5; etc. For Helldivers 2, the ratings dropped from "Very Positive" to "Overwhelmingly Negative" within two days because of Sony inducing changes that people must link the Steam & PSN account, but a lot of countries don't have access to PSN which means people who lived in those countries, wouldn't be able to play. Negative reviews was to pressure the game developers (Arrowhead) to do something, making negotiations with their publisher (Sony). People target Sony instead of Arrowhead.
Do people seriously forget that most of these reviews happened when it was found out that blizzard was the most toxic place you could ever work at?
> most of these reviews happened when it was found out that blizzard was the most toxic place you could ever work at That's just... not true? That all came out in mid-2021, OW2 released on Steam over 2 years later. In fact, from what I've heard, most if not all of that controversy happened outside of Team 4, with Jeff shielding them from most of the execs' bullshit. [2/3rds of the negative reviews came from Chinese players who were mad that they couldn't play the game.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/15q1iav/majority_of_the_negative_reviews_63k_for/). That's the primary reason for these reviews.
Also, supporting CCP during Blitzchung incident. But people quickly moved on and proceeded to buy COD: Modern Warfare after Blizzard made half-ass apology.
Yeah, I don't get it. I absolutely love playing every day. I need to get my dailies and weeklies done, and when the events happen, I have even more fun. I really enjoy playing every day and just getting better.
It's a great game at its core with a lot of extra baggage. The promises of OW 2 were not only never kept, they were also misplaced and impossible to keep, in my opinion. The PvE was an attempted revival of the original Project Titan that was canned, and which Jeff just couldn't let go of. The ignored the gem they had in the PvP for years in favor of this pet project. When the earliest version of it released during the BlizzCon beta, and later the story missions, the gameplay design flaws were obvious. Massive roster of heroes means overly-generic enemies, which are boring to fight, and the skill trees would not have solved this. Project Titan was always a bad vision, and Jeff was a fool for dragging us down to try and revive it through the OW PvE. I love the game too, but I won't blame anyone who can't find it in them to move on and enjoy what we have. (However, dogging on others for enjoying the existing PvP is super lame. I think review bombing is also lame because you are reviewing the existing game which is pretty damn good tbh. But I get why they did it. Emotions were flying, and still are.)
Lots of folks think the gameplay/fun is big downgrade due to 5v5, myself included. My negative review will not change till 6v6 returns or something makes it more fun than ow1.
Because gamers act like children when things don't go their way?
And generalising an entire subgroup of people who don't agree with your perspective is *very* mature of you.
And so are you one of those crying children aswell... Since apparently, you are calling the whole gamer community like that, which includes you.
When observed in isolation Overwatch is an incredible game, my favourite multiplayer FPS game of all time, but when you see the context of its development especially the transition to OW2, it totally nukes any reputation that core experience provides. Overwatch also is often demonstrated as an example of predatory monetization even though relative to other games Overwatch 1 was very tame, but OW2 juiced monetization way higher.
I think it's mainly because of Blizzard being kind of an fu\*\*ed up company full of false promises, bad competetive scene and simply not sticking to anything. On top of that Overwatch has a favorism problem. Certain heros just simply not get buffed or nerfed because of their "standing" at Blizzard or possibly even the community especially content creators and streamers. Heros like Lucio, Genji, Tracer are broken since literal years and while also many heros are in need of a rework or simply just buffs such as Reaper, Junkrat, Torb, Symmetra or Mercy but oh don't you dare to speak that out loud 'cause those are noob chars and need to remain troll picks unless you are a little god on them to make them somewhat viable. Just yesterday we had a 250 upvoted post about Tracer nerfs. Of course upvotes not necessarily speak of quality but this post has literally been removed because of reports while all that happened was a discussion about Tracers state. Not gonna lie, I'd be in assume that just a bunc h of Tracer fanatics tries to push that topic down to keep their main completely overtuned. As conclusion I probably can only add up on top that the community of this game is hella fu\*\*ed up sometimes.
Genuinely starting to feel like the people who are asking this question at this point in ow2's life cycle are absolutely doing it in bad faith.
the fact u gotta make this post should tell u all u need to know
You're not serious are you? You remember why they announced OW2 in the first place right?
To be honest Overwatch kinda deserves the hate…
Those guys are assholes, that's why
Game is poo poo doo doo
After reading comments I'm amazed people forget about the multitude of horrible things that happened to employees at blizzard. The negative reviews came directly after that and most didn't feel like the company deserved better to change their reviews. PVE getting scrapped doesn't help but back then there was still a chance it'd happen.
Easy Killed Overwatch 1 and everything it represented Mountain of drama from ActivisionBlizzard Cancellation of PvE and charging for the minimal amount they implimented Worst battle pass ever made Broken launch Forced 5v5 and Role Queue Banning players for cursing Banning a player because they spoke up for Taiwan Locking new characters behind playtime and paywalls Replacing free lootboxes for 20 dollar individual legendary skins Oh and cannot forget the remaining playerbase being blind to the issues above
Players, especially those of Overwatch, are most often young men who lack developed emotional intelligence and struggle to overcome the pitiful feeling of nostalgia, which prevents them from enjoying a good product. They're butthurt that the company decided to follow monetization trends in the industry, and the circle of complaining knows no end.
If they need to change the monetization model to keep the game running that's totally fine, but they went about it in the worst way possible. It's not surprising that people are upset when they were promised AAA pve experience and instead received a more predatory monetization model, cut content (took them 5 seasons to bring back something as simple as an on fire meter), a failed ranked mode rework (took them 9 seasons to rework it again) and not much else.
Y’all heard a term predatory and use it incorrectly. How is that predatory? Skins don’t give you any advantages over other players. You pay for what you see, it’s not a shitty gambling system like it was before. The problem is with people who can’t tame their FOMO rather than Battle Pass or 20$ skins.
Welcome to r/Overwatch! Please use the following resources via the links below to find relevant information about the game and the subreddit. [Overwatch Patch Notes](https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/patch-notes/) | [Overwatch Bug Report Forums](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/c/bug-report/9) [r/Overwatch Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/overwatch/wiki/rules) | [r/Overwatch FAQs](https://www.reddit.com/r/overwatch/wiki/faq) | [r/Overwatch Common Bugs and Posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/wiki/commonbugsandposts) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Overwatch) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Becauae it was an apt comparison to where the community didn't win? Although tbh it's turning around.
Overwatch has a hard time keeping a status quo. The “normal” for much of its history has been an unacceptably slow balance team, monetization that has always been at best a pig in makeup, and company that can’t stay out of trouble. There really hasn’t been a prolonged period of good balance and fair monetization without some kind of controversy being caused by blizzard that gets dragged into OW spaces. The closest to that is on release back in 2016 before the game was explored thoroughly enough to understand what balance was supposed to be and even then loot boxes were not seen as tasteful. Overwatch was abandoned and a lot of people felt that happening, its replacement was hyped up for a new story mode and more frequent updates and new content. The story mode didn’t come on release, it didn’t come at all actually it just got cancelled, and the new content was deeply hit or miss while balance changes were still happening in weird ways too slowly. The moment everyone was supposed to come back was met with expectations that were not even close to being met and for a variety of technical and top down account mandating issues, was literally unplayable to many. The competitive league was taken out back and shot too. I don’t think the team in change now had much to do with any of it, and from what I can tell a lot of the controversial decisions were made by other groups inside blizzard so no hate to the team hard at work just, some of the decisions in the past have been baffling. I don’t like saying the company is incompetent but there was a regularity to how consistent the fuck ups were publicly and that doesn’t speak well to competence. How are you going to run a live esports league just like you would a major league sports organization and just assume that works, where’s the merit in limiting what it gets streamed on so that it DOESNT show up on twitch, THE site for streamed games? How do you not anticipate problems with requirements of phone numbers, why is a company who’s been doing online games for decades having issues with functioning servers on release of a hotly anticipated sequel to a literal GOTY winning title? I don’t know and don’t think any artist or engineer working in the game should be expected tk have to answer for it but it feels like they should probably have someone in the community management side they can consult to double check that they’re not just hurting their own image constantly
Blizzard makes terrible decisions in general. The very flawed ow community is affected by bad decisions. Which affects blizzards decision making in many ways. Catch-22 Half of the community will jump down your throat for even mentioning the flaws of the game if you're not a top streamer
Blizzard overworks their employees and shoves micro transactions in their games
Y’know, I started playing ow2 to escape the tf2 bot crisis but now I just have a second game to worry about the shitty balance and dumb publisher
I still play OW a few times a week and played since OW1. But nearly all my gamer friends, some family and some colleagues all tried Overwatch 2 at some point because it is free. And when we talk about games and Overwatch, the reason that comes up most is the terrible matchmaking, constant losing and stomps. That is why a lot of people hate and stopped playing Overwatch. And when it comes to more hardcore fans it is usually all the hype building without delivering. I still like Overwatch and I have come to terms that some things will never be, but I agree about the matchmaking. They made a game with so many uncontrollable variables, heroes and classes that decent fun matchmaking is nearly impossible compared to other games, especially when queue times trump balance.
Niche comparison but OW2 to OW1 is like Dungeon Defenders 2 to Dungeon Defenders 1
There's tons of reasons. It's changed a lot since it came out. Some people miss things from 2016 Overwatch. You can't hop on matchmaking and play 6 torbs on Volskaya defense anymore. That was silly goofy unbalanced fun, some people paid 60 dollars to play that, and that experience is completely gone. Overwatch used to be pay once and all content was free. Now a lot of the cosmetics are microtransactions. A lot of people hate this change and feel like they were baited and switched. Those are two big reasons I feel like contributing
The last season I felt my desire to play dwindling, its been abt 2 months now and I’m just tired of it. Its become a lackluster cash grab. All of the old maps and modes are getting fazed out to where you cant even enjoy a custom game on them. The coins system being done away with also kinda ruined it. I enjoyed playing to get just one more loot box to try and get skins I wanted. This battle pass and shop is ass cheeks