Alright, let's actually provide a constructive review. Why are people "review bombing" Overwatch 2?

We paid for Overwatch, we supported it throughout its lifespan, it was popular and liked by its community, and turning a happy profit each year.

When Blizzard announced Overwatch 2, the big new feature they announced, the entire premise that made it "worth the sequel treatment" was the PvE campaign mode. Hero talent trees, customizable abilities, an expansive co-op campaign that would add to the story and lore. We were told it was going to be so much work that they wouldn't be putting out updates for Overwatch any more, they were re-allocating the staff to work on this new project.

With no updates, and no content, Overwatch started to get stale... people grew tired and bored, spending less time in the game, or moving on. Many of us stuck with the product, playing a little each week just to keep fresh... waiting for the new campaign mode. For a lot of us, playing became a chore, something we were doing out of habit, so we'd be ready for the new campaign...

But the new campaign wasn't the premise that established OW2, it was the pretext. It was a lie. Blizzard abandoned the PvE campaign a full YEAR before OW2 launched - but continued to push it in marketing as the big new feature. It's even in the announcement trailer for OW2, and on the roadmaps. They knew they'd canned it 12 months earlier, but they knew that's what people wanted, so kept putting it front and centre to get people's money, to get people to buy into the project. They took our trust and monetized it.

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What does OW2 ACTUALLY offer then? What did they work on for those two years that was so important that they couldn't make content for OW1, the product people paid for and were supporting?

1) They overhauled the graphical engine:

Before, Overwatch would play on a relatively low spec computer, and it'd be smooth. Now, it stutters and stammers in the menus. They've added this weird shiny plastic finish to everything in the world, heroes and environment alike - so where before, heros would "pop" against the background and be easy to follow, now everything has the same texture to it, and it all merges together into visual noise - especially at longer ranges. They've compensated for how bad this looks by adding lots of additional flashy effects and explosions, that makes it much harder to see anything amidst the chaos. A PvP game at this pace relies heavily on quick disambiguation of what you're looking at, so you can react and compete, and the new engine makes this impossible without turning all the effects back off... meaning that the two years of development is for a feature best disabled.

The new engine also has a weird slippery "feel" to it. Reviewers who'd played Overwatch for 50 hours came into Overwatch 2 and reported "look! it's the same Overwatch you love, but it's F2P now! Just ignore the monetization and you can play this great game for free!" Established long term players with thousands of hours were on reddit complaining that their hitboxes were all over the place and shots that would previously "feel" like a dead certain hit were just completely whiffing, and they didn't understand why. All the timings are messed up.

2) They reworked most of the heroes:

TLDR: they screwed up the game balance. Previously, one of the biggest appeals of Overwatch was that you could find a hero that suited your play style, and main them, getting good at whatever suited you best. Some people like sniping, or hitscan run and gun, some people aren't good at reactionary aim and instead liked to focus on positioning, tactics and strategy. You could make a big positive different to your team by playing lucio or mercy, and paying attention to your surroundings, and positioning yourself in the right place at the right time to make the difference.

With Overwatch 2, the damage and healing behaviour has been reworked heavily. Now, the one tank on the team is insanely chunky, and it's near impossible to kill them quickly - with healer support, they can just stand in the line of fire and laugh. Everyone else dies almost immediately, regardless of who their aggressor is.

Team-fighting now is very one-note, you have one tank who's immortal if they have support, and you have four hitscan DPS characters following them - there's not a lot of difference between supports and DPS characters. The teams try to pick off the other team's DPS/Support characters, and when they pick a few off, they can finish the tank and take the objective. Repeat. There's no room for variation in play style at all, you either play a DPS and try to kill the other team DPS, or you play a tank, and try to position correctly - maybe picking off an enemy hero that gets too close to you.

I understand a lot of this came from feedback at the professional levels, where support players were complaining that they wanted to have more direct impact in teamfights, they wanted the game to feel more like other FPS games - but for a large portion of Overwatch's playerbase specifically, the appeal of the game was that you could do something else and still matter.

3. They got INCREDIBLY greedy with the monetization...

It's a longstanding argument that lootboxes are terrible in modern gaming... but Overwatch was one of the few examples of Lootboxes done right. Most of the long-term players of the game actually liked the system, that just rewarded you for playing the game and let you unlock whatever content you wanted relatively quickly. I started playing OW1 with the first anniversary, cleared the weekly boxes from arcade every week, and at the launch of OW2, I owned every single item in the game. Those who didn't have the time to invest in doing everything could still quickly unlock specific items they wanted (and let's be honest, when you have your favourite skin, how much do you care about unlocking other skins?) - and those who didn't want to spend hours unlocking stuff could spend a little cash to get it - if they wanted to.

The new system puts almost everything behind a paywall. The minute number of cosmetics on the "free" track are often insultingly lazy, simple recolours or minor alterations, while they put serious effort into skins that you can only buy for $20. The content you can unlock by grinding often feels like it only exists to drag you into interfaces that advertise the paid content for you. Even content from the first game, that was originally free, is now paid only.

Battlepass systems suck. "Pay us for the opportunity to unlock stuff if you play a lot. If you don't you have to pay us more, or lose the stuff you already paid for." - Limited time deals, rotating shop offers, FOMO FOMO FOMO... it reeks of manipulation and insincerity.

4. Occasional DLC packs of PvE adventures.

These are Blizzard's "new" approach to PvE. Occasional mission packs where you can get a little bit of story and a PvE mission. You can pay (in my UK currency) £13 for the DLC pack, or £35 (the cost of a good indie game" for the "ultimate bundle".

So here's the thing - this content is the same amount of content, and the same pace of release as the old mission scenarios - it's just now, instead of them being a free event to get people excited about playing and encourage their friends to join up - now they're paid DLC.

Nobody likes paying a regular subscription for a product that they previously owned completely. It doesn't make anyone like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office, and it doesn't make anyone like Blizzard.

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So this is why people are "review bombing" your game. You took something we paid for, supported and enjoyed for years, lied to us about your plans, and turned it into trash. Now you're telling us to pay for features and content we previously enjoyed in the game we paid for. It's greedy, it's cynical, it's manipulative, and you've lost our trust.

Also you should fire Bobby Kotick.

It's like watching your beloved child slowly grow into a drug addict with no future :(

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