Can’t wait to watch the steam charts. I’d be especially interested once they put the other blizzard titles on Steam as well since then we can estimate the number of players per game out of the “monthly active users” they report in their quarterly.
Blizzard is desperate here. And if there’s one thing about the internet it’s that people are good as sharks for smelling blood in the water. It’s the objectively correct move, but it could still end up backfiring if people can actually SEE just how dead the game is, and leave negative steam reviews.
Also, who exactly is going to install it through steam? Almost everyone who was going to play Overwatch already has. There’s going to be a minimum of people who just don’t want to have any game launcher but steam on their pc and really wanted to play Overwatch but couldn’t stomach the battle . net client. If it gets steam deck certified that is the only draw I can really see aside from a smattering of casual new sign ups.
Sad days. This was my favourite game for a very long time and it feels like potential squandered on a level not seen until Musk came along and bought Twitter.
Edit: spaced out the battle net to not be recognized as a link
Blizzard is desperate here. Am I right in thinking this is the first time they’ve put anything on Steam?
Enjoyed Overwatch back in the day, i.e. when it was new; but really not a fan of them reducing team sizes to make it a more conventional “fit” with other ‘esports’.
I haven’t actually played ow2 after a few tens to the low hundreds of hours I played in ow1. Is it true that they’re locking characters behind battle passes now?
Yep, since the very beginning
Miserable game design for something that is trying to get players to come back every few months for content releases. “You can’t play the new hero until you grind for it until you burn out or pay” is just not a compelling pitch to get people to resume playing your game.
It’s only going to get worse over time as the proportion of premium characters grows… 😐
I’ve been out of the loop on this game. I really liked the first one, it brought back a lot of team fortress 2 memories. How bad is the second one? The general sentiment is “bad”.
There isn’t really a “second one”. Overwatch 2 was just a patch with essentially two major changes. They changed the monetisation, making the game free-to-play and introducing the battle pass. An especially unpopular part of that is that new heroes now have to be bought with real money or unlocked through the battle pass. The other big change is the move from 6v6 to 5v5, which was controversial. There are definitely some positives, like getting rid of the “double shield meta”, which did make the game more fun. But there’s also more pressure and focus on the single tank.
The game is free and if you bought OW1 you still have all your stuff (cosmetics and all the non-OW2 heroes), so if you’re curious you can just check it out. Personally I’m still enjoying the game but there’s also a lot of valid criticism.
Idk if it’s “bad,” exactly, but I don’t like it. I liked the meta for the first game way more, I miss the old 6v6 team structure, I don’t like the changes made to my favorite characters, and the monetization is really sucky. It felt to me like they took everything that was wrong with the first game, kept it as is, and then took a bunch of the good stuff and made it worse. lol
But that’s just my opinion, I know there are def people that like it. I only wish they’d release “Overwatch Classic” or something so that people who prefer OW1 can still play it–ideally with the lootboxes removed and a way to unlock character skins and stuff by playing those characters and progressing, but I’d honestly take just like a snapshot of the last stable release before the OW2 update. It was one of my favorite games and I just really don’t like the OW2 updates. 😥
I have hundreds of hours in OW1 and about 40 in OW2. I will never play a blizzard game again. Blizzard lied about what OW2 would be. Broke the games balance , and now throw out battle pass after battle pass. The vitriol of the player base has intensified as everyone’s frustration increased. One of my most played and beloved games absolutely ruined.
Still requires 3rd party account and separate launcher, am I right?
Aparently not – the store page doesn’t say it requires a third party launcher (which it says for EA and Rockstar Games), only that you’ll need a battle.net account, which you could create online. A journalist has also confirmed this on twitter, although I don’t have a link right now.
Play some Paladins instead!
