In light of Mei’s return to the Overwatch roster, it’s about time someone discussed the issues that have followed OW2 since its release.

On October 11th, Canadian Twitch streamer, xQc uploaded his reaction to Activision Blizzard’s sequel to the 2016 game, Overwatch. His first impressions were mostly shock, with comments such as “It’s the same game” and “I don’t know how I feel about this.”

xQc isn’t alone in this judgment, many Overwatch 1 players agree with his complaints. Though, no one could predict the issues that came with the game.

Following the success of Overwatch 1, Activision Blizzard had announced plans for Overwatch 2… three years ago. The idea of OW2 became somewhat of a meme for taking an excessive amount of time on the game. Within this time, OW2 pro video game designer and former Vice President of Blizzard Entertainment, Je Kaplan, resigned from the company. These company complications were a bad omen that foreshadowed the lovable Dumpster fire that we have now.

Overwatch 2’s marketing didn’t help much either. A drought of information suddenly became a river of “doing too much.” Blizzard started with behind-the-scenes development every 4-5 months, then added the paid promotions from C-list celebrities, eventually leading to seeing rework, rework, rework in succession on the channel, which received many mixed reactions, and way too many songs from the Overwatch soundtrack. Truly the two things that saved OW2’s horrendous advertising; 1. the release of Junker Queen and Sojourn and 2. the mysterious Fox Hero.

Let’s start with the release of JQ and Sojourn. While both are established characters in their own right, considering they’ve been teased since early OW1 days, their abilities feel recycled. There are prominent similarities between Sojourn/Soldier: 76 and Junker Queen/Roadhog when looking at their abilities. For example, Soldier and Sojourn both have hitscan roles in team composition, a faster mobility ability that allows them to move away from or towards enemies, a medium range gun that shoots a burst projectile when loaded, and lastly, the most obvious example, being their ultimate, a huge damage-boost that utilizes the character’s mini-missiles and mobility. Junker Queen and Roadhog evidently share abilities as well; a grappling tool that hooks onto enemies and brings them closer, and a high damage scrap gun. Even though both of these characters are the first in many instances, Sojourn being the first black female hero in Overwatch, their abilities not being unique spoiled the hype.

Onto the mysterious fox hero, Kiriko, the healing ninja. Kiriko is the third Japanese character in the game and the first female Japanese character in the game. The general audience reaction to Kiriko was lukewarm. Her release was completely overshadowed by Overwatch being down for “maintenance”. Her character nor her kit was even popular with OW2 players until her cinematic was posted.

Overwatch 2 is a glitchy mess as well. There are instances of voice chat malfunctions, blurred visuals, and lack of balance in characters. Players have recently entered voice chat and were met with a message explaining they were ‘removed’ from voice chat. This has be mostly seen on Xbox, but PlayStation and PC players have reported the disabled voice chat glitch also. The blurred visuals have been fixed since the reports of it circa-OW2 release week. The unbalanced characters are a large problem in Overwatch. With heroes like Bastion, Sojourn, Torbjörn, Sombra, Mei, and Zarya, the game feels like you can’t play a match without seeing one of them in a team composition.

The characters should have been balanced before the release and played with casual players instead of tested with the Overwatch League gods. This whole thing is messy and frustrating.

MB