After a few hours of Overwatch 2’s alpha playtest, it finally clicked. I’m a 3,000-hour Overwatch player – obsessed, really – and it took me several games to figure out what went wrong for me in the long-awaited sequel to Blizzard’s heroic shooter. By removing two players, one tank per. teams, Overwatch quickly broke the button on its FPS team matches. 5v5 Overwatch is faster and I had to play faster.
To me, the most boring heroes to play in Overwatch are those with weapons. Sniper rifles, shotguns and shotguns can not match the thrill of escaping the shock of a Reinhardt’s Earthshatter by climbing up a wall like Genji or the shock you get from landing a precision arrow with a headshot like Hanzo. Overwatch is the most satisfying shooting game out there if you want to outcompete your enemies with movement-based abilities and weapons; that’s why a fighting game hero like Doomfist can survive in the chaos of his firefights. Many of its most acrobatic heroes require precise timing based on sharp observation of the enemy’s abilities and behavior. It is a game that often rewards patience and tactical consideration as much as pure goal-scoring.
All for one
In Overwatch 2, I kept getting crushed while playing one of the game’s most mobile heroes, Genji. I was not sure what I was missing, especially after spending so many hours refining my playing style in the original game. Could remove a tank do that to various? I decided to try an experiment and play as if I had brownies in the oven and absolutely no time to waste. Every time I saw the enemy Baptiste standing behind his team and lobbing healing grenades, I threw the shuriken’s his way and rushed right into him and took the one-on-one duel. I won the engagement every time, charged my Dragonblade ultimate and got more and more kills.
Without an extra tank to back up Baptiste, there was a lesser chance that someone would interrupt the fight. In several of the clashes between our two teams where I took this tactic, my team won as a result. Every tank, including Doomfist – which is new to the role – is built to get into battle quickly and to throw itself over weak targets. To be stacked on top of each other is to make yourself an easy prey. The threat of mobility from the newly designed tanks and their inability to consistently defend their teammates forces you to separate from the herd. You want a tank to decide whether to attack an individual target, and you want the decision to be a punishable mistake that you can then turn into a victory.
In the original Overwatch, it’s not smart to fly directly to the enemy’s backline – it’s ruthless. You rarely ever want to force a duel, even if it’s a support hero that you would theoretically want to eliminate first. Unless it’s down to your head and you have no options left, that level of aggression will often kill you simply because of the amount of resources you need to start the fight in the first place. A good enemy team would have noticed my ability to cool down and punished me by sending in a tank I have no escape from.
In Overwatch 2, this kind of risky game has to happen a lot more often. Each match is accelerated relative to the original game. The flow in the sequel is similar to the ‘dive’ meta that rose to the surface early in Overwatch’s life. In diving, mobile tanks and damage dealers on both teams would race to be the first to delete the opposing team’s supporters. Each match was final. There were no survivors after an engagement, but as a result, they would re-emerge and be back to fight again within seconds. The fast dive meta defined Overwatch early on because it was the most effective way to start matches and end them quickly.
The problem with diving, and with Overwatch 2’s adherence to this fast-paced style of play, is that you lose the breadth of strategy available when you brake everything. That’s why the tank and support roles exist: heroes who only heal others or absorb tons of damage means you can not only count on target killers winning the day. While other hero shooting games like Valorant, Apex Legends, and Rainbow Six Siege value gun games above all else, Overwatch makes room for unconventional forms of FPS skills and heroes who rely on those skills. By removing an entire tank from each team, Overwatch 2 gets closer to every other FPS.
A shift in identity
Overwatch 2 shows more signs of a traditional shooter with how much the ultimate charge has slowed down – again something that could be adjusted in the future. During alpha, it was not uncommon to go a whole round as a character like Zenyatta and only earn one Transcendence. Because ultimate charges are almost exclusively charged due to damage to smaller, squishy targets now (shooting tanks builds much slower), it encourages everyone on a team to go for quick kills.
Framing team fights around a collision of lone wolves doing their own thing, rather than a group of people with an unspoken strategy depriving the game of what makes it so fun.
This homogenization of player goals, especially for players with average skill, leads to games where everyone spreads and looks for their own goals. In the games I played, the teams that clumped and stayed together, which is the area where many support and thinking skills are most effective, were almost always at a disadvantage compared to those who went out and went to risky killings. instead of. That this was effective in many of the games I played says a lot about the priorities inherent in Overwatch 2’s design.
Success with Overwatch 2 is finding a way to push the enemy team from all directions and only gather to push or conquer the target. Tanks, in part because so few of them have shields, are much more about causing distractions than cutting a path against the enemy’s team. And because of the speed increase for injury heroes, you end up doing the same thing, albeit more cautiously because of your poorer health. Playing Doomfist as a tank was no different than playing him as a DPS; I didn’t really have to consider how accurate my team was as long as they were generally nearby.
Many abilities, like D.Vas bullet-eating Defense Matrix, were best used selfishly instead of protecting and activating my teammates. Instead of motivating you to circle each other because of the different abilities in the game, like Ana’s healing grenade or Meis’ ice wall, Overwatch 2 expects you to hope that everyone is on the same page and attacks the same. It happens more often than not with two fewer players in the mix, but hitting team fights around a collision of lone wolves doing their own thing, rather than a group of people with an unspoken strategy based on team composition deprive the game of what makes the team -play in game so fun.
Matches at different skill levels – and with much better matchmaking than the alpha I played – in the last game can tighten this up (players with low skill tend to feel confident in numbers), but the mortality that Blizzard has given them most of the heroes, would require far-reaching balance changes to avoid being identified as the most effective form of play. And as we have seen with other popular playing styles, like having two shield tanks or an Orisa and a Roadhog, it could easily seep into the most casual games.
The original Overwatch’s DNA is not completely gone in Overwatch 2, but it’s minimized enough that it’s starting to make certain non-goal-based heroes and strategies fall behind when they do not fit into the new rhythm of the game’s team matches. . Number adjustments can solve this, and I imagine that it’s the bulk of the work that will go into the beta outside of new hero releases. But Overwatch 2 makes me question whether it’s all worth the effort to push the game into this slimmer form.
Overwatch 2 is already lagging behind its competitors in many ways that do not pertain to its particular brand of first-person shooting. It’s finally getting its first black female hero in Sojourn, it’s finally getting a proper PvE mode, and it’s likely to have a combat pass as well. Back in 2016, Overwatch was the game that everyone else copied; it was not like anything in the FPS genre at the time, and still is not in many ways. It has things that need updating, but I’m not sure the basic ebb and flow of its gameplay was one of them. Now, in an attempt to chase the speed of competition by removing one of its most important hero types from each team, it dilutes what made it so compelling in the first place.