Overwatch 2's "Overwhelmingly Negative" Steam launch brings years of frustration to the boil
Overwatch 2 has launched on Steam and well, Activision Blizzard are probably regretting that right now. At the time of writing, the game has attracted 22,619 reviews, many written by people who've already been playing for a while on Battle.net, of which just 15% give the game a thumbs-up, making for an "Overwhelmingly Negative" rating. Tucked in amongst the usual troll reviews, cheeky links to Team Fortress 2 and dubious ASCII jokes there are some rather extensive essays on the game's direction and faults.
Many players still have axes to grind about Overwatch 2's switch to a free-to-play battle pass model - check out our launch-day Overwatch 2 review for the nitty gritty - which introduced levelling for new characters and cosmetics to a game that once handed you its entire roster almost without caveats, and encouraged you to experiment freely. Others are angry about Overwatch 2's story-driven PVE modes, the supposed focus of the sequel - announced as a full-blown Hero Missions mode with skill trees and levelling, then dramatically stripped back to a series of separately sold seasonal co-op missions, much as with Halloween events in the first Overwatch. There are complaints about Blizzard's recent handling of the Overwatch League, and more subjective quibbles about the switch to a 5v5 team format and the precise ratio of DPS to Support heroes. A few reviews touch on Activision-Blizzard's alleged culture of sexual harassment and claims of unfair labour practices, which make Overwatch's emphasis on team spirit ring rather hollow.
It's all very sad reading as somebody who adored the original game back in 2016. The first, now-unplayable Overwatch is one of the few mega-corpo game-as-service enterprises I've ever been
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