Overwatch 2
PREVIEW
If you, like me, have played Overwatch
since its inception, you can track the
progress of the game by memory alone.
What started as an ambitious, goofy
shooter for people who don’t play
traditional FPS games like Call of Duty and
Battlefield has slowly turned into a game
that keeps dialling up its lethality to
mirror its competitors. So much has
changed since 2016, and a lot of it
comes from how Overwatch
skewered the idea of what FPS
games could be. Valorant and Apex
Legends wouldn’t exist if Overwatch
hadn’t roused the shooter audience with a
colourful cast of characters with unique
abilities and weapons.
Overwatch 2 chooses to ignore the
revolutionary spirit of its predecessor and
looks to other games to try to revitalise
where it left off. Needless to say, I disagree
with Morgan (see p12) on how much
Blizzard is actually shaking up here – for
me, this is a game that mistakes imitation
with innovation. Overwatch used to be the
most diverse game, the FPS for all
different types of players, the example
that everyone followed. Now, it’s a game
stuck trying to please its most hardcoreplayers and hoping new ones will simply
follow along.NEW RULES
Since its launch, Overwatch steadily made
changes to bolster its growing competitive
scene, bleeding its casual playerbase.
Before the rise of the Overwatch League,
matches could consist of any number of
heroes in different combinations. Now,
each team is locked to a specific number
of tanks, damage dealers, and supports.
Overwatch 2, as part of the next step in
this trend, reduces the 6v6 game to 5v5,
shaving off a tank from each team. In
Blizzard’s words, 5v5 is the solution to
Overwatch’s frequent issues with metas
controlled by the power of support and
tank heroes in the game. With one less
tank, the game’s highly-mobile team fights
will loosen up and allow for more individual
impact, or ‘carry potential’.
In the Overwatch 2 beta, 5v5 isn’t as
clean of a solution as Blizzard might want
it to be. Although it frees up the
restrictions on the amount of damage
many heroes can put out, it removes a lot
of the ways healing and tank mitigation
would keep firefights from getting too
chaotic. Now, team fights erupt as
you search for flank routes and
opening eliminations. A Tracer can
zip behind a support, take them out,
and snowball that into a win by herself
while her team fights elsewhere. But on
the flipside, a solo Reinhardt can do the
same if he charges into several low-health
characters and starts swinging. Team
fights are won not by an interlocked team,
but by the first hero that finds an opening
instead. In the original game, this is
common, but held back by a second tank
that could help control the fight and deny
attackers, but in Overwatch 2, fights swing
back and forth as both teams try to find
uncontested positions.
Overwatch 2’s hectic fighting is clear in
its new Push mode. In Push, you and your
team race toward a robot located in the
middle of a S-curve map and try to push it
to one side, further than the other team is
trying to do the opposite way.
Unlike maps where you escort a
payload one direction or try to capture
and hold a singular point, Push yanks
teams back and forth over the same
chunk of the map. Not only do you not getT
he toughest battle I fought while playing
Overwatch 2 was trying to figure out
why it’s a sequel. Blizzard’s follow up to
its 2016 team-based hero shooter doesn’t
make substantial enough changes to the game that
you can still play today. It’s too familiar, and that
only heightens the current game’s issues.
Blizzard’s new entry doesn’t quite
earn sequel status
OVERWATCH 2
OVERWATCH 2 CHOOSES TO
IGNORE THE REVOLUTIONARY
SPIRIT OF ITS PREDECESSOR
RELEASE
TBC
DEVELOPER
Blizzard EntertainmentPUBLISHER
In-houseLINK
bit.ly/3vQZKd2NEED TO KNOW
PLAYED
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