Overwatch 2
PREVIEW
to see the totality of Blizzard’s beautiful
art direction in its new Rome, Toronto and
New York City maps, the number of flank
routes is so high that the identity of them
disappears. Hunker down strategies that
work on the hard chokepoints of a Payload
map are less effective – you’re unlikely to
find success setting your team up on high
ground and forcing your opponents to find
a way around a bullet-spewing Bastion. It’s
not uncommon for team fights to not be
team fights at all and, instead, be groups
of two or three skirmishing in their own
parts of the map.
The shift to 5v5 and the Push mode, at
least in their current state, deteriorate the
team play that was always so essential to
the original Overwatch. While it allows for
more immediately rewarding plays, it’s
merely a fleeting influence in a match.
When everyone, across all of its once-
distinct roles, are chasing kills in largely
the same ways, the originality of its roster
of 33 heroes starts to dissolve.NEXT SLIDE
Sojourn, Overwatch 2’s first new hero in a
long time, is a fragment of the hero design
that once defined the game. She’s a pilot
from when Overwatch, the fictional
organisation, was at its height. She’s an
African-Canadian woman who’s been
behind the scenes assisting characters by
commanding them on the battlefield and
whisking them away as their pilot.
It’s the kind of heroism that many of
Overwatch’s cast have at their core. Like
Mercy, story-wise Sojourn is someone
that is most adept at supporting her
combat-oriented allies. It’s puzzling then
that they’ve decided to arm her with a
massive railgun and an AOE energy bomb.
Even if it’s somewhat justified in her short
biography, angling Sojourn as a damage
character in the first place speaks to the
direction of the game mechanically more
than it does narratively. The game already
has 16 other damage heroes; there’s no
reason that she couldn’t have been a
support or even a tank. Blizzard has
promised that more heroes will be added
in Overwatch 2, but kicking off a sequel by
not addressing its glaring role imbalance,
after years of fans criticising it, is telling
about the types of players Blizzard values.Sojourn’s kit is very similar to
long-range heroes like Widowmaker,
Soldier: 76, and Ashe. You rotate around
the map, pelt exposed enemies with her
projectile fire, and then line up an
alternative fire shot to delete them from
the fight. If a fast-paced flanker like Tracer
or Genji gets in your face, you can drop the
AOE Disruptor Shot to drain their health
and then use Sojourn’s best ability, Power
Slide, to slip away. It’s the only compelling
ability she has because using it feels like
you’re briefly playing Apex Legends,
dashing into a high jump that rewards
mobility over stationary shooting.
When playing against reworked heroes
like Doomfist and Orisa, Sojourn requires
the tactical thinking that Overwatch excels
at. Doomfist, who is now a tank, can easily
close the distance by launching a charged
Rocket Punch her way or using his
long-range Seismic Slam. Orisa, who is
almost a new hero in her own right, can
rush toward you with a spinning javelin
that sucks up all of your bullets and can
even send you flying backward with a
javelin toss. As Sojourn, you can predict
these tank abilities and save your Power
Slide for when they get close, firing on
them as you escape. Unlike other games,
Overwatch 2 still has moments where
careful observation and decision-making
will prevail over pure aim. These are the
kind of hero interactions that Overwatch
should be about, but when you zoom out
and look at the increasingly rapid pace of
the game, it happens so often that it loses
its significance over the course of a match.HOPEFUL FUTURE
The tragedy of Overwatch 2 is that the
parts that made it great are still in there,
beneath a new game that can’t decide
whether it wants to be a hardcore FPS or
the game it was at its height in 2018. The
beta tries to be both by adding new toys to
what is the same sandbox that the most
skilled players have been unhappy in for
the last few years.
More heroes and balance changes,
particularly to the survivability of support,
could shift the game back into a slower,
methodical direction that fuelled the
popularity of the original game – it could
even find some compromise between
high-skill and casual play. To do that,
Blizzard will have to decide what kind of
sequel it wants to be, and sync up the
game’s six years of design into something
that earns the title Overwatch 2. Without
that, it may fail to please anyone.
Tyler ColpSOJOURN REQUIRES THE
TACTICAL THINKING THAT
OVERWATCH E XCEL S ATWhile tank barriers still
exist, many of them have
been removed.