I played a lot of Overwatch. I owned it across all platforms and put in hundreds of hours across a number of years since its original release. I also bought far too many loot boxes thanks to my compulsive personality and skins my brain convinced me I couldn’t live without. With the power of hindsight it was a pretty bad time, and I’m relieved the RNG has been wiped away in favour of a more honest model of purchasing skins. No longer am I toying with a slot machine and pulling myself further into a spiraling gambling obsession.

Overwatch 2 stumbles into a unique conundrum though, because its cosmetic economy is built on a system so different to what we have now. Skins used to be earned randomly, with each loot box offering a small chance of us rolling a rare or legendary item that would absolutely make our day. It was certainly unhealthy and downright exploitative in how it preyed on vulnerable people like me with no concept of how much money or time they were wasting on such pursuits, but now things are so much more definitive.

However, Overwatch has always felt like one of my favourite games even though I so rarely play it. While other hero shooters feel loaded with generic characters, Overwatch’s cast feels full of life and heart. Overwatch 2 - which really might have been a mistake , considering most online shooters use the season model - will apparently include a campaign mode, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. Obviously, I love single player games and prefer PvE to PvP, but Overwatch won my heart as it is. There’s something about how vibrant the characters are that makes me think I want to see their own journeys, but I’m not sure if I actually trust Overwatch 2 DLC|https://overwatch2fans.com/ 2 to pull it

Despite my praise for the designs, Overwatch is not a game with in-depth characters - it’s all skin deep. Any attempt to flesh them out usually comes through fine print in the lore, promo reels, or external material like comic books. I understand why fans want these great designs to be built upon further, and I appreciate that a hero shooter all about utilising powers and fast PvP play is not the ideal genre for deep, interconnected stories. Overwatch has two queer characters, which is more than most triple-A games, but it’s hard to give it too much credit when their queerness has been so completely downplayed. It’s often lauded for its diversity - it even once had a GLAAD nomination - but that fact is its two queer characters are white, cis, and straight passing, while there are more playable animals and playable robots than there are playable Black women. That’s not too much of a stretch though, given that there are zero Black women in Overwatch’s heaving roster right now - Sojourn will join in Overwatch 2, but that feels too late for a game with playable 32 charact

In total, I’ve probably played less than ten hours in Overwatch. That’s a pretty pathetic return for an online shooter that’s been out for five years. In fact, ‘an online shooter’ barely does Overwatch justice. For a while, it was the biggest hero shooter in the world, and despite increasing competition, it arguably still is. I know people who have hundreds, if not thousands of hours in Overwatch, and I’m still in single figures. Yet it’s a game I’m always thinking ab

When I play Overwatch , I bounce between DPS and Tank heroes. Entirely because of Mercy's design I have dabbled in Support, but I'm frankly not that great at it, so DPS and Tanks it is. I'm in the mood to write about Overwatch, but at the time of writing Overwatch 2 has not yet launched and the original has been shut down. I missed the beta, haven't played for at least a year, and I'm nowhere near enough of an expert to comment on anything meaningful. That's why I'm ranking all of Overwatch's Tanks by how well they could drive a real t

It was convoluted and it didn’t do much to cut back on toxicity. Instead of antagonizing your teammates for not getting enough kills, players would just rub their gold medals in each other's faces. In the end, it just led to bullying with extra steps, so for Overwatch 2, the developers replaced it with a good old-fashioned scoreboard. Now players can see exactly how many elimins, assists, and deaths everyone has right away. Flaming your teammates has never been eas

I loved seeing three or four gold medals pop up at the end of a particularly good match. It was the perfect cap on a great experience. Sometimes when my team played well, we’d sit on the medal screen for a minute or two talking about the high points of the match and bragging about our medals. I took a screenshot of my last Overwatch game before the servers shut down where I earned three gold medals and three career bests. In Overwatch 2, matches just sort of end. There’s no fanfare, no time to reflect on how well you did. You can’t even see the scoreboard anymore once the game is over. I’m glad we have a real scoreboard, but we didn’t have to give up the medal completely, did