Overwatch 2 excites MeinMMO demon Cortyn – but at the same time, the game is really bad because much of it is simply annoying and insidious.
It has now been just over three weeks since Overwatch 2 was released, and we are now in the first recurring event of Blizzard’s hero shooter, “Halloween Terror”. And fundamentally, what has been reiterated in the last few weeks still holds true:
Overwatch 2 is a lot of fun.
On the one hand, this is certainly because it is a game that everyone in my circle of friends likes, but on the other hand, it is also because the gameplay is simply good.
That was the case in Overwatch 1 as well, not much has changed. It is simply one of Overwatch’s great strengths that you can occasionally be the hero of the team. When you block Reinhardt’s ultimate as Mei with an ice wall, when Cassidy takes down Pharah during her rocket barrage, or when you, as Kiriko, time the invulnerability perfectly so that the whole team survives the explosion of D.Va’s mech.
Overwatch allows such moments and others repeatedly.
There is a lot of laughter when Roadhog gets shoved into the well while trying to pull someone down. There is vigorous eye-rolling when the one random in the team, who of course plays Genji, hops around somewhere in the wilderness and spams “I need healing!”.
The close matches where you desperately try to push the payload just one centimeter further than the opposing team during “Overtime”, the cool team attacks when the coordination works, and the relentless failure when someone misses their chance again.
All of this is fun and got even better with the current “Wrath of the Bride” mode for Halloween. This is actually a first taste of the PvE mode and, at least a few times, is a lot of fun. It is a cool, short story trip in a typical scary tale that could take place in the Overwatch universe.
But as cool as I find the “Wrath of the Bride” mode, in the end, it is nothing more than a marketing event for the skins in the shop.
“Blizzard has done a clever job of showing all the skins here and even giving them a bit of story.”
That was the first reaction of a friend after we successfully tackled the new Junkenstein mode. He is simply right. It is hard to see the new game mode in a different light. It is a large billboard for the shop and the skins there. Because the cool skins are “tested” in the Halloween mode, and through the voice lines and small dialogues, you feel a little more connected to these characters. That’s clever – and at the same time so transparently evil.
But honestly? I think the Kiriko skin as a witch is really cool. If it cost 10 Euros, I would have bought it. I probably would have seriously considered paying over 15 Euros for it, I think it looks that good. Instead, it costs 2,600 premium currency, which is equivalent to exactly 26 Euros, and is part of a “reduced” bundle with all sorts of nonsense that I don’t want at all.
What is particularly curious is that this bundle, with its price reduction, is completely imaginary. Because the individual items from the bundle cannot be purchased individually. Of course, it’s easy to add that you would save 29% here.
This practice of supposedly selling bundles “reduced”, whose individual parts were never on sale, would be legally prohibited in many countries. However, Blizzard cleverly circumvents this by using premium currency. Because this means the bundle is not directly offered for real money, but for fantasy currency, to which such rules do not apply – because you actually only bought Overwatch coins and not the bundle.
And also the fact that we got the “Reaper” skin for free as compensation for the botched launch of the game can no longer be taken seriously. Because I am pretty sure we would have gotten the skin anyway, only as a Twitch drop.
I can hardly explain to myself why you get a “exclusive” skin for Winston as a Twitch reward that has been in the game for two years.
It simply seems as if the reward was quickly switched and marketed later as a “Sorry” skin.
Right now, Blizzard’s hero shooter is moving in that area between “Overwatch 2 is so much fun” and “Overwatch 2 is so shabby”. Honestly, I don’t believe that anything will change in monetization in the coming months, because as many Kiriko witches as I encountered yesterday seem to agree with the developers. Apparently, many others are willing to spend a lot of money in a game’s shop, where just a few weeks ago, you could simply earn all these things yourself.
Or how do you see it?
