So Far, ‘Overwatch 2’ Only Makes the Biggest Problems With ‘Overwatch’ Worse
The 'Overwatch 2' PvP Beta has been a huge disappointment, from middling character re-works to a new, almost invisible, coat of paint.
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In its current state, Overwatch 2 does not feel like a sequel to Overwatch. So far, the player-versus-player beta feels like a very significant patch, filled with character reworks in line with the seasonal patches of dozens of other video games. It is also an extension of every single thing that frustrated me about the latter half of the original game's lifespan.
In competitive play, however, it was generally accepted that there should almost always be two tanks, two DPS, and two supports. Tanks would draw enemy attention through AOE (area of effect) damage and crowd control abilities (stuns, slows, and knockback), while being bolstered by supports who they directly protected with their bulky bodies and defensive abilities. One DPS would focus on general damage, while the other would focus on flanking to kill supports. This was a popular and reliable team composition, and in September of 2019, it was formalized through the "role queue" system.
Role queue forced teams to adopt this composition by forcing players to matchmake via a selected role and not by open player slots within a game. While a solid idea in theory, particularly in the game's competitive mode, role queue came with a host of frustrations. There were suddenly far more people who wanted to play the DPS role than there were open DPS slots, and so their queue times ballooned. Many DPS players switched into support and tank roles just for the sake of getting into games. On paper, this is a success. In practice, this led to an abundance of tanks and supports who didn't know what they were doing, or were trying to force DPS tactics on heroes that couldn't execute them well.
Overwatch 2 not only kept the role queue, but has exacerbated the problem by reducing the number of tanks on any given team from two, to one. Overwatch 2's 5v5 structure has led to massive tank queue times in the beta, as thousands of players attempt to fill half the available slots from the previous game. The removal of a second tank also contributes to the shift towards a faster time to kill, and accelerates the ongoing DPS-ification of Overwatch's meta, which refers to the standard strategies and optimal playstyles of competitive play.
Damage heavy supports were accompanied by an ever decreasing "time to kill" (TTK) metric across the entire cast. "Time to kill" refers to the amount of time it takes to defeat an enemy in a perfect interaction. The higher a game's time to kill is, the longer the average character survives in a gunfight. Overwatch's time to kill began relatively high, with the majority of heroes being able to tank a few shots in any given fight barring a fully-charged Widowmaker headshot. This made healers essential for keeping your team alive during any given fight. The lower your TTK gets, the less opportunities healers have to heal. This further muddled their role.
The Overwatch 2 beta's time to kill is significantly lower than the first game. The lack of another tank to soak damage, the increase in damage capabilities across the board, and the overwhelming dominance of hit-scan weapons, has made the game feel extremely scrappy. That scrappiness makes it a headshot fest, where strategy begins to collapse under the weight of all the people trying to kill you at any given moment.
Overwatch, and now by extension Overwatch 2, when confronted with the question of how to make their characters unique, chose to make their guns feel different from one another instead of encouraging a wide range of unique playstyles. When compared to other character driven, team composition heavy games like the MOBAs that inspired it, and the hero shooters which have followed in its wake, its failure of imagination is staggering. Overwatch 2 had an opportunity to stop its slide into generic team deathmatch, and it chose not to take it.
While the game is still in beta, and by definition has an opportunity to course correct, years of patches and the current state of this sequel don't allow for much confidence that Blizzard will even identify the problem, much less correct for it.
Complaints mainly about queue times and ttk, along with maybe the questionable difference between OW1. Beta players, what say you 🤔
