Overwatch 2: How's it looking?

 Functional

In an era of remakes and reboots and retries and arguably prematurely cancelled reattempts (I was against Anthem 2.0 from the start, I agree with it being put to rest) it almost seems fitting that the world should treated with one of the most middle-of-the-road 'sequel' attempts of recent years. That is, of course, the upcoming game known as Overwatch 2; a game which seems mostly redundant for an original that made all of it's success off the back of an evergreen gameplay model in a timeless art style that seemed to have been built of the more-than-a-decade-long success of Team Fortress 2. Why should a game like that, built on those bones, even need a sequel? Well when you think about it there was something special and unassailable that Team Fortress had and still has which Overwatch couldn't compare with. That special little something, that if Overwatch truly wanted to surpass it's predecessor it needed to claim for it's own. That's right, Team Fortress 2 has the special mark of 'two'. There are two of them! That's means there was a first one! No one can remember TF1 for the life of them under pain of torture and/or dismemberment; but at least that history is real. Probably. I mean, if I were to tell you that there literally was not a TF1 game ever and they literally started with 2, I'm pretty sure a hefty chunk of people would just take my word for it. But isn't that the only thing Overwatch needed? I can but assume.

Because when you break it down, what else does Overwatch really bring to the table that could only be achieved through a brand new sequel; except maybe an upgraded engine? Yeah, it's not even a totally brand new engine, they could have just re-released the old version on next gen consoles, said it was incompatible with cross-play on the older model and totally avoided the whole onus of having to prove the worth of their new game's existence. Wouldn't have that been a much more lax way for the new Overwatch game to be framed? Because when you break down what we're getting with our new game, it really is pretty vacuous and surface level. There's a few visual changes to maps and character designs, there'll be a story mode now, the HUD has been updated, and the amount of players in a team has been reduced across the board. Oh, and we're getting the Pirate Queen as a playable character, someone who had literally been teased for years and so I had just assumed she's already been made into a character. Is that enough to warrant that number 2? Well, I guess that's the question now isn't it?

And what's more there's this whole on-going connection that Overwatch 2 is maintaining to 1 which meant that the development of both games, post and pre, was conducted simultaneously; which made the wait for Overwatch 2 much longer than it should have been, building up the expectation and utterly disappointing with a boneless bucket of chicken. (Wait- no a boneless bucket would be a good thing... That's- not my best analogy.) The point is there's not a big standout list of features worthy of justifying the wait from announcement to sequel, which makes it feel like Overwatch literally just killed the momentum of it's own game so they could have a multiple year break of intensive development until they had to squeak out 2 in about 8 months of work. Am I going crazy here? Overwatch 2 was announced three years ago, pretty much on the downwards slope of that first game's interest and in doing so they totally murdered any momentum that original game was holding onto because in the eyes of the public; "why get into Overwatch 1 when 2 is on the way?" Fast forward three years and we get a presentation eerily similar to the game we left all those years ago, of course people are going to be looking confused and asking "Well what was the point of all that then?".

But I'll tell you what the point was. I'll deliver the big kicker directly to your front door and lay out Blizzard's whole plan for you to munch on. Because you see; the big change coming to Overwatch 2 that one couldn't have rightly adopted without the stench of 'failure' that typically comes with such a move, is the jump from an out-right purchase model to a 'Free to play' format. Free to play almost always says 'our game was failing so we had to give it out for free' and, fittingly, such a move predates the online closure of such a game nine times out of ten. Destiny 2 is an obvious exception and Overwatch 2 wants to be the next one. And when you accept that attached stigma, then think about Blizzard would have had to pitch such a change of direction to investors after a year of huge Blizzard/Activision scandal that would mark a multiple year fall-from-grace for the once-beloved games developer; it really does all make sense, doesn't it? 

To be fair to the grand team working the Overwatch front desk, I will agree that the introduction of a story mode is neat, because it should have been in the damn first game from the word go. I mean every time you launch Overwatch it starts with a pompous fart-sniffing cinematic about the grand return of Overwatch, and I'm so dis-interested in the lore I can't even rightly tell you what they're returning from. Then there's the fact that we've endured nearly half a decade of Overwatch events and activities, and the story literally hasn't progressed one iota. Every narrative event has revolved around reliving past events, the animated character introductions follow past events, the comics are all about past events; why even bother write a story contextualising Overwatch if that context goes entirely unutilised? Heck, it's so bad that the Overwatch 2 intro trailer was literally just the very first mission that New Overwatch went on. It took them five years to get their first mission ready? God forbid if anyone actually calls for these guys in an emergency! 

Having an actual campaign with missions is a great opportunity to, you know, have a story! But it's also an invitation to royally screw up so I hope the team have their goggles set on the right way before they attempt this. I think the best way they could go about this, and this is optimistic to the point of lunacy but we've been waiting half a decade so I feel like we deserves something special, total campaigns dedicated to playing one character. That doesn't mean I want everyone to have their own quest line, but standouts would and they should be self contained at a glance and aiding a wider narrative from a bigger lens. That would give us the chance to really get into the members of Overwatch on an individual level and through that in-road come to understand what the hell we're supposed to love about this agency anyway. Because as it is they've just been a band of homicidal maniacs who spend all day putting holes in each other for no real reason.

However I would be remiss not to mention the huge hanging caveat over everything this game wants to be and very much could be in the near future: it's free to play nature. Previously Overwatch did have purchasable lootboxes that would offer cosmetics and purely cosmetics; which is actually the game's only form of progression outside of numbers and emblems around those numbers. If they were to start edging out the amount of free boxes that player got in order to incentivise them to start buying packs, that would net them buyers, no doubt. And would Overwatch 2 do that? Well I don't know, maybe you should ask their parent company Blizzard; oh wait, we don't to because Diablo Immortal just released! Seriously though, Free To Play never comes without a big swinging axe of a 'but actually' tied to it, because overwise they could not justify such a move to their partners. Someway, somehow, this game is going to try extracting more money out of you than a typical £60 purchase would, and that's the exact point where I have to ask what exactly it is you're bringing to the table, and if I'm left wanting than I'm out.

So how is Overwatch 2 looking right now? Questionable. Extremely questionable. The developers have failed time and time again to convince me that they have an actual gem-of-a-game on their hands and it's getting to the point where I don't even know if this sequel was any of their ideas of if it was mandated by Blizzard brass to try and reinvigorate the fanbase. But if it's the latter than I think it's clear that Blizzard totally missed the boat on that one, what with the team a ghost of what it once was and the game a laughing stock outside of it's diminished competitive community. Overwatch needs a blinder of a release to land a spot on in the household mantlepiece once again, and I don't think they have it. I guess at the end of the day your faith in Overwatch 2 is really dependant on your faith in Blizzard to still have the magic that they scarified on a spit 5 years ago.