You don't think! You never figured out how to think, did you Blizzard?
Is there such a thing as a 'good' video game release anymore? You know, the sort of release where a big and connected video game company with the resources and 'on-hand-staff' to really know better turns around and actually anticipates the upcoming difficulties with the upcoming launch they've been planning for the last four years at least? A launch where basic teething troubles and hang-ups are resolved before the doors to the player base is opened up and everyone has to sit on their hands for the next three weeks for the developers to be told over and over the basic elements of their own launch that they screwed up? Is that even a possibility in the market of video games today ruled by developers and publishers so obsessed with squeezing as much money out of the gameplay loop as possible that they can't even be bothered to ensure the bloody thing plays as intended first? Because after Overwatch 2, I'm dubious...
Last time I talked about Overwatch was in criticism of a fundamental and serious change to the way that heroes (literally the second half of this sub genre's tag!) were obtained. A switch-up that was revealed mere days before a release that has been on Blizzard's docket for nearly four years and only revealed through a leak that the team later went on to confirm. And if you're curious if the Overwatch 2 team has become yet another contingent of Blizzard that have, in recent years, totally lost touch with their audience; hear this: The game director came out and claimed that locking Heroes behind the season pass is 'no big deal' because 'most players never switch out characters mid-game, they just pick who their comfortable with and stick to it'. Oh yeah? And how the hell are they supposed to get comfortable with a character they can't play around with, Blizzard? Besides that point... I switch up my character mid game, and I'm sure some other players do to! Do we not matter because we're not the large consensus anymore, Blizzard? Are we just errant scum against the grain? I understand that it's impossible to make a change that pleases everyone, but waving away the effected like they don't exist is callously small minded!
And it's a redundant take anyway because; behold the contradiction, Overwatch 2 literally changed the way that Ultimate is carried over between mid-switch characters in order to incentivise switching. So what the hell point is begging to be made here? And that's just the problem for people who have managed to get into the game which is, sad to say, nowhere near the majority due to the plethora of log-in issues. The first big issue isn't exactly Blizzard's fault, because some group of asshats thought it fair and funny to strike the Overwatch 2 launch with a DDOS attack, turning a launch already plagued by painfully long queues into a minefield of disconnecting and being kicked to the back of that queue even if you do get in the thing. But I wish I could say that was the only issue plaguing people.
The other is a funnelling problem leading to those queues. Not only is this a highly anticipated game with absolutely no barrier to entry, encouraging everyone and their recently deceased grandmother to try and log into the thing at the same time; but the team made the inspired choice to kill servers for Overwatch 1 at the same time, meaning that people are forced to run to the gates of Overwatch 2, only to find them inundated with applicants in the tens of thousands. If you want to play Overwatch 2; just don't. You're gonna have to wait till the hype dies down because there's no way through those doors otherwise. Another inspired self-imposed checkmate by the absolute galaxy brain morons running the Blizzard gaming division. How they manage to dress themselves in the morning, no one knows.
What could be worse? How about their 'inspired' method for cutting down on cheaters? Get this; new accounts to Overwatch are subjected to a five match grace period that people have to go through in order to access the full game, meaning that banned players will have a headache jumping back into the game. That's actually not a terrible idea. It's also a chance for new people to become a bit familiar with the game through a guided tutorial, but part of the intrinsic charm of the original Overwatch was that each character was built intuitively enough to be casually played by anyone before the complexities of the gamestyle dawned upon them. The original didn't need a tutorial; throwing one in kind of feels like the new team just throwing up their hands and pre-emptively giving up on matching the quality of design that the original prided itself on. Whatever, it's mostly there to slow down cheaters, how could they screw this up?
How about with their second verification method to cut down on cheaters? Blizzard accounts that sign up for Overwatch 2 need to link a phone number in order to activate their account, and Blizzard have blocked non-contract phones so that they can cut down on easy to acquire dummy phone numbers for cheaters. Are you seeing the problem here? Beside the concern of giving your number to a company who is absolutely going to sell it within a year, there are actually a number of people in the world who have very legitimate reasons for not having a phone contract. One such reason being because they can't afford to maintain one. Hundreds of reports flooded in from people complaining that Blizzard is literally poor-shaming people out of being able to play their free-to-play game for no good reason whatsoever. And I mean no good reason, because get this; they screwed up this feature too!
It appears that instead of creating a greenlist of phone providers they'll accept a phone number from, they created a blacklist of companies they'll block from, which means that phone's from abroad using a provider that Blizzard doesn't know about can be non-contract and the Blizzard team won't ever know. Whatsmore, any future secretive phone provider that pops up can slip around Blizzard's crappy detection system requiring active updates by the team to maintain a protective net that is too zealous in the first place. I would call it astounding that Blizzard could screw up implementation this badly, but that would imply this in any way surprises me, and it doesn't. This keeps perfectly in line with the company that Blizzard has become.
Overwatch 2 is what we call a rough launch for a game that is quite literally the exact same product as the first game with one less player and a story mode tacked on. I don't know what Blizzard have been doing for the past 5 years, but it hasn't been strategizing about the complexities of this launch. The coming weeks will show if Blizzard have any soul left and commit to changing some of these laughable moronic choices, or if they're going to go the same way about this as they did with Diablo Immortal and scream "Ha! Gotcha money, we don't need to fix anything now!" and proceed to amend nothing. Personally my hopes aren't very high, as every choice made here could have been avoided with even the slightest degree of empathy with their audience; demonstration that even within their IP created explicitly to promote diversity and representation, total audience alienation had taken firm root. Let act III of a company in self destruct commence...
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